Jesus the Forgiving Victim Quotes

“I hope that we can start to see what Jesus was about in a rather richer way. One of the things that Jesus was about was that he was creating faith. He was doing something so that we could believe. Effectively he was saying “I know that you are susceptible. I know that you find it very difficult to believe that God loves you. I know that you are inclined to be frightened of death. And because of that you are inclined to run from death, mete it out to others and engage in all sorts of forms of self-delusion and self-destruction. You find it difficult to imagine that things really will be well and that you are being held in being by someone who is utterly trustworthy. All this I know.” “What I want to do is to try to nudge you into being able to trust that the One who brought you and everything into being is actually trustable, not out to get you. You can believe him. Believe in him, believe in me. I am going to act out in such a way as to make it possible for you to believe — I am setting out to prove God’s trustworthiness for you.” In fact, in John’s Gospel the very phrase appears “Believe in God, believe also in me ... and now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place, you may believe.”1 John actually frames Jesus’ speech before the Passion as a discussion by which Jesus explains how he is inducing belief.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“it is not the “I” that has desires, it is desire that forms and sustains the “I”.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“Whenever you interpret anything, you can read it two ways: in such a way that your interpretation creates mercy, and in such a way that it creates sacrifice.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“And this is what it means to be able to see yourself as a sinner: far from “seeing yourself as a sinner” being some sort of moralistic demand that you browbeat yourself and come up with a list of alleged failings, being able to see yourself as a sinner is merely the sign that you are able to hold yourself peacefully and realistically as being who you are, non-defensively, because you know yourself loved. You are no longer frightened of being seen to be, or actually being, a failure.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“Now I would like to stress that what we have just seen described is actually much more difficult, and produces much more of a shake-up, than seems to be the case from St Luke’s account. The reason is that we are all actually far more run by our systems of purity, the things which keep us “us” and the other “other”, than we realize. Peter, for instance, was not someone who was in principle a citizen of the world, but just happened to hold to a purity code as a pleasing cultural option. He had been completely brought up within a system, had taken it for granted. The system had given him to be who he was. It hadn’t even occurred to him for quite a long time after hanging out with Jesus, after Jesus had risen from the dead, and after he, Peter, had been performing miracles in Jesus’ name, that all this was going to have unpredictably huge cultural consequences. So what we witness is him being taken to a place at the very limit of his experience. He actually finds himself being asked to do something repulsive.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“Both prophets are faced with the same problem — the presence of child sacrifice understood as obedience to a sacred decree — and both want the same solution — that child sacrifice should stop, and that God should no longer be associated with such things. Yet they have recourse to entirely different strategies of interpretation to get the same result: one holds to a proto-Marcionite “wrong god” solution, the other holds to a proto-fundamentalist “same God, serious mental gymnastics” solution. Yet what is interesting is that, had you been an ordinary, traditional observant Israelite or Judaean of the period, you would have assumed that God wanted child sacrifice, and that both Ezekiel and Jeremiah, each in their own sweet way, were the ancient equivalents of the leader writers of the Guardian newspaper. In other words: dangerously secularizing proto-atheists who are not God-fearing people at all. Good, straightforward God-fearing people will have known right away that religion is a serious business, and it involves sacrificing children. “If you don’t go along with sacrificing children, then you can’t really be serious about respecting God.” So, let’s remember that over time it turned out that the word of God was being spoken by these prophets, the very ones who would have appeared to be insufficiently religious to their contemporaries. In other words, in the Bible, it is the dangerous secularizers who win out in the end.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“You may indeed have had the experience of reading a story under a headline, and wondering whether there wasn’t some mistake — what the headline shouted and what the story appears to say point in different directions. And you can sometimes imagine how infuriating and humiliating it must be for the original journalist to have her nuance and research traduced by the quick-grab title. The point I’m trying to make is a simple one: we don’t read the story in the order in which it was written. We read the most recent piece of editing first, and that is what first guides our interpretation of the process which led up to it. Well, this is no less true of the Scriptures than it is of newspapers. We read the texts through the eyes of the most recent editors. And that means that the more we know about who edited the texts and when, the better a sense we will have of the different fragments that make up the whole.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“If you believe that Jesus, the crucified victim, is God, you stop believing in the gods, you stop believing in weird forces revealing who is “really” to blame, and you get closer and closer to seeing things as they really, humanly, are. What I’m bringing out here is an understanding of progressive revelation. How it is that as the truth emerges more and more richly in our midst we cannot expect the textual effects of that emergence to get nicer and nicer. You would expect them to get nastier and nastier, but clearer and clearer. And finally you see exactly the same story being told from exactly the inverse perspective, so that there are no longer even the remains of any mythical bits at work. It requires no great imagination to think either “The Old Testament is bad and the New Testament is good” or “All word values are the same in both Testaments.” It requires rather more subtlety to imagine a process in which, as the self-manifestation of the innocent victim becomes clearer and clearer, so the understanding of how humans typically are inclined to behave becomes darker and darker, but more and more realistic.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“If that is the case, then I wonder whether it isn’t better to read both the uses of “behold” in the scene by the cross as drawing the eyes of the person being addressed to Jesus. He is urging his mother whom he here greets as “Woman” as though she were Eve, to behold him, her son. In doing so he is both indicating the old creation going out of being which is killing her son, and indicating to her that she is in travail with him for a birthing that is taking place now. Then he draws the eyes of the beloved disciple towards himself as mother indicating that in his going to death he is bringing to birth a new family. From that hour a new family is being born, and it makes perfect sense for the relationship of Mary and the beloved disciple to be recast as one in which they are of the same generation. The elective family which has been brought into being by Jesus’ birthing stretches towards and welcomes into it the woman whose motherhood was both honoured and yet had its cultural meaning transformed as it was stretched into a sisterhood in the new creation.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults

“Thus, Mary, after the Annunciation, goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country of Judaea. Elizabeth, as soon as she hears Mary arrive, “shouts out with a great shout” — the same Greek verb as the shout by which the Levites greeted the Ark of the Covenant when King David brought it into Jerusalem. And then John the Baptist, still in her womb, dances with joy, in the same way as David danced before the Ark. In other words: the missing holy objects are all coming back into the restored Temple, a process which will be complete when the Fire comes back, at Pentecost, and the wall of separation between Gentiles and Jews comes down shortly thereafter.”
― James Alison, Jesus the Forgiving Victim: Listening for the Unheard Voice - An Introduction to Christianity for Adults