Visible victim

Christian Century, March 14, 2001 by S. Mark Heim

But in the case of Jesus' death, something else happens. People do not unanimously close ranks over Jesus' grave (as Jesus' executioners hoped), nor is there a spree of violent revenge on behalf of the crucified leader. Instead, an odd new countercommunity arises, dedicated both to the innocent victim whom God has vindicated by resurrection and to a new life through him that requires no further such sacrifice. As Girard sees it, this is the good news, the inexplicable revelation, that is found in the Bible.

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 prophets' condemnation of scapegoating the widow, the weak or the foreigner; the story; of Job; the Psalms' obsession with the innocent victim of collective violence; the passion narratives' 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 as 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.

This is why the case of anti-Semitism is the infallible test for a healthy Christian theory of atonement. One of the crucial things that makes the church a new community is its solidarity not against some sacrificial victim, but in identification with the crucified one.

Christians have always been as inclined as others toward scapegoating, and have too rarely overcome that inclination. Our guilt in this regard is underlined by the fact that the gospel prompted Christians who would resist its revelation to create a new version of the old sin. Because the dynamic of Jesus' passion has made it impossible to be unconscious of scapegoats or to mystify them in myths, Christian persecutors have put them in plain sight. Jews were scapegoated with the claim that they were the ones who had scapegoated Jesus. The new sin, for which Christians can claim "credit," was to victimize people by accusing them of being victimizers, to make the revelation directed against sacrifice a new rationale for sacrifice. To use the gospel in a "mythological" way, Christians have somehow to distort the very truth it has given them. The moment we point a finger at some "they" as Jesus' killers, we have enacted the sin that the very particularity of the cross meant to overcome. Christians bear a special culpability for this prompt perversion, with less right to claim that we knew not what we did: our sacrificial violence toward Jews proclaimed the very sin it practiced.

WE BEGAN BY NOTING the tension seeded through the passion story: Jesus' death saves, and it ought not to have happened. The tension is there not because the gospel writers can't get their story straight but because this tension is the heart of the story itself. The language of sacrifice and blood (with all its dangers) tells the truth. To want to purge these elements from the story reflects a naive confidence that we are in greater danger of being corrupted by the bloody language than we are of falling prey to the sin it describes. The good/bad tension is there first because of the frank description of the sacrificial, scapegoating violence that has existed from the foundation of the world. That violence does save people from more violence. But its victims ought not to be sacrificed. This tension reflects an honest description of our human condition.