CHRISTIANITY AND SACRED VIOLENCE

by Andrew Marr, OSB

For those who like to imagine the spiritual quest as floating above the Himalayas on a cloud, the central proclamation of Christianity comes as a shock. The Gospel claims that God is most fully revealed in the judicial murder of a man who was innocent of any wrongdoing. The murder was not just the deed of a small group of people acting in secret. The death sentence was passed as a result of pressure from a mob. It was Caiaphas who said that it was better for one man to die for the people, but it was the whole city of Jerusalem who ratified Caiaphas' recommendation by shouting for the crucifixion of Jesus. Then, after three days in the tomb, this same man rose from the dead with the wounds of violence still on his body.

The religiously motivated sacrificial death is not something that makes the Gospels unique as religious documents. The practice of sacrifice marks most religious observance in world history. Many animals have been butchered and burned on altars as offerings to the gods or to God. But it isn't just animals who have been sacrificed. The practice of human sacrifice surfaces in every known culture that developed any significant political and religious complexity. The Aztecs were unusual only for the quantity of sacrificial victims, not for the fact that they sacrificed their fellow humans. Contrary to the way violence is ordinarily understood, there seems to have been no malicious intent on the part of those making these sacrifices. They were not performed as an outlet for sadism, but out of a conviction of necessity. The sun wouldn't rise without the offering of human blood.

The French writer René Girard has made the fascinating suggestion that there is reason to believe that the necessity of human sacrifice had (and has) to do with maintaining the cohesion of society. Many creation myths tell of a dismembered deity from whose broken body the world was created. Rome was founded after Romulus slew his brother Remus. Girard believes that these myths disguise sacrificial violence. In the sacrificial rituals for which we have information, we almost always see a unanimous act of the crowd. It seems that when a society is under pressure of any kind, the instinctive solution is to control the situation by agreeing to kill somebody who can absorb the blame for the crisis. The death of Jesus, also, was the result of mob violence. The danger of uncontrolled violence throughout Jerusalem was brought under control by the death of one man. People who were normally enemies suddenly became friends. When Acts takes up the story of Christianity, it includes several narratives of mob violence including a riot stirred up by the craftsmen in Ephesus and the violence in Jerusalem that resulted in the arrest of St. Paul.

Who are the victims? At times, the victim is chosen at random. When the choice is not random, the victim is usually someone at the fringe of the society. In this case the victim is usually an individual who stands out from everybody else through talent (think of Orpheus), position (perhaps the king), sheer difference, or most often, the helpless. It is well-known that sacrificial victims were and are often children. At other times, the victim is a captive from a neighboring tribe, that is, one who is other, a designated enemy. In every case, it is essential that the humanity of the victim be denied.

Girard does not see the mechanism of sacrificial violence as something humanity has outgrown as a result of Christian influence or the advances of secularism in recent centuries. On the contrary, Girard sees the same mechanism operating throughout the Christian centuries and into our time. The record of persecution by the churches is well known. In our own time, human beings are most usually sacrificed not by priests, but by those with political and economic power. As in ancient times, the victims are the same: those who are different and those who are helpless. The scapegoating of minority groups and the helpless continues to be justified through the use of ideologies and stereotypes which prevent the persecutors from perceiving the humanity of the victims.

In the face of the bad news about humanity's history of sacred violence, the Bible announces the Good News. I don't mean that the throwing of children into the fire in honor of Molech or the judicial murder of Son of God is good news. What is Good News is that the Bible reveals the truth about what has been happening since the world began. Girard points out that by telling us the truth, the Bible opens up a way, the only way, out of sacred violence and its modern secular substitutes.

That we even have the concept of a victim is something we owe to the Bible. The Aztecs and Canaanites had victims, but not the concept of a victim. The victim, as victim, was not real to them. In the Bible, we have something different. Romulus and Cain were both fratricides who founded cities. The blood of Remus didn't say anything; the blood of Abel cries from the ground. No Canaanite we know of protested the religious practices of the society, but the prophets of Israel cried out on behalf of the children who were being sacrificed to Molech. The Psalms are filled with the cries of victims, confident that God will hear them. Most important, the Bible tells us that Jesus was the innocent victim of sacrificial violence. Like the people who offered their children to Molech, those who killed Jesus did not know what they were doing, but the Bible tells us what they were doing. And that makes it harder for us to do likewise and not know it.

Once we have heard the news that there are victims and that God Himself is one of them, there is the chance that we will empathize with victims rather than sacrifice them. There is even the chance that this empathy will motivate us to sacrifice ourselves rather than sacrifice others. One of the most popular and important devotions in Christian spirituality is the contemplation of the sufferings of Jesus. In some devotional manuals, the writer describes the wounds in gory detail. Such writing aims to foster compassion for Jesus.

However, when Jesus said that whatever we do for "the least of these," we have done for Him, he made it clear that compassion must not stop with Him but must be extended to other people. The challenge of the crucified Lord makes us face a fundamental choice. Will we sacrifice our time for the sake of a person in need? Will we make excessive and presumptuous demands on other people? When it comes to issues of abuse, the stark choice is whether or not to sacrifice the well-being of this woman, this man, or this child to one's own sexual appetite or need to act out unresolved anger. Will we offer support for people who are recovering from serious abuse when it is painful to do so? This is a ministry that is clearly a pressing need for the Church of today. There are more subtle ways to sacrifice other people to an idolatry of self. Power issues play a part in many human relationships, to the detriment of all concerned. We must constantly be vigilant against the temptation to treat other people as extensions of ourselves. Because people do give in to that temptation, we must defend ourselves and others from those who demand this level of sacrifice of us. Taking steps to free ourselves from the tyranny of dysfunctional behavior requires a sacrifice of time and energy, as anybody who has participated in an intervention knows.

Satan had offered the whole world as a sacrifice to Jesus. Instead, Jesus sacrificed His own life at the hands of those He could have ruled. In using His freedom the way He did, Jesus frees us from the sacred violence that shackled humanity before His coming into the world. The Canaanites seem not to have experienced a choice about sacrificing their children. We do face a choice as to whether or not we will make sacrifices for our children or sacrifice them instead. Insofar as we refuse to expend the time and resources for the raising, nurturing, and education of children, we are throwing them into Molech's fire as surely as the Canaanites did. It is because of the social, political, and economic ways in which we sacrifice the helpless, that some contemporary theologians insist that God practices a preferential option for the poor and oppressed. Some people take offense at the idea that God takes "sides," in human affairs, but if God is the Perfect Victim, than how can God side with any of us who are unjust oppressors, insofar as we are oppressors? Through the Cross, all of us are invited to be on the side of God who is on everybody's side.

Much of the anxiety that inclines us to sacrifice other people before they sacrifice us comes from the fear that our sacrifices will have no end. But in Christ, our sacrifices participate in the one final and complete Sacrifice, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. The Divine Love of the crucified One frees us of the need to sacrifice any of the human beings for whom Christ died. Perhaps we are tempted to draw back in the fear that we will remain victims if we become victims in Christ. But that is not what happens. Just as Jesus moved from death to new life, so we also will experience the movement to new life. In Christ, we gain the courage to face the reality of our own pain as victims and the pain of others because the our Risen Lord allows that pain to unfold into His Body as an Easter lily blooms in the sun.

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