I finished it today, my reading for Lent this year, S. Mark Heim's Saved from Sacrifice, A Theology of the Cross. That it took me so long to read says something about my slowness when it comes to seriously heavy theological texts - I can't rush them, need to be sure I've properly understood. And especially in this case, Heim's subject being the very delicate area of the precise meaning of Jesus' crucifixion, death and resurrection. Battles have been fought (and all sides lost) over this ground over the centuries. As I mentioned in my blog on 9 March (start of Lent) the book's title 'speaks for its intention, to unmask the sacrificial violence in the biblical witness - scripture's repetition of the deadly cycle of sacrifice present in all human societies and in all religious ritual and myth - and using the approach of Rene Girard, to offer a new theology of the cross'.
It is a tour de force and I'd strongly recommend it. I've got so much from Heim's close readings of Job, Jonah, Susannah, Paul and the Passion narratives which affirm his view that scripture is full of antisacrificial stories, exploded myths, where the victims of scapegoating violence are revealed and the mechanism of sacrifice is thus unveiled and challenged. I was especially taken with his repeated suggestion that whenever we show ourselves to be aware of the mechanics of human sacrifice - bullying, victimisation - it demonstrates that Jesus' gospel work has been done: we have been converted to the point of view which was previously hidden from humanity and which he died to demonstrate (thus saving us from further repetition).
In the light of this, our communal reading of the Passion narratives in Bratton Clovelly and Sourton today spoke a straightforward truth - that the events of what we call Holy Week are the account of a lynching: not a mythical account in support of the sacrifice but a broken account in which the victim has a voice, the perpetrators are portrayed having grave doubts about what they are doing, and witnesses at the foot of the cross make the previously unthinkable claim that the victim is innocent.
This is not mythology - this is a radical new way. Jesus is treated as all scapegoats are - by a community sacrificing one victim to restore well-being to all. This sort of sacrifice works - but only for a while; it has to be repeated over and over again as violence begets violence, sin crashes into sin. The message of the gospels, Heim says, is that Christ died to put an end to sacrifice, revealed the mechanism and broke the cycle of retribution with his loving reconciliation. Jesus and the Father did not want death - because they are all about life. But this one distinctive act of sacrifice works for all time now. Heim concludes:
The God who paid the cost of the cross was not the one who charged it. We are saved from sacrifice because God suffered it. To be reconciled with God is to recognize victims when we see them, to convert from the crowd that gathers around them, and to be reconciled with each other without them.
I was engrossed by Heim's expose of German National Socialism (whose theologians rewrote scripture to excise its antisacrificial critique and to justify its scapegoating programme)* and Communism (which embraced Christianity's critique of the victim but turned the victims - the oppressed masses, into the victimisers - seeking to defeat the elite in a bloody revolution). This chapter demonstrates that the sacrificial urge in humanity is still strong, that we are in a struggle to convict people of the saving significance of the cross and to release ourselves from the cycle of violence which, despite its defeat at Calvary, still urges to sustain the world.
* more on that subject here.
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