Remembrance Sunday, 9 November 2014
Corton Denham, Weston Bampfylde
Lest we forget - the teachings of Jesus which we call the Sermon on the Mount were words spoken to an audience in wartime.
Lest we forget - the extract from that sermon which we now know as The Beatitudes, Jesus gave to the crowds in Occupied Palestine, circa AD.30.
So when he spoke of the poor on that day, he did so with his eyes open to those most damaged by the Roman occupying forces and their client rulers of the Jewish hierarchy, those who had lost their homes, their land, their freedom in being coerced into supplying the means by which the regime could survive and flourish.
And when he spoke of those who mourn, at that time, he was awake to the grieving mothers and sisters and friends of those who the state had executed for plotting treason, or for petty theft, or for all crimes in-between which upset the balance of empire.
When he spoke of the meek he would have had in mind the conscripts to the empire’s armed cause; the lepers cast out to the gates of the cities lest they contaminated the people.
When he spoke of those who hungered and thirsted for righteousness he would see in his audience those who followed the rule of the governing powers to the letter, in faith that this was the just way, and those who, by contrast, were members of protest groups, some plotting insurrection, seeking to re-establish the higher laws of God in the land.
Jesus had his eyes open to those who in this occupied territory nevertheless performed acts of mercy, even on those their community opposed; he watched and saw peacemakers at work, those who raised eyebrows by reconciling differences between people in the Temple courts, in the marketplaces and in homes.
The Sermon on the Mount was not a spiritual meditation about a pie-in-the sky future world. The Beatitudes were formed and articulated in an occupied territory at a time of great conflict. And because of this they remain persuasive today.
One hundred years after the First World War what is the authentic Christian voice to say about conflict in our times? What words do we have to contribute to the well-being of our world? To begin to answer this we have to go back to the roots of our religion, to the ancient ways whose genesis we share with our Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters.
Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people’s misdeeds on to its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In this way, Moses explained, ‘the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place’.’ In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community. [1]
If we look again at the people Jesus spoke about in the Beatitudes, we see that they were the scapegoats of that world, just as they are in ours:
The poor, forever exploited for their land and livelihood by society’s elites; the mourners and the meek, who had lost out in the conflicts of the time and from whom society withheld welfare; those who protested and those who tried to establish peace, whose voices were silenced by the ruling elite, by any means possible.
Each of them victim to the ways of the scapegoat mechanism: having the blame for society’s ills placed on their heads, being cast out of the community for the greater good of all.
It is not difficult for us to identify the scapegoats we create today - in this time of massive economic inequalities our society demonises our poorest by our cruel and unjust insistence that those on welfare are feckless scroungers, and reviles those who travel across borders in search of an income to support their families. [2]
Is it too provocative to propose that there is a line which firmly connects our scapegoating of economic migrants with the regular scapegoating of the Jews in European history which culminated in the Nazi death camps of World War Two?
And is it too fanciful to suggest that those sent to the trenches in the First World War were scapegoats of the end of empire? Allied and German soldiers alike cast out to the wilderness of the Western Front to bear away all the faults of the crumbling world to which the ruling elites still clung?
We might consider these questions credible if we recognise the reality of the scapegoat system at work in our world, creating the conflicts into which we are constantly drawn.
Perhaps the greatest contribution of Christianity to humanity’s understanding of itself, is this profound insight of the scapegoat. From ancient times societies have kept order by identifying the vulnerable ones among them, and eliminating them. This is the root of our rituals of sacrifice, at first human sacrifice, then animal sacrifice, and in modern wartime the language of sacrifice through which we send others to their deaths.
Though deeply ingrained in its ways, the scapegoat mechanism was hidden from the world until revealed by the scapegoating of God himself - the show trial and execution of Jesus, whose death revealed him as the sacrificial victim of the empire whose ways he challenged. The words and actions of the resurrected Christ bear what we might call ‘the intelligence of the victim’ which makes the insights of Calvary the pivotal point on which human culture turns. [3]
Since Calvary, our eyes have been opened to the scapegoat mechanism. We have seen it at work in our own lives and societies. We have realised how deeply ingrained it is in us. Since Calvary, some have turned their backs on all restraint and escalated violence through the industrial-scale slaughter of troops in World War One, the fire bombings and nuclear annihilations of World War Two, and the genocides and terror acts of more recent times in which civilians are the primary victims. But the knowledge of the scapegoat mechanism has prompted others to place limits on our behaviour by means, for instance, of the application of the Just War Theory. We hear the intelligence of the victim in the insights of the last survivor of the First World War Harry Patch, who with his eyes wide open once claimed, ‘War is organised murder’.
The preeminent contemporary historian of religion Karen Armstrong has recently written of her belief that ‘modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.’ ‘In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident,’ she writes. She speaks of the mantra recited to her constantly, by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics - the view that ‘Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history’.
It is an odd remark [she says]. Obviously the two world Wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material and ideological factors are involved, among the chief of them competition for scarce resources. Experts in political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. Yet … we routinely load the violent sins of the twentieth century on to the back of ‘religion’ and drive it out into the political wilderness. [4]
This makes it difficult for an authentic Christian voice to contribute to discussions about conflict in our times. But perhaps no more difficult than Jesus found it in the conflicted society of his day.
And the joy is that The Beatitudes do not offer a mere sticking-plaster to the suffering scapegoats of the world. The beauty in the Sermon on the Mount is that it proposes a new way of human behaving towards others which, if followed, will introduce a new realm of human well-being, in the here-and-now, which Jesus calls The Kingdom of God.
For the poor are blessed when the privileged turn to them as equals and stand with them in their struggles for economic justice; the meek are blessed when the powerful share their power with them and bring them in from the cold; the mourning of those whose loved ones have been lost to the wars of empire will be relieved by those who recover the means to build peace between peoples and deal with conflicts without violence.
The Beatitudes encourage us that it is possible to build peace and understanding with those we would otherwise distance ourselves from, and cast out into the wilderness: among them not least our Muslim brothers and sisters, of whom the vast majority are peaceable citizens, of whom far more have been killed by ISIS than any other group of casualties.
If Karen Armstrong is right and religion is being made a scapegoat in the modern world, then this should be questioned, she says.
"Having a scapegoat means you displace your sins and put the blame elsewhere. They're not your sins any more. We are not looking sufficiently at nationalism, aggressive colonialism, and our inability to accept minorities, which resulted in the explosion of the Holocaust, and the creation of a world with a new aristocracy, the West versus the rest. [5]
The ethic expressed in The Beatitudes is not pie-in-the-sky spirituality. This is Christianity with its eyes wide open. The Beatitudes invite the world to cease displacing our sins and putting the blame elsewhere, and to embrace a new and better way of being human.
Notes
[1] Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, p.1
[2] For a detailed critique of this contemporary attitude see Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class.
[3] ‘A phrase that James Alison uses a great deal in his work is "the intelligence of the victim." It describes the revelation that begins to issue forth, through the power of the Spirit (the "Paraclete" in John's Gospel), as Jesus the Risen Victim appears to witnesses on Easter morning. According to mimetic theory, all human mythology is from the persepective of the victimizers, namely, the story of human culture generated at the expense of victims - though the collective violence of culture is veiled behind the violence of the gods. The Gospel is the inbreaking into human mythology of God's story of salvation as told from the perspective of the Lamb of God, God's Son offered to our cultural mechanisms of victimage. "The intelligence of the victim" is an epistemology that proceeds from the perspective of the victim.’ - Paul Neuchterlein, James Alison on "The Intelligence of the Victim”, Girardian Lectionary. See also An Excerpt for James Alison's The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes, from the same website, and all James Alison's work.
[4] Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, p.1
[5] Cole Moreton, It’s not all religion’s fault (Karen Armstrong interview), Church Times, 31 Oct 2014
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