This morning I’ve chosen to reflect on our second reading,
the text from Paul’s letter to the churches in Corinth.
This text, as theologian James Alison has
remarked, tells “a tale of two spirits.”
[1]
The first is the spirit of religion.
The
second is the Spirit of God.
Allow me to
explain.
In the opening verses of First Corinthians chapter twelve,
Paul is distinguishing between two forms of spirituality. The first, which I am calling the spirit of
religion, leads people to worship idols and to create a sense of community by
defining themselves against some other, who is “cursed.” This is the dynamic at the root of religion,
the basis of all human culture. In the
course of human evolution, tensions and conflicts reach a point of crisis that
spills out into violence, or at least its threat, and are resolved by the
unification of the community over and against some person or group, set apart
as a scapegoat.
The expulsion or murder of the scapegoat produces a renewed
stability and peace. So powerful is
this experience of relief and reunion that an aura of sacredness gathers around
the one sacrificed for the sake of this unity.
The one cursed paradoxically attains a divine status. The dynamic is repeated whenever conflict
remerges, which it inevitably does, and gives rise to increasingly complex sets
of prohibitions and rituals associated with the sacrifice. The sacrifice itself moves from humans, to
animals, and then to an increasingly abstract ideal. The elaboration of myths and rituals covers
over the founding murder and obscures the violence that creates and sustains
cultural order.
Religion, then, becomes the cornerstone and justification of
the continuing dynamic of sacrificial violence, the scapegoating mechanism that
preserves order through the identification and expulsion of victims.
When Caiaphas, the high priest, says with
reference to Jesus, “better to have one man die for the people than to have the
whole nation destroyed,”
[2] he
was basically giving voice to the spirit of religion.
This is why Jesus will say of the religious leaders, “You
are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s
desires.
He was a murderer from the
beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in
him.
When he lies, he speaks according
to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”
[3] Satan
here is the personification of the whole system of sacrifice upon which
civilization is based.
Religion lies about
the murder at the foundation of culture, serving to mystify and justify
sacrificial violence as something that God requires, rather than admit the
innocence of the victims whom we curse.
[4]
Karl Barth, perhaps the greatest Protestant theologian of
the 20
th Century, intuitively understood this dynamic when he wrote
that “Religion is not the sure ground upon which human culture safely rests; it
is the place where civilization and its partner barbarism are rendered
fundamentally questionable . . . Conflict and distress, sin and death, the
devil and hell, make up the reality of religion.”
[5] Barth, to his credit, following St. Paul,
subjected Christianity to this same critique.
As we see in our reading from Corinthians, Paul is alert to
those who would say, “Jesus is cursed” and thus fashion from his death yet
another religion based on sacrificial violence. Already Jesus’ death and resurrection is
being interpreted on the model of the sacrificial victim, one who dies because
God requires it, and because we need such a murder to restore our sense of
unity and goodness.
Paul will have none of this.
It smacks of religion to him. The
spirit of God does not lead one to say, “Jesus is cursed” but rather “Jesus is
Lord.” He is “Lord” precisely because he
has revealed that the sacrificial victim is innocent, and that such murder is a
purely human attempt at creating order.
It has nothing to do with God, who is the source of endless creativity
and life.
The spirit of religion creates a false sense of community on
the basis of division and expulsion. It is only concerned with the welfare of “our
people.” It projects violence on to God
to absolve us from taking responsibility for our own violence. It leads to death.
Notice how different the true spirit of God is. It does not feed on human death by demanding
sacrifices, but rather generates the giftedness of every human being that
sustains life. These gifts are not given
to favor one group or person over another, but rather for the sake of the
common good. God is not the source of
order based on sacrificial violence. God
is the source of community based on the sharing of gifts. Unity is not secured through pitting us
against them (much less all against one), but rather through the recognition of
mutual interdependence. It is the
energy of love, not of violence, that expresses the Holy Spirit.
In his death, Jesus reveals the truth of human culture: that
it is based on sacrificial violence. In
his resurrection, he reveals that the sacrificial victim is innocent. God is identified with giving life to
victims, and not with requiring or justifying their perpetuation. In his renunciation of violence and in his
practice of forgiveness of enemies, Jesus opens up for us a way of being human
that is truly creative of community because it is not defined over and against
anyone.
It is important for us to affirm this, perhaps especially as
we prepare for the national commemoration of the life of Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. In doing so, we must place
his renunciation of violence at the center of his witness. Like Jesus, Martin identified with the
victims of sacrificial violence and proclaimed their innocence. He invited us to realize the Beloved
Community, a community rooted in the recognition of our common humanity and the
common good manifest when the giftedness of each and all is acknowledged and
expressed.
Martin revealed the murder, the violent lie, at the very
foundation of American culture as only the son of slaves could do.
But he didn’t stop there.
He also said, “I identify with those people
you call gooks and enemies and Viet Congs and those who must be burned to death.
I identify with them; they are my sisters and
brothers.
Those are my children running
aflame.”
[6] It would have been tempting for Martin to
resort to religion, to sacrifice the Vietnamese enemy as a means to create a
new unity between blacks and whites in America.
This same temptation arises in the form of making Martin himself a
sacrificial victim, around whose death we forge a unified, post-racial
America.
That would amount to yet
another religious mystification, covering over our responsibility for the
murder that created such pseudo-unity.
It was not Martin’s death that should inspire us.
It is his life.
Legend has it that Martin carried around a copy of Howard
Thurman’s
Jesus and the Disinherited wherever
he went.
“Thurman was saying, if you are
living the spirit of Jesus, then you cannot live in the spirit of fear, you
cannot live in the spirit of deception, even for good causes; you cannot live
in the spirit of hatred.
None of those
is the way of Jesus.”
[7]
This was the spirituality, the spirit of God, which Martin tried to embody.
It was a spirituality that Martin learned from Thurman,
among others. There is a passage from
Thurman’s book, The Luminous Darkness, that
illuminates the meaning of Martin’s life and the nature of the Spirit of God
with great poignancy:
The
burden of being black and the burden of being white is so heavy that it is rare
in our society to experience oneself as a human being. It may be, I don't know,
that to experience oneself as a human being is one with experiencing one's
fellows as human beings. It means that the individual must have a sense of
kinship to life that transcends and goes beyond the immediate kinship of family
or the organic kinship that binds him [or her] ethnically or
"racially" or nationally. He has a sense of being an essential part
of the structural relationship that exists between him and all other men [and
women], and between him, all other men [and women], and the total external
environment. As a human being, then, he belongs to life and the whole kingdom
of life that includes all that lives and perhaps, also, all that has ever
lived. In other words, he sees himself as a part of a continuing, breathing,
living existence. To be a human being, then, is to be essentially alive in a
living world.[8]
Thurman is well
ahead of his time in realizing that the community to which we belong, and whose
good is commonly held and collectively realized, extends beyond even the human
species. His is a truly prophetic word
in a time when the very “kingdom of life” could become our next, and final,
sacrificial victim.
To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the
common good. When we recognize this, we
can no longer make victims with a clear conscience; no matter how well they may
or may not conform to our notions of good and evil. To know this is the end of religion. It is the beginning of Resurrection life.
[1]
James Alison,
Faith Beyond Resentment,
pp. 147-149.
[4]
Rene Girard has exhaustively analyzed the anthropological and biblical witness
to the dynamic of sacrificial violence.
See his
Things Hidden from the
Foundation of the World.
[5]
See Kart Barth,
Commentary on Romans,
pp. 258-259, 266, 268, 270.
[7]
Harding, “Dangerous Spirituality”
[8]
Quoted in Harding, “Dangerous Spirituality”
