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| The sacrifice of Aslan from The Chronicles of Narnia |
The death of Jesus marks the end of religion.
C.S. Lewis, who was very familiar with the history of
religions and their mythologies, seemed to understand this intuitively in his
Christian allegory, The Chronicles of
Narnia. In Lewis’ popular fantasy
novel, the lion Aslan, the Christ figure, allows himself to be killed in
exchange for creation’s release from bondage to the evil powers of this
world. This exchange is proposed by the
evil powers based on the ancient law that an innocent victim may die on behalf
of others to free them. This sacrifice
is referred to as “deep magic from the dawn of time.”
The evil powers exploit this arrangement and have no
intention of honoring the bargain. When
Aslan is resurrected, this comes as a totally unexpected development. The evil powers of this world are adept at
making victims disappear and hiding the injustice of their deaths. Aslan’s death and resurrection exposes this
“deep magic” or “religion,” if you will, as a lie told to maintain an unjust social
order.
When Aslan rises from the dead, the ancient stone altar on
which the sacrifice was offered cracks and crumbles to pieces. It is destroyed and will never be used
again. This is a “deeper magic from
before the dawn of time,” says Aslan.
The Gospel, in Lewis’ view, announces the end of religion: replacing the
practice of sacrificial violence with the practice of sacrificial love. The Gospel is not about the substitution of
victims, but rather about their vindication as God’s beloved. God does not require sacrifice, but rather
mercy for the victims of history.[1]
It is hard to see clearly and without illusions the victims
of sacrificial violence, the “collateral damage” or “unintended harms” justified
as necessary to preserve our social and economic structures. We hide them behind ritual sacrifices and
theological mystifications – “deep magic” such as theories of “market
efficiency” or of “just war” that legitimate the death of innocent victims.
How does this deep magic of sacrificial violence work? It goes back at least to the foundation of
human culture. In his studies of
comparative religion and anthropology, René Girard argued that social life
in its origins is marked by rivalry and violence: think of the Old Testament story of Cain and
Abel’s rivalry ending with Cain murdering Abel.[2] This leads to escalating cycles of
violence: the original sin of human
culture. “Now the earth was corrupt in
God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence,” we are told at the
beginning of the story of Noah.[3]
Girard notes that such violence almost undoes human culture
before it can even get started, and the ability to break this vicious cycle is
considered miraculous. When the cycle of
violence threatens to destroy a community, spontaneous and irrational mob
violence directed against a particular individual or group erupts. The identified victim serves to unite the
community. They are scapegoated, accused
of terrible crimes, and lynched; restoring peace as the sacrifice “clears the
air.” Paradoxically, the scapegoat comes
to be regarded as the source of unity, and becomes a god. This is the root of religious myths and
rituals of sacrifice, which obscure the violence at the origin and center of human
culture.
The prescription for treating unchecked cycles of rivalry
and violence is the reduction of divisions within the community to just one
division between a common victim or minority group and everyone else. Those who are weak and marginal, isolated or
foreign, become good candidates for sacrifice.
The innocence of the victims is forgotten
in the quest for unity and order. It is
obscured through myth and ritual, even though the cure is only temporary and
the need for new victims is insatiable.[4]
If you think this description of human culture is an
exaggeration, consider the dynamic of the class “fairy,” the child identified
as the victim of group teasing and harassment who haunts our school hallways
and playgrounds. The specter of the
class fairy forces us to sort out the social pecking order and conform to the
demands of social acceptance that we crave to feel secure. This dynamic gets replicated in different
ways and in different social structures up to and including national security
policy. How do we know who we are
without an enemy against whom we can define ourselves?
Perhaps a striking example is the life, death and memorialization
of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King was
the exemplary innocent victim, representative of a demonized minority group
blamed during his lifetime for disrupting social order and sewing division in
our country. Only after his murder was
he idealized as the miraculous source of unity created through his sacrifice as
a scapegoat for white racism. His
apotheosis was finally realized in the national holiday and monument which
honor him as a kind of god; a mythology of King that obscures the threat he
posed to an unjust order and downplays the racism that maintains that order
through ever renewed acts of sacrificial violence, right up to the murder of
Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man shot dead by police in his grandmother’s
backyard in Sacramento last week.[5]
The whole trajectory of the biblical narrative is an attempt
to help us see through the mythology of sacrificial violence and the mechanism
of scapegoating innocent victims that underlies it. Such scapegoating is perhaps the deepest
structure of human sin, foundational to human culture, the “deep magic from the
dawn of time.” As Mark Heim points out,
The revelatory quality of the New
Testament on this point is thoroughly continuous with Hebrew scripture, in
which an awareness and rejection of the sacrificial mechanism is already set
forth. The averted sacrifice of Isaac;
the prophet’s condemnation of scapegoating the widow, the weak or the
foreigner; the story of Job; the Psalm’s obsession with the innocent victim of
collective violence; the passion narrative’s transparent account of Jesus’
death; the confessions of a new community that grew up in solidarity around the
risen crucified victim: all these follow
a constant thread. They reveal the
“victimage” mechanisms at the joint root of religion and society – and they
reject those mechanisms. Jesus is the
victim who will not stay sacrificed, whose memory is not erased and who forces
us to confront the reality of scapegoating.[6]
In the Passion Narratives we see a profound
demythologization of sacrificial violence.
The story is now told from the perspective of the victim, whose
innocence is understood clearly. We know
that his execution by the state, cleverly orchestrated through the manipulation
of mob violence, was unjust. The
resurrection of Jesus makes his death a kind of failed sacrifice. When a mythical sacrifice succeeds, it brings
peace, obscures the innocence of the victim and the violence of the
perpetrator, and prepares the way for the next scapegoat. When it fails, either because the community
is not unanimous in its collective violence or the victim is not sufficiently
demonized, it just becomes another killing in the tit-for-tat of retaliatory
violence, and the cycle escalates.
With Jesus’ death and resurrection, we have an entirely new
and unexpected development. People do
not unanimously close ranks over Jesus’ grave in celebration of a faux peace,
nor is there a spree of revenge killings escalating the violence another notch
in response. Instead, a novel community arises dedicated
both to the innocent victim vindicated by God in the resurrection, and to a new
life inspired by Jesus’ sacrificial love that puts an end to sacrificial
violence. The identity of this new
community is not formed in solidarity against victims, but rather in solidarity
with the crucified one.[7]
Against the deep magic of sacrificial violence, our only
hope is the deeper magic of sacrificial love.
In his death and resurrection, Jesus enacted and his disciples
commemorated the death of religion. The
making of new sacrificial victims can no longer be justified. Jesus died in our place because it is
literally true that any of us could, in the right circumstances, be the
scapegoat. In so doing, he became the
victim of sacrificial violence to subvert it from within. Through him, the power of God is at work to
unmask the lie that only violence brings peace, and to free us from our bondage
to this lie. This is what it means to be
set free from sin and death: to no
longer receive our identity from the system of sacrificial violence in any of
it manifestations. The Risen Jesus is now
the source of our identity and security, the innocent victim who comes to us,
not to avenge himself, but to say, “Peace be with you.” Through him we are set free to create genuine,
lasting community rooted in forgiveness, repentance, creativity and joyful
service.
Whenever we gather at the table for Holy Communion, we are
reminded of Jesus’ bloody death. We recall
a real sacrifice and celebrate a substitutionary atonement. But unlike the mythic victims who became sacred
models of an ever-repeating pattern of creating unity through sacrificial
violence, Jesus offered his very real body and blood as a new pattern of living
in which bread and wine are substituted continually for victims – substituted
for any, and all, of us – so that we may find our unity in that which gives
life rather than death.[8]
What makes this Friday good is the celebration of the end of
religion, and its replacement with the deeper magic of deathless love.
[1]
S. Mark Heim, “Visible victim: Christ’s
death to end sacrifice,” The Christian
Century (March 14, 2001), p. 21. I’m
indebted to Heim for what follows as well.
[2]
Genesis 4:1-24.
[3]
Genesis 6:11.
[4]
Heim, p. 20.
[5]
Paige St. John and Nicole Santa Cruz, “As outrage over Stephon Clark's killing grows, his
grandmother asks: 'Why? Why?'” Los
Angeles Times (March 27, 2018).
[6]
Heim, p. 22.
[7]
Heim, p. 22.
[8]
Heim, p. 23.
