The Sentencing of God

A play in Manhattan closed last week after only three performances, but it was a smash hit. Students in the religious drama program of Union Theological Seminary closed their six-play season with a production of a play by a German Evangelical pastor that moved Drama Critic Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times to soaring words ("stunning," "remarkable") and packed the seminary auditorium with standees.

Pastor Guenter Rutenborn, who is somewhere in East Germany, wrote The Sign of Jonah immediately after the war, for a Germany that was standing shocked and beaten in the rubble of the Third Reich. The one-act play was intended only for a church group, but so intimately did it speak to the anguish and anger of the time that Jonah ran for more than a thousand performances on a professional West Berlin stage and on the road. Slight in size, it nevertheless bites off a big chunk of cosmos, compressing into an hour-long performance a range that includes Babylon, Nineveh, Nazi Germany and Judgment Day. With much Pirandello-style shifting of role and perspective, the play is a theodicy--a justification of the ways of God in the face of evil.

Climax of the action comes when mankind, up for judgment for the world's sin, turns against God as the guilty one, and sentences him to experience for himself the agony of a D.P., "homeless, hungry, thirsty, terrified of death," surrounded by misery and sickness, suffering even the death of his own child, and dying at last himself in pain and dishonor. The human judge duly condemns God "to the hellish journey of being a man," and the three Archangels leave to carry out the sentence.

GABRIEL: I, Gabriel, shall go to a virgin by the name of Mary. She shall bear him--a Jew.

MICHAEL : I, Michael, shall go and order the heavenly hosts to let him walk on earth without any protection . . . And should he sink down on his knees with the sweat breaking out of him like drops of blood under the burden of the curse of being Man, I shall strengthen him only from afar that he might continue to suffer, just as he gave consolation to the believers, consoling them in order that they might continue to suffer.

RAPHAEL: And I, Raphael, shall be present when he dies, and I shall stand at his grave.

The Archangels depart, and in the long silence that follows, the people on stage and in the audience realize that God has already served his sentence.

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