Holy Thursday

The Scapegoat by William Holman Hunt, 1854. Hunt had this framed in a picture with the quotations "Surely he hath borne our Griefs and carried our Sorrows; Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of GOD and afflicted." (Isaiah 53:4) and "And the Goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a Land not inhabited." (Leviticus 16:22)

It seems every year during Holy Week I am led to dwell on the paradox and mystery of the Paschal sacrifice. We are united with Christ in His suffering and He is united with all of the suffering of humanity. Like Christians all over the world I am troubled and moved by the fact that it was a tragedy that shouldn't have happened, and yet the fact that it did saves mankind. In Fr. Richard Rohr's meditation today, he touches on the significance of this sacrificial instinct:

Note that today’s reading from Exodus (12:1-8, 11-14) says on the 10th day of the month of Nissan (“April”), they are to procure a small year-old lamb for each household.; They are to keep it in the household for four days—just enough time for the children to bond with it and for all to see its loveliness—and then “slaughter it during the evening twilight”! That night they are to eat it in highly ritualized fashion, recalling their departure from Egypt and their protection by God along the way. It was called the Passover, and the victim was the Passover Lamb, which we would identify with Jesus.

A cultural anthropologist would see what is happening here. The sacrificial instinct is the deep recognition in most religions that something always has to die for something Bigger to be born. We started with human sacrifice (e.g. Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22). We moved then to animal sacrifice as we see here, and we gradually got closer to what really has to be sacrificed: our own beloved ego—as protected and beloved as a little household lamb!

We still resist this recognition, and love to look for any vicarious sacrifice other than our own selves. That is the temptation that Jesus totally resisted, and we pray with him “for one hour” (see Mark 14:37) tonight hoping we can share in his courage and love.
Richard Rohr, OFM

I do think Rohr is on to something. That we look for any vicarious sacrifice cannot be denied; scapegoating and bullying are ubiquitous to human culture. This is one of the deepest structures of human sin. It is most virulent where it is most invisible.

Remember the myth of the Indian princess from the book, The Shack? Not to get into a review of the book right now, but I thought of that as an example of mythology that hides violence. The princess sacrifices herself for her people and a beautiful waterfall springs from the place of her death. Isn't that lovely?

So long as we are in the grip of sin, we do not see our victims as scapegoats. Texts that hide scapegoating foster it. Texts that show it for what it is undermine it.

Jesus’ willingness to face death, specifically death on a cross, suddenly looks anything but arbitrary, and much more like the "wisdom of God" that the New Testament so surprisingly discovers in the crucifixion.

God is willing to die for us, to bear our sin in this particular way, because we desperately need deliverance from the sin of scapegoating. God breaks the grip of scapegoating by stepping into the place of a victim, and by being a victim who cannot be hidden or mythologized. God acts not to affirm the suffering of the innocent victim as the price of peace, but to reverse it.

God is not just feeding a bigger and better victim into this machinery to get a bigger pay off, as the theory of substitutionary atonement might seem to suggest. Jesus’ open proclamation of forgiveness (without sacrifice) before his death and the fact of his resurrection after it are the ways that God reveals and rejects the "victim mechanism."

Note that in the Gospels it is Jesus’ accusers who affirm the reconciling value of his death.

"It is expedient that one man should die for the sake of the people," said the high priest.

And Luke 23:12 contains this curious note after Pilate and Herod had shuttled Jesus between them: "That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies."

Jesus’ persecutors intended his death to bring peace; it offered a way to avoid an outbreak of violence between Romans and Israelites, between Jews and other Jews. Jesus’ death is intended to be sacrificial business as usual. But God means it to be the opposite.

I refer to myth because I think it has something to tell us. Enthusiasts for myth deride Judeo-Christian religion for its low symbolic quality and its crude moral literalism. They deplore the Bible’s brutal representations of violence, its fixation on persecution and murder. The biblical tradition, they say, lacks the beauty and imaginative sophistication of great myth. The story of Jesus’ death is a cut-rate version of the sacrifice of the corn king, flattened into something that belongs on a police blotter and not in high spiritual culture.

This sort of critique gets things just backwards. Major myths are rooted in sacrificial violence, prescribe it, and shield us from awareness of our complicity in it. That is why they do not show it directly. The Bible, by contrast, makes the violence visible, and therefore makes the victims uncomfortably visible too.

Modern sensitivity to victims, which now makes people uneasy with the Bible, is rooted in the Bible. We would not be able to criticize the Gospels of encouraging victimization if we had not already been converted by them. We would not look for scapegoated victims in every corner of the world if the magnifying glass of the cross had not already helped us see them.

The workings of mythical sacrifice require that in human society people "know not what they do."

But in the Gospels, the process of sacrifice is laid out in stark clarity.

Jesus says these very words from the cross.

The scapegoat is revealed as a scapegoat.

The point is made dramatically in Luke’s account, when the centurion confesses at the moment of Jesus’ death, "Surely this man was innocent."

Sociologist Rene Girard recounts the shock of recognition he experienced in coming to the New Testament after studying violence and the sacred in anthropology and the history of religion.

He found in the Gospels all the elements he had come to expect in myths: the crowd coalescing against an individual, the charges of the greatest crimes and impurities. But he was startled to recognize that the reality of what was happening was explicit, not hidden. Here is the same mythic story, but this time told from the point of view of the victim, who is clearly accused unjustly and murdered wrongly.

In the Gospels, the scapegoating process is stripped of its sacred mystery, and the collective persecution and abandonment are painfully illustrated so that no one, including the disciples, can honestly say afterward that they resisted the sacrificial tide.

The resurrection makes Jesus’ death a failed sacrifice, but of a new kind. When mythical sacrifice succeeds, peace descends, true memory is erased and the way is smoothed for the next scapegoat. If it fails (because the community is not unanimous or the victim is not sufficiently demonized), it becomes just another killing, stoking the proliferation of violence, and the search intensifies for more and better victims.

But in the case of Jesus’ death, something else happens.

People do not unanimously close ranks over Jesus’ grave (as Jesus’ executioners hoped), nor is there a spree of violent revenge on behalf of the crucified leader.

Instead, an odd new countercommunity arises, dedicated both to the innocent victim whom God has vindicated by resurrection and to a new life through him that requires no further such sacrifice. The revelatory quality of the New Testament on this point is thoroughly continuous with Hebrew scripture, in which an awareness and rejection of the sacrificial mechanism is already set forth.

The averted sacrifice of Isaac; the prophets’ condemnation of scapegoating the widow, the weak or the foreigner; the story of Job; the Psalms’ obsession with the innocent victim of collective violence; the passion narratives’ transparent account of Jesus’ death; the confessions of a new community that grew up in solidarity around the risen crucified victim: all these follow a constant thread. They reveal the "victim mechanisms" as the joint root of religion and society -- and they reject those mechanisms.

Jesus is the victim who will not stay sacrificed, whose memory is not erased and who forces us to confront the reality of scapegoating. It is hardly accidental that "Peace" is usually the first word of the risen Christ in his appearances. It is an apt greeting in two ways.

If a sacrificial victim were to return with power to those who had persecuted or abandoned him, peace is the opposite of what they would expect. And peace not based on new victims, "not as the world gives," is what is now offered.

So in the gospel a new kind of tension is stressed, in which it is the entire complex of sacrificial violence -- both the "good" peace it brings and the bad violence it uses -- that becomes the bad thing.

And it is God’s willingness to suffer the worst this process has to offer to deliver us from it, to deliver us to a new path of peace, that is the good thing.

Christ is wounded for our transgressions. We can hardly deny that Jesus bears our sin of scapegoating, precisely because of its collective and ubiquitous character. Christ died for us. He did so first in the mythic, sacrificial sense that all scapegoated victims do. That we know this is already a sign that he died for us in a second sense -- to save us from that very sin. Jesus died in our place, because it is literally true that any one of us, in the right circumstances, can be the scapegoat.

As the Letter to the Hebrews says, Christ is a sacrifice to end sacrifice, and he has died once for all. Christ’s purpose was not "to offer himself again and again, as the high priest enters the Holy Place year after year with blood that is not his own; for then he would have had to suffer again and again since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the age to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself" (9:25-26).

Only one whose innocence truly can be vindicated and whose power could have offered escape can, by suffering this sacrifice, reverse it. The work of the cross is the work of a transcendent God breaking into a cycle we could not change alone.

If we limit Jesus’ work to that of a human exemplar, the crucifixion becomes more of a prescription for suffering than if we grasp it as the work of the incarnate one, done once for all. It is a saving act of God, a victory over the powers of this world, a defeat of death.

Early Christian writers spoke of the crucifixion as basically a trick on Satan. The powers have been tricked. By drawing Christ into the usual sacrificial machinery, the powers have been revealed and broken, because all the traditional means of justifying and erasing the sacrificial violence won’t stick this time, and their hold will increasingly be broken.

When Christians gather at communion we see this clearly in the unequivocal reminder of Christ’s bloody death.

When we hear "Do this in remembrance of me" we should hear the implied contrast that comes with emphasis on this.

Unlike the mythic victims who became sacred models for future sacrifices, Christ is not to be remembered with more scapegoating.

This is a humble meal and prayer, not a new cross.

Christ has offered his very real body and blood so that at the last supper he can set a new pattern and say of bread "this is my body" and of wine "this is my blood."

Following that example, Christians believe this meal of the new community is able to accomplish all the peace that sacrificial violence could, and more. In it, we recall a real sacrifice and celebrate a substitutionary atonement.

Here on this table, bread and wine are to be continually substituted for victims -- substituted for any, and all, of us.

Watch and pray.