Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross

by Mark S. Heim

If a debt is owed to God, why can't God simply forgive it, as Jesus apparently counsels others to do?

Andre Trocme, the legendary pastor of the French village of Le Chambon, led its people in the rescue of thousands ofJews during World War II, and went on to lead the Fellowship of Reconciliation. He stated concisely the conviction that animated his work: "Basic truth has been taught to us by Jesus Christ. What is it? The person of any one [hu]man is so important in the eyes of God, so central to the whole of His creation, that the unique, perfect being, Jesus, (a) sacrificed his earthly life for that one [hu]man in the street, and (b) sacrificed his perfection [by taking the blame for his sins] in order to save that single [hu]man."16 The strangers who fled to Trocme's door were people whose worth had already been established by the cross. He and his neighbors would risk going to the cross themselves to save them.

Girard's most famous book, Violence and the Sacred, was an anthropological analysis of ancient religion and myth that seemed to presage a similar treatment in the future for Christianity as well. It won him admiration from thinkers who saw his work as a general deconstruction of religion, a welcome contribution to a general critical analysis of all human institutions in terms of underlying relations of power, violence, and domination. However, one such thinker, Michel Foucault, reproached Girard for his insistent concern with violence and sacrifice: "It is not necessary to build an entire philosophy on the victim." To which Girard replied, "No, not a philosophy - rather a religion.... But one already exists! 1121 It was in the Bible.

The book of job is a failed sacrificial event where the victim inexplicably has the stage and is interrogating his persecutors, including the divine power appealed to as the foundation for sacrifice.

In the book ofJob, Satan plays the role of the serpent, this time tempting God rather than humans. In Eden the serpent suggested humans should suspect God's inner motives, intimating that God was animated by competition and jealousy rather than love. In the book of job, Satan suggests to God that job's secret inner motive is greed. He wants what God can give him. God yields to this fear of deception, to resentment. He authorizes Satan's violence.

The "world's" view of sin, righteousness, and judgment is summed up in the sacrificial dynamic. Sin becomes an excuse for persecution, righteousness becomes defined as submission to scapegoating, and judgment uses violence against violence. The historical task of the Holy Spirit, which is another name for the paraclete, is to prove this wrong, by testimony to Christ. Christ is the counterexample. The world that crucified Jesus is wrong about sin and righteousness because it wrongly accused him of sin and refused to see the righteousness confirmed by God's raising of Jesus, and wrong about judgment because the verdict against Jesus has been reversed. The last point is perhaps most striking. The paraclete is directly opposed to Satan. The paraclete will prove the world wrong about judgment, because the prince of this world, Satan, has been condemned. It is the sacrificial process that is on trial, the accuser who is accused.

When writers in the first Christian centuries treated Jesus' death, they put primary emphasis on the cross as a great victory over death and sin. Christ defeated the powers that held humanity in bondage and succeeded in restoring the intimacy with God and participation in eternal life that had been lost. "God became as we are, in order that we might become as God is," was an idea frequently expressed in these texts.16 This is an interesting turn on the serpent's charge, in Eden, that God feared having Eve and Adam become "like God." Quite the contrary. God acts to restore that possibility for humans when it has been lost.

That ambiguity, even at this distance, tells us something about the situation Christians faced. To present the cross as a positive sign of their faith ran many risks, from seeming to endorse Jesus' death (and that Christians would practice human sacrifice, or desire such an end for themselves) to being taken as incitement to violence (i.e., Jesus' death was wrong and the fate of the victim is displayed as a call to retaliation against those who opposed him, then or now).' The frequent appearance of anchors, ship masts, and the Chi-Rho sign in early Christian art as discreet representations of the cross avoided these risks. It may not be coincidental that we have no images of Christ on the cross until after Constantine outlawed crucifixion as an actual mode of execution. So long as such a death was a regular occurrence, a Christian display of the picture could readily be misunderstood by outsiders as a threat from authorities or as a pattern Christians sought to repeat.

Jonah's story is that of a scapegoat sacrifice turned upside down.

Stowe's work was addressed to white Americans, and its single aim was to make them face their own sacrificial behavior. It deserves to be criticized for trading in racial stereotypes and lacking realistic images of African American identity and empowerment. Yet no contemporary text had more actual effect in ending slavery in the United States. The reason for this is disarmingly simple. She presented African Americans as Jesus on the cross, and white Americans as the crowd that crucifies him. She did this by painting Uncle Tom as Christ, and his death as a passion. He is brutally flogged and beaten.

This is why anti-Semitism is a test for a healthy atonement theory. The moment we point a finger at some "they" as Jesus' killers, we have enacted the sin that the cross specifically revealed and meant to overcome. We cut the branch behind ourselves. In anti-Semitism the Christian revelation becomes a grim parody of itself, an ironic mirror of mythical sacrifice. The gospel of Jesus' death reveals to us that the scapegoating solution to the crisis of violence is itself a violence that needs changing. But the anti-Semitic reading of the Gospels turns the cure back into a disease. Christians bear a special responsibility for this evil, greater than that which attaches to "ordinary" scapegoating, just as a nurse would bear a special responsibility if she used a medicine to poison instead of to heal. We who read the Gospels can scarcely claim we know not what we do. Our sacrificial violence toward Jews proclaimed the very sin it practiced.