Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross

by Mark S. Heim

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.