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| San Damiano |
Well after
unintentionally being a few months out from my last post, here we go! I have just finished reading Mark Heim’s, Saved
from Sacrifice, which works out well as Holy Week is here and I want to
discuss some of his relevant ideas. While I will not go into it specifically,
Heim spends a decent amount of time setting up, and writing in dialogue with,
Rene Girard’s work on the scapegoat for understanding the crucifixion which
could be helpful background knowledge for this, but not entirely necessary.
Recapping Some
Things
A
few years ago I wrote a post against the Penal Substitution Atonement theory
(PSA) and I stood in favor of the Christus Victor (CV) theory (See Here). If you are not familiar with PSA it is, in
short, the idea that Jesus died as the only acceptable sacrifice that would divert
God’s angry retributive wrath away from human failure.
Now
I still abhor PSA and believe that to say that humanity was both forgiven for
our sins and that someone “paid” the debt in full cannot simultaneously be
true. However, I do not totally agree with CV anymore either, though it was a
necessary progression to get to something more Biblical. PSA is an idea that
began with Anselm and found new life with Luther. But, for the first thousand
years the church did not have this view of the crucifixion and the Orthodox
Church has never claimed this view, so it should raise red flags.
As
Tom Wright iterates throughout his recent book, The Day the Revolution Began,
PSA falls in line with the pagan religious beliefs in which the community
sacrificed human life to appease a retributive deity (like Molech). Now it is
not out of line to say that prior to Abraham’s call from YHWH he was part of one
of the many cultures that did practice human sacrifice. Yet, God’s cease and
desist on taking Isaac’s life (Gen 22:12) reveals that He is different on what
faithfulness to Him was going to be.
I
believe the church arrived here due to having misunderstood this Abrahamic
scene along with a couple of other factors such as: The influence of their own
cultural norms and early philosophies of jurisprudence; getting their
anthropology of the ancient Jews wrong and thus misinterpreting the Torah, the
prophets, the book of Hebrews, Paul’s letters and so on. The bigger problem,
however, is that we can never arrive at this view when stories with innocent
victims like Abel, Joseph, Job, Daniel and the Gospels are taken seriously.
Sacrificial
Myth
Heim
points out that there are many historical myths and symbols in which a demigod
of sorts dies and rises for the people. Those myths, however, can neither be
read as purely literal or purely fake. This is because people were blind to
their sacrificial mechanisms and so create a palatable shrouding from which
behind stands a genuine human victim.[1]
Heim says, “In myth no victims are visible as victim, and therefore
neither are any persecutors. But with Jesus the victim is unmistakably visible
and the collective persecutors (including in the end virtually everyone) and
their procedures are illustrated in sharp clarity.”[2]
Moreover, in “the
Christian account, nowhere more evidently than in the passion, says it took
divine intervention, a revelatory act, for us to translate supernatural myths
into the actual historical realities behind them. For once God actually was the
victim, with the reverse effect of unveiling the humans beneath the
symbols.”[3] This completely reframes how we should be viewing the cross but
instead we have managed to restructure our theology around the very idea it
aims to disarm (i.e. temple theologies of sacrifice).
Heim
draws this from the Biblical text. Each of the Gospels offers its own
theologies of the crucifixion that are anti-penal. It begins with Jesus forgiving sin without ever offering a sacrifice or
becoming a sacrifice first. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of
the world (Jn. 1:29).
Jesus putting God’s flagrant forgiveness on display is kind
of a regular occurrence (Mt. 6:12; Lk. 7:47-49; Jn. 8:11) but the case of Jesus
forgiving the paralytic man gets attention in all of the Synoptics (Mt. 9:19;
Mk.2:1-9; Lk. 5:20-23). In this particular scene we have Jesus’ forgiveness
being challenged by the scribes: “Why does this fellow speak in this
way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”(Mk.2:7). It is not
that God cannot entrust reconciliation for someone via another person, but when
there is absence of a presiding priest, temple ceremony and sacrifice, Jesus is
thus assuming God’s place, or at least claiming to know God’s position on the
matter, namely in regards to what God’s necessary requirements for reconciliation
are. In this case Jesus seems to be saying, short of facing our failure there
are no requirements because grace was always central to God’s dealing with us
and healing in us.
If you forgive anyone their sins they are forgiven; if you
withhold forgiveness it is withheld (Jn. 20:23). Forgiveness then is quintessentially a display of God’s
character. “Go learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice” (Matt.
9:13). Here Jesus is referencing Hosea
6:6, (and possibly Psalms 50:8-14, 51:16-17, Micah 6:7-8) and setting the stage
for followers of God to move forward with life and bring peace and
reconciliation in a way that does not come at the cost of another. Yet, it
simultaneously is calling out the sacrificial system. As Heim says, “In the
Bible when the story of redemptive violence is finally told from the viewpoint
of the victim it is told as a sinful human construct for peacemaking, not a
divine institution. Jesus reveals that God is not the author of the process,
but the one crushed by it.”[4]
Who Asks
For Blood?
This
brings us again to the point that the Gospels are anti-penal. If Jesus is the
ultimate sacrifice to appease a wrathful deity, then why is everyone involved
in his demise seen as the evil doers and betrayers? Are they not doing a needed
sacrificial act? Like Caiaphas says, better for one man to die than to let an
entire nation perish (Jn.11:50), right? Except the accusers in Jesus’ parable
of the “evil tenants” are unmasked. The story is centered on those symbolic
tenants (scribes, Pharisees and previous royal orders) who torture and/or kill all
the workers (prophets) that the king (God) had sent, but at last he sends his
beloved son who they think just needs to be bumped off in order for them to
steal the very inheritance that they have been unfaithful tenants of (Mark 12:1-12).
Sequentially, they make plans with Judas by buying him off to find a moment for
them to secretly arrest Jesus, but in Luke it goes further to say that Judas is
doing the work of Satan (Lk.22:1-6). I do not need to explain the critical
light this is casting.
But,
from the cross the words of forgiveness, not vengeance, ring out (Lk.23:34).
Make no mistake; the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world and breaks
the sting of death in the process, but it has nothing to do with taking God’s
wrath off of us. Rather it has everything to do with the coalescing of all the
sin that led to “sacred violence” past, present and future and broke it. As
Heim says better than I can:
The
sacrificing of Jesus was the work of sin, but the overcoming of that scapegoat
death is the work of God. Sacrifice is the game the powers of this world were
playing with Jesus, and apparently winning according to the old rules. God’s
victory broke the hold of this game itself, ‘made captivity itself a captive’
(Eph. 4:8). Such images dramatically affirm that God has defeated scapegoating
death and returned to claim that site of violence, the cross, as a throne. It
is out of commission for the execution business and ruled by another power.[5]
In
this we ourselves become forgiven not bought, rescued not legally defended,
loved not proven worthy because life is not a worthiness contest, but it is a
gift that any good Creator would want Her/His creation to thrive in. The Gospel
is the good news that God will forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors so
we can learn to reconcile without killing something, Tikkun Olam!
[1] S. Mark Heim. Saved From
Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans
Publishing, 2006), 111.
[2] Ibid, 114.
[3] Ibid, 122.
[4] Ibid, 17.
[5] Ibid, 310.
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