1 Corinthians 1.1-9, John 1.29-42
The Second Sunday of Epiphany, 15 January 2017
Sutton Montis , West Camel
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
They loved their theatre in ancient Corinth, and what a wild form of theatre it was. Corinth was a centre of the cult of Dionysus, the god of the vine, the grape harvest, of wine and winemaking, of ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. And at festivals and in theatres dedicated to Dionysus, sure enough the wine flowed, the dancers danced, the revellers got all bacchanalian - and - this is the part which we might struggle with - the crowd onstage made sacrifices to the god Dionysus in the ripping-apart of animals, sometimes even humans, and the eating of their dismembered flesh. [1]
Now, this isn’t the sort of theatre you’re likely to pay to see in the West End today. But our theatre is rooted in Greek theatre of this kind. We’ve evolved away from ritual sacrifices into far subtler kinds of performance, but - this is a question for today - have we left Dionysus behind?
The influential theorist René Girard, who died a year ago, didn’t think we had.
“In the sinister cult of Dionysus”, he wrote, “the protagonist is the entire community transformed into a violent mob. They believe that an isolated individual threatens them, who is often a foreigner, and they spontaneously massacre the visitor.” Girard struggled to find a French term to describe “this sudden, convulsive violence, this pure crowd phenomenon,” he said. “The word that comes most readily to the lips is an Americanism, ‘lynching’.” [2]
Now lynching is never far from the news. This week came reports that the British singer Rebecca Ferguson has pulled out of Donald Trump's inauguration after the organisers denied her request to perform Strange Fruit - the 1930s Billie Holiday song which protests at racism and particularly the lynching of black people. She said, “I requested to sing Strange Fruit as I felt it was the only song that would not compromise my artistic integrity and also as somebody who has a lot of love for all people, but has a special empathy as well for African American people and the Black Lives Matter movement, I wanted to create a moment of pause for people to reflect.” [3]
But from the West Front of the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., next Friday, back to the cult of Dionysus over a thousand years BC. The cult’s bloody rituals originated in the very disturbing tale that when he was just newly-born, Dionysus was murdered by a crowd of Titans, who ate everything but his heart, and the very astonishing story that Dionysus’ father Zeus used the heart to recreate his son, making him ”the twice-born”. [4]
The story seems to tell us that even the gods can’t escape being lynched, or sacrificed, by the crowds, for the sake of the greater good. But also that the gods have the power to be reborn.
And so to John the Baptist, announcing the coming of Jesus the Messiah with these words, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
And the term ‘Lamb of God’ is a reference to human sacrifice. John saw what Jesus later taught, that just like Dionysus, in time the people would demand the blood of Jesus.
And so they did - at the start of his ministry in Nazareth when the crowds tried to throw him over a cliff [5]; at various flash points in the temple when the pharisees tried to stone him [6] and at the end of his ministry in Jerusalem where those who wanted rid of him wound up the crowd to collectively press for his execution; Jesus’ death was a kind of lynching.
So Jesus and Dionysus shared the same story; even the radically anti-Christian German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche saw it clearly. In his famous book The Will to Power, in a section headed Dionysus versus the Crucified Nietzsche explained how he saw the equivalence between the collective murder of Dionysus and the passion of Jesus. There is a difference between the two, he said, but “It is not a difference in regards to their martyrdom - it is a difference in their meaning of it.” [7]
So when Dionysus dies his brutal sacrificial death and is reborn, all that happens is that the cycle of violence picks up again and carries on as before. The work of the Titans is never done. Dionysus always wants our blood. Lynchings are still being performed today. What name shall we give this endless cycle of sacrifice to our angry vengeful gods, of this steady stream of lynchings and expulsions of our scapegoats who don’t fit in? We might call it ‘the sin of the world’.
But when Jesus the Lamb of God dies and is reborn, John proclaims “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
What is the meaning of that?
The way that most of us have been taught, the meaning of Jesus being the Lamb of God is that ‘God is in his heaven, and he demands that someone pays the bill for all the evil in the world. Jesus pays the bill, and the rest of us are let off.’ That’s the sacrifice; that’s the “Lamb of God.” [8]
But doesn’t that sound a bit Greek to you? You know, the Jewish people couldn’t understand the Greeks’ obsession with human sacrifice - for they had abandoned that themselves way, way back in their story, when God saved Abraham’s son Isaac from sacrifice. Abraham moved from the sacrifice of his son to something less troubling. And Jewish people today can’t understand why Christians insist on the theory that God, angry at our sins and ready to punish us for them, sent his Son in order to take the rap himself, and for us.
The Jews have a point when they say this looks like reversing the Abrahamic move. They say, ‘You Christians look like you’re going in the other direction: you see God sacrificing his Son.’
The problem for this atonement theory is that it leaves in place a vengeful God who demands that someone be punished for sin. This is not a God who conforms to the God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. [9]
Isn’t this God revealed in Jesus, the Father who loves his Son unconditionally? [10]
Isn’t this Jesus the Son who taught his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”? [11]
And isn’t this Jesus the Lamb of God, who comes from the Father and returns to the Father? [12]
Now, as Paul put it in his letter to them, those first Christians in Dionysian Corinth found themselves ‘enriched in Jesus Christ’ as they embraced these great new truths about the nature of God. [13] Enriched in Jesus Christ as they asked themselves the sorts of question we must ask ourselves if we, too, seek enrichment of our hearts and minds.
When we think about the meaning of The Lamb of God, we must ask ourselves, who is offering the lamb to be sacrificed? And who is the lamb being sacrificed to? Who is the one demanding blood sacrifices?
What if we have had it all the wrong way around for so long - that the Lamb of God is not the people’s offering to a wrathful God - it would be more accurate to call that lamb the Lamb of Man; but rather that the Lamb of God is God’s offering to the people; for it is humanity who demand sacrifice.
The Lamb of God is not the lamb of the human community given to God, but is the Lamb of God given to the sacrificial human community. We are the ones who lynch; we are the ones who demand sacrifices of the weak and outsiders. We can’t blame it on God. We can no longer say God wanted that sacrifice. The passion story of Jesus exposes the sin of the world as humanity’s addiction to human sacrifice. [14]
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
So how does Jesus’s blood save us? By revealing to us, uniquely, how we’re bound into an endless cycle of sacrifice - and releasing us from it, by breaking that cycle himself. For he is the innocent victim whose death opens our eyes to our sinfulness; but there is no vengeance in him, towards us, just pure entirely giving love.
We can sense the truth in this when we remember how firmly Jesus opposed the lynchings of crowds when he saw them - that time he saved the woman caught in adultery from a stoning, for example. [15]
We can see how awareness of this salvation has seeped into our culture, for unlike the ancients the gospel has made the world aware of how we make victims, of how we create scapegoats as sacrifices for the good of our community - as Rebecca Ferguson’s stance this week well shows.
We can live this good news ourselves by standing alongside those who we feel are being victimised in our village, scapegoated in our school, vilified in social media, being prepared for expulsion and punishment by those soliciting our popular support.
We might ask, when we see society expecting our young people to sacrifice the possibility of good work, their own homes, a safe environment - what god does that sacrifice serve?
You can find yourself ‘enriched in Christ’ by training yourself to be more aware of when sacrifices come into play in daily life - if you feel you’re being pressured to make a sacrifice of some sort - that could be a sign of a pagan god at work; in January it’s the gods of the body, the health-and-fitness gods who crush us with their demands for sacrificial eating, extra exercise to atone for the sins of the Christmas season. …
But if you find yourself making a sacrifice for someone else’s sake, out of love - that’s surely a wonderful sign of our Father God at work.
In our church calendar we travel this year with the gospel of John. The theologian John Fenton says that
John [the Evangelist] is one of those comparatively rare people who are dissatisfied with the way their contemporaries are living and horrified at the second-rate quality of what they find acceptable. He believes passionately that we could do better; and this dissatisfaction colours not only his view of those who are not believers, but also his attitude to the contemporary churches. Darkness and death are at work not only in the world, but among the faithful.
[In his gospel] John jettisons so much of the traditional religious baggage. Jesus did not come to offer a sacrifice for sin, or to found a church, or to teach people how to keep the old law, or to give them a new law; he came to be himself. What he does, he does by… being here.… This is the meaning of the I AM sayings - everything that is needed for the real and full life, is available here and now. [16]
“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” - let us let our hearts to embrace him anew as the world turns through the start of this new year.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia: Dionysus, Theatre of Dionysus and related pages. I was pulled in this direction by Paul Nuechterlein’s Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Reflections, Year A. Epiphany 2A, regarding Robert Hamerton-Kelly, “A Girardian Interpretation of Paul: Rivalry, Mimesis and Victimage in the Corinthian Correspondence,” Semeia 33: René Girard and Biblical Studies (1985), pp. 65-81. Nuechterlein notes that ‘A feature that Hamerton-Kelly lifts up is the fact that Corinth was a centre of the Dionysian cult, an important foil for Girard - first in Violence and the Sacred, but also later in his treatment of Nietzsche (many places).’
[2] René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, p.63-64. This book informs much of the wider discussion here, as does Girard’s paper “Dionysus versus the Crucified”, MLN Vol. 99, No. 4, French Issue (Sep., 1984), pp. 816-835.
[3] Rebecca Davison and Chris Summers, Singer Rebecca Ferguson PULLS OUT of performance at Trump's inauguration in feud over her decision to sing anti-lynching protest song, Mailonline, 10 January 2017.
[4] Wikipedia: Birth (and infant death and rebirth).
[5] Luke 4.14-30.
[6] John 8.59, John 10.31-33.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p.542-43.
[8] Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Reflections, Year A. Epiphany 2A.
[9] Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Reflections, Year A. Epiphany 2A.
[10] John 3.35.
[11] John 15.9.
[12] John 16.28.
[13] 1 Corinthians 1.5.
[14] Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, Reflections, Year A. Epiphany 2A.
[15] John 8.1-11.
[16] John Fenton, Finding The Way Through John, p.143. Thanks, Robert Gallagher, for this reference.
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