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Nothing New Under the Sun? Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 3, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Job 19:4-12; 23-27a Matthew 2:1-20a
I think it not by chance that Matthew begins his account of Jesus’ birth with the slaughter of the innocents. Though decreed in the gospel by the local politician, such slaughter has been sanctioned for centuries as the will of one god or another and made holy through the venerable practice of ritual sacrifice. We did not need Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to remind us of this on Christmas day. Though make no mistake: Allah is not the only god used to justify human violence. “Take the crudest form in which the biblical God appears,” writes theologian Mark Heim, “a vengeful divine warrior crushing enemies, a deity who delights in blood as the cost and sign of commitment and reconciliation. This is the place to start because this is what the gods of the traditional sacred are. And they are no less powerful where people have stopped going to the religious temple or altar.” Matthew starts at this place, the place that reminds us of the sacrificial and violent death Jesus eventually must die. Ringing the changes on the ritual sacrifice of innocents in his own scriptures, Matthew begins his gospel by laying bare the coincidence of religion, politics, and violence that has marked so-called human civilization from its beginning east of Eden. It is violence masquerading as religion and aided by politics, Matthew implies, from which we are about to be saved in this child whose life is spared in the beginning only to be sacrificed in the end as religion’s final victim. To repeat, our scriptures are no stranger to the slaughter of innocents. Begin with Abel’s blood and trace human carnage in the service of religion and politics through the flood, the sacrifice of Isaac, the betrayal of Joseph, the death of male babies decreed by Pharaoh, the drowning of Egyptians, the massacre of Canaanites in the conquest of the promised land, the annihilation of Israel’s enemies, the defeat of God’s people at the hands of gentile armies who visit God’s judgment upon them. But there is a finer point to put on the violence we find in Scripture, for also running through its pages are the rivers of blood spilt through the ritual of sacrifice in the temple or in the stoning of a scapegoat outside the city walls. God not only visits violence on the human community. We have interpreted these texts to reveal a God who demands of us violence for the sake of our vindication. You will remember that we considered ritual sacrifice in Advent as we made our pilgrimage to Bethlehem by way of Golgotha. Now in the aftermath of another Christmas marked by the violent intentions of the radically religious--and in a new year that has found us demanding someone to blame for our own vulnerability, a scapegoat if you will, we would do well--with Matthew’s prompting--to revisit this not so ancient practice of mistaking murder for social righteousness and of promoting the practice of scapegoating as though it were the cure for what ails us all. According to philosopher Rene Girard, “sacrifice is the discovery that stands at the structural origin of both human society [read politics] and human religion, explaining why they both emerge hand in hand. Girard’s theory is that sacrifice is not a mistake. It is based on an actual cause and effect relation, one as real today as it ever was. Humans develop awe for a mysterious power of the ‘sacred’ and society overcomes its first ‘political’ problems because sacrifice works.” The narrative of sacrifice goes like this: human society is fragile and subject to rivalry and vendettas that race through the community like a plague. Someone is wronged—accidentally or on purpose—and the kin or comrades or tribe of the injured responds to violence with violence, which in turn begets retaliatory violence on the part of the accused until literally all hell breaks loose. Think in the last fifty years of the Hutus and Tutsis, the Croats and Serbs, the Sunni and Shia, the Israelis and Palestinians, Al Qaeda and us, Republicans and Democrats! “The contagious escalation of violence is the archetypal social disease,” says Girard. “Without a cure, human community cannot get off the ground.” The “cure” requires the group to settle upon one person or class of persons said to be the cause of the community’s pollution and conflict: the scapegoat. For this cure to work, the scapegoat must be a person not likely to garner support in the community: the marginal, the abnormal, the weak, the isolated. Again think in the last century of Jews, homosexuals, blacks, immigrants, women and children. “They are accused of the worst crimes the group can imagine, crimes whose very enormity would be sufficient to cause the terrible plight the community now experiences. They are lynched.” And, says Girard, it works! “In the train of the murder, the community finds that this sudden war of all against one delivers it from the war of each against all….The contagion of reciprocal violence is suspended, a circuit breaker has been thrown. The collective violence is reconciling because it reestablishes peace.” In sum, there is a founding murder that is redefined as redemptive by religion with God’s imprimatur and reenacted through a ritual of sacrifice. The question that insinuates itself on any who read our own scriptures through the lens of reasonable post-modern suspicion is whether God finally is on the side of the sacrificed or on the side of the purveyor of ritual violence. “The question,” says Heim “is whether God’s spirit is a mirror of the rivalry and violence embodied both in the social crisis and the sacrificial solution, or whether God transcends and opposes them.” One could argue this both ways up to a point, the point being the cross. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Imagine yourself a reader of the Bible from beginning to end. Having slogged through the legendary history of the Patriarchs, the ancient history of Israel’s judges and kings, the minutia of the Holiness Code, you turn the page to the Book of Job. Who is this God of terrible vengeance and tender mercy, of retribution and redemption? you wonder. Remembering the beginning when Satan tempted Adam and Eve to suspect God’s motives, “intimating that God was animated by competition and jealousy rather than love,” now you read that Satan tempts God to be suspicious of Job who perhaps obeys God not out of love but out of greed. God succumbs and becomes the purveyor of violence through Satan against one who is a scapegoat in relation to the story’s other characters. As God visits unspeakable violence on a heretofore righteous man, Job’s religious friends do theological somersaults to defend God’s honor. Their every argument covers over the reality of the violence by attributing it to God’s will and divine justice. But, says Heim, the incredible gift we have in the Book of Job is not a justification of God’s actions but an interview with the scapegoat himself. Through the crusted eyes of the victim, the Book of Job lays bare the “struggle for the soul of the biblical God, a trial as to whether this is a divinity of the classic, mythical, sacrificial sort or something different.” Will God see the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat for the good of the society as a test of the faithfulness of the victim? If so, then the suffering--that is deemed to be God’s “testing” of us-- becomes indistinguishable from humanly designed retributive justice carried out in God’s name by the community. “This,” says Heim “is a recipe for keeping the monotheistic God firmly within the logic of sacrifice.” As the scapegoat, however, Job both denounces God’s injustice and disregard for his plight even as he begs the same God to choose another way. Instead of praying to the purveyor of violence, Job cries out for a Vindicator. He calls on God to become a God who sides with the scapegoat against religion. At the very end of the book, God tells Job’s religious friends that they “have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” This is remarkable, though I think it fair to say that the author of the Book of Job remains ambivalent, presenting us with a struggle in progress between a God who demands sacrifice and a God who sides with the suffering. Apparently the prophets pick up Job’s cry, forcing God’s hand by denouncing in God’s voice burnt offerings and grain offerings in favor of justice for the poor and steadfast love for the outcast. Many of the psalmists do the same. In essence, they begin to call into question the peace that ritual sacrifice has been said to bring. The euphemism of burnt offering is replaced by outrage at the suffering of God’s servant who is despised and rejected, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief. Their prophetic witness means to unmask the false peace, the palliative cure of sacrifice and so to create conflict within a community no longer willing to be united by the stoning of the innocent or the lynching of the marginal. Still, ritual sacrifice persists because, as Girard contends, it works. That is why, looking back at Christ’s manger from the height of the cross, I think it no coincidence that Matthew begins with the story of a plot to murder Jesus for the sake of a social order. The plot thickens in the end when it turns out to be Jesus’ political and religious “antagonists who also view his death as a redemptive sacrifice—[as] one life given for many…[that will] unite the community and prevent the outbreak of escalating violence between occupier and occupied.” From beginning to end, priests and politicians are threatened by the revelation of the God who not only sides with the sacrificed but becomes the sacrificed. No doubt Matthew’s birth narrative is the narrative that comes closest to setting the incarnation in the context of the second decade of the third millennium. Here is the world we know, replete with academics seeking direction from politicians and politicians fomenting terror among the general population. To the slaughter of innocents in our own time and nation we cry “vengeance” and seek a scapegoat that will restore the unity that surely escaped us one brief decade ago. But what we miss in the story of this bastard son of a poor mother, this outsider from Galilee, this threat to established religious and political powers is the revelation of the God who becomes the scapegoat that there may never again be blood shed in God’s name. He is born for us and dies for us “to save us from what killed him. And what killed him” Matthew means to tell us as he marks his birth with the slaughter of the innocents foreshadowing Jesus’ own murder, “was not God’s justice but our redemptive violence.” “I do not understand,” writes poet Czeslaw Milosz
That the Son of God had to die on the cross.. Nobody has answered that question. How can I explain it to Katie? She has read somewhere that the Majesty of the Creator Had suffered offense which called for payment in blood. Yes? So that he could, in a golden robe and a crown Observe from behind a cloud the scene of torture? I say to her: a Mystery of Redemption. And Katie? She does not want to be saved At the price of the suffering of an innocent man. Her father kneels every Sunday in his church Because what would you introduce in the place of religion? Perhaps the idiotic rituals of the Party, Or football games ending in a brawl? …I raise above the alter bread and wine. Humbled since my reason does not comprehend what I do. |