Was my Passion Sunday Homily Heretical? (delivered 4/4/04 at Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, Corona Del Mar, CA)

Maybe. Maybe I should say it was probably heretical. I definitely deviated from what has been the orthodox position on the death of Jesus.

Why did I decide to become a heretic? A number of thoughtful people, many of whom attend church regularly, have been questioning the way Christians interpret the death of Jesus. I’ve been listening to their questions, concerns, and complaints, which have only grown louder with the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion, and I had them in mind as I sat down to write my homily. After wrestling with their question, I think I have to agree with them: Christian theology struggles to create a meaningful interpretation of the death of Jesus that doesn’t become nonsensical, self-contradicting, or sinister.

Christians could have chosen to construct their narrative of Jesus’ death entirely within the “martyrdom” meta-narrative. They could have been satisfied to depict Jesus as a martyr, but, for the most part, they chose to go a step further and describe Jesus death in terms of the “sacrifice” meta-narrative. Clearly this image of “sacrifice” is central to Christian theology. We call that table in front of the church “an altar,” and we frequently even use the word “sacrifice” to describe both Jesus’ death and the Eucharist. In my homily I never questioned the use of the “sacrifice” metaphor to read Jesus’ death, but I did question the way Christians, especially twentieth-century Christians, have understood this sacrificial image.

Not satisfied to leave the notion of Jesus as sacrifice in front of us, some Christians have tried to read the sacrificial narrative in juridical terms. In this reading, Jesus’ death becomes the place where God’s justice and love meet. God is just, and therefore can’t excuse sin, but God is also loving, and therefore doesn’t want to punish us for our sins. Therefore, God becomes human and, in a sense, punishes himself by punishing Jesus, thus finding the perfect compromise that satisfies both his (sic) justice and love. The other reading uses an economic language to understand the sacrificial narrative of Jesus’ death. In this reading, we owed a debt (or a “fine” if you want to link it with the juridical reading) to God because of our sin. We couldn’t pay this debt, so Jesus paid it for us. His suffering literally pays for our sins.

While both of these readings can find their roots in the New Testament Epistles (especially Romans, Hebrews, and I John), the logic of these readings is a bit troubling. What kind of justice would be satisfied by punishing an innocent victim? Is sin really part of an economy, and if so, how do we know that love, by itself, can’t overcome this debt without requiring suffering? Did what the Romans did to Jesus really “equal” the suffering necessary to atone for the sins of the whole world? Some respond to this question by saying that since Jesus was “one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man” the divine side of him, being infinite, was able to experience infinite suffering while on the cross. Some suggest this infinite suffering actually took place when “darkness covered the earth” and was expressed by Jesus’ cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”—both signs, according to this reading, that God had turned his back on Jesus who was, as an infinite being, experiencing both all of human sin and the eternal torments of every person who ever lived (or of all the elect if you are a Calvinist) during those hours on the cross. But, if this is true, why did God need to get the Romans involved? Also, this requires God to “create” a human person to torture and kill while he is punishing the “divine” Jesus with all the torments of hell. Is that just? Does that violate the unity of Christ? If Jesus is infinite, wouldn’t a paper-cut, or a “pinch” be experienced infinitely, so why all the flogging, beating, and nailing?

I could go on, but I won’t. A lot of smart people—people smarter than I—have been aware of these problems for almost 1800 years, but they have felt satisfied with their understanding of this sacrifice. I’m not sure I’m one of those people any longer.

So instead of trying to explain the “sacrificial” nature of Jesus’ death in juridical or economical terms, I decided to let it just “sit there.” Having done that, I read Rene Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred, and concluded that Girard was right: sacrifice does not seem to be about expiation, but about deflecting violence onto an innocent victim. By this reading, it is not God who requires Jesus to suffer, but us. It is our violent impulse(s) which requires blood and sacrifice (cf. with the Cain and Abel story). Thus, I affirm God’s love and justice, but by suggesting that God condemns (as opposed to planning and executing) what happened to Jesus.

Now, I’ve developed much of this out of my recent fascination with Process Philosophy. According to this reading, all suffering is incarnational, since God is always right with us in the midst of all of our experience. Still, it might be that Jesus’ suffering may represent a unique example of human-divine suffering as the realization of a universally redemptive possibility. Jesus becomes the innocent (sacrificial) victim par excellence, demonstrating both God’s union with humanity and God’s condemnation of our destructive, mimetic impulses.

Is this heresy? Probably, but I am concerned with how we can still “think” Christianity today, and I suspect the juridical and economic atonement discourses may be losing their grip on us because they require us to read God’s abuse of Jesus as loving (even with an incarnational reading) and they propose a rather strange account of “justice” (requiring justice to be served by punishing an innocent victim—something straightforward sacrificial reading avoids). Perhaps it’s time to find new language. I think I may have found this new language in the unlikeliest of places, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ll write more on that later.