April 2, 2006
(Fifth Sunday in Lent)
Divine Subversiveness
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Jeremiah 31:31-34 • Psalm 51 or 51:11-16 •
Hebrews 5:(1-4)5-10 • John 12:20-33
(From
The Lectionary Page)
To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T.S. Eliot wrote those lovely, enigmatic words and, for all I know – since I’ve forgotten most of what I once learned about the Four Quartets – Eliot may well have been thinking about the fifth Sunday of Lent. We used to call today Passion Sunday in the old church calendar. The end of Lent draws nigh, and what we now call the Sunday of the Passion – Palm Sunday – and Holy Week will soon begin. In today’s gospel passage, too, the end is fast approaching for Jesus. And it, too, signals a beginning. The arrival of the Gentiles who are seeking Jesus is the final sign of his Messiahship. His earthly work is at an end. What now begins is God being glorified.
We, of course, know what the end is – crucifixion. God is somehow to be glorified in the horrific suffering and death of his beloved Son. And if that seems paradoxical to you, welcome to the last 2000 years of Christianity already in progress. We struggle mightily to unpack that mystery – just ask anyone who routinely preaches on Good Friday. Thanks in no small part to the Protestant Reformation, even those of us with Catholic sensibilities are apt to find ourselves interpreting the death that awaits Jesus in highly personal and ultimately troubling terms. It goes something like this:
- I have sinned
- I cannot by my own efforts atone for the sin
- God demands that the debt be paid through blood sacrifice
- Jesus paid that debt by dying on my behalf
Classic, Substitutionary Atonement theory. It’s been around for a long time, and though it’s fallen out of favor in theological circles, it continues to inform the piety of much of the church.
The only problem with it is that it’s not entirely consistent with the Gospel.
The God whom Jesus has been preaching, the God who is to be glorified, is not a God who delights in the shedding of blood – be it the blood of sacrificial animals or the blood of his only begotten Son. We are not talking about an angry vengeful God. That’s all a great big human projection. The crucifixion wasn’t about Jesus volunteering to get into God’s justice machine, as one theologian put it. God, in Jesus, volunteered to get into ours. [Mark Hein, Andover Newton Theological School, reflected on Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” in April, 2004, on his school’s website. I owe this graceful, evocative phrase to him.] After all, we humans are the ones who dwell in a world of anger and vengeance and violence. That propensity is our pharmakon and our pharmakos (if I may just throw in some Greek for a moment). Violence is our poison and it is, tragically, what we also believe is our remedy. We are the ones who secretly cheer when the bully at the bus stop himself gets beaten up. We are the ones who execute murderers and call it justice. We are the ones who manage in each generation to identify a group of people to hate and build a coalition around such scapegoating. That’s who we humans are and, what’s more, that propensity toward violence is apparently who we humans have always been. Centuries of evidence to the contrary, we stubbornly hang on to an insane belief in the power of violence to redeem violence. Little wonder that this pharmakon, this poison, has even been the lens through which some biblical writers chose to view sacred history.
But angry, vengeful and violent is not the God whom Christ incarnated.
The God whom Jesus will glorify is, instead, a God who created this world in the vastness of the universe, and set in motion a life-giving energy such that a single grain of wheat dying in the ground produces of itself a hundred more grains of wheat. The God whom Christ is to glorify in his death is a God whose default setting is always on abundant, new, transformed life – where ends are always beginnings.
Throughout the seasons of Epiphany and Lent, our Eucharistic prayer has recounted Christ’s salvific work with these words, “He yearned to draw all the world to himself, yet we were heedless of his call to walk in love.” An angry, violent, vengeful God would have called it quits with humanity long before then. But for a God of grace and glory, to make an end is to make a beginning. Even before the stone is rolled away, John the Evangelist reminds us that this new beginning was already well underway. As Passion Sunday and Holy Week unfold, we will see that God used our terrible tendency toward redemptive violence – our sin – to save us from that sin. Call it glorious, divine subversiveness. God will refuse to use divine power to show the doubters a thing or two. God will refuse to be an angry vengeful violent God who would destroy those who conspired against his beloved Son. God will refuse to be like us, longing for us instead to be like him. Christ will be lifted up and will draw all the world to himself. And we are made free to live without the kind of reconciliation that demands that blood be shed.
It’s been done. That is the end.
What remains is for us to believe it and to live accordingly. That’s the beginning.
Several Cathedral parishioners wanted to know more about the theology reflected in Sunday’s sermon. What follows is an extremely basic introduction which comes from an Internet website. Several sites devoted to Mimetic Theory have a link to this summary. I did not write it, nor can I cite the author because I’ve not been able to track down who the author is. It’s a good introduction, however, and if it whets your appetite for more inquiry, there are numerous internet resources for more information on Mimetic Theory. Use your favorite internet search engine and search either under Mimetic Theory (Google, for instance) or Rene Girard (again, Google).
Those of you who took part in the Trinity Church webcast on Reconciliation recall that one of the presenters was James Allison. Allison “translates” Girardian theory into pastoral theology in several of his works.
A Brief Summary of the Mimetic Theory
Discovered by René Girard
The preeminent characteristic of human beings is that we imitate each other. Even our desires--especially our desires--come from the imitation of others. Because we want the same things that others want, we come into conflict over who will possess the desired object(s). This conflict, or rivalry, is in turn imitated so that it escalates into violence, or a mimetic crisis. The violence in turn threatens to destroy everyone involved, unless a solution is found.
The solution which our species stumbled upon was the mechanism of sacrifice. One individual is singled out by the community as the scapegoat whose death absorbs the violence in the community, delivering the community from this threat. This deliverance is the basis for the primitive sacred.
Human culture extends the power of sacrifice by creating myths and fetishes which remind the people of the sacred event of the sacrifice, damping down the fires of the mimetic crisis. Human culture also inhibits the development of the mimetic crisis by putting in place taboos, laws, and other forms of differentiation so that the effects of mimesis (imitation) are reduced, thus slowing the development of mimetic crises.
The biblical revelation breaks the power of this sacred violence by revealing it for what it is: the collective murder of an innocent victim. The voices of the prophets, and especially the revelation of Christ on the cross, force humanity to acknowledge our sacred sin. Because the sacred depends upon denial, the biblical revelation renders sacred murder unworkable. The Bible brings the workings of the sacred to an end.
The loss of the sacrificial mechanism would result in our self-destruction, if some alternate form of functioning were not provided to human culture. Fortunately, the Gospel also gives us new means to avoid mimetic rivalry, supplanting the old taboo systems, by calling us to imitate Christ.
These few simple principles – mimesis, desire, rivalry, scapegoating, and tabu – form the basis of a new paradigm which clarifies a vast array of questions that bedevil the modern mind. Biblical interpretation, psychology, institutional dynamics, church and culture, “spirituality,” and mission ethics are a few of the themes which acquire a new clarity in the light of the mimetic theory.
