A Father Learning to Love: Atonement

Showing posts with label Atonement. Show all posts

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 9: Azazel

In my last post, I threw some challenges out at the so-called "Penal Substitutionary Atonement" theory that began to develop with Anselm. The struggle that many people have with letting go of this theory stems from verses in the Bible that say things like "the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all" (Isaiah 53:6) and "he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." (Isaiah 53:12)

But these passages don't bother me in the slightest. In fact, I affirm them. And yet I deny that God required a death in order to forgive. How?

Catholic theologian and priest James Alison put it best, I think, when he wrote that the Penal Substitutionary model of thought "is far too little conservative. I want to put forward a much more conservative account."

I hope that sounds intriguing to you. So let's explore this thought.

The problem with the Penal Substitutionary Atonement model is that it ignores the liturgy of Jewish sacrifice. James Alison explains:

Now that doesn't sound like too much of a contrast in our world because we tend to have an impoverished notion of liturgy. And we do not realise how much our dwelling in theory complicates our lives. That in fact having atonement as a theory means that it is an idea that can be grasped – and once it is grasped, one has got it – whereas a liturgy is something that happens at you. I want to go back and recover a little bit of what the liturgy of atonement was about; because when we understand that we begin to get a sense of what this language of “atonement” and “salvation” is about.

The description of this liturgy Alison alludes to is provided in Leviticus 16:1-28. In the description of this ceremony, the High Priest - whom, if you remember from before, plays a representative and mediating role between God and the entire nation of Israel - would go into the "Holy of Holies" - a section at the back of the temple that was blocked off by a curtain. Now, the only person who was allowed in this area was the High Priest, and only on certain days of the year. When he entered, the priest would take along with him one of two goats. The passage in Leviticus explains that at the entrance of the Holy of Holies, he would choose between the two goats by casting a lot - this would identify one of the goats "for the Lord", while the other would be identified as the scapegoat (verse 8). Interestingly enough, there is a footnote in most Bible's on this verse which explains that instead of "scapegoat", the name "Azazel" may be used.

What's so intriguing about this is that there is a connection between Azazel and Satan. This connection is provided by the Book of Enoch. In Enoch 8:1, Azazel is introduced as the leader of seven evil spirits who taught mankind how to make swords, knives, shields, and breastplates. Also, he apparently taught man how to make mirrors, paint, and...how to beautify the eyebrows. Apparently, Grumpy was right: women who use makeup are full of the wicked wiles. At least, according to the writer of Enoch.

Please keep in mind that for the people during Jesus' day, this book was thought of as Scripture.

Now what's really interesting is that Enoch implies that Satan and Azazel are one and the same. One has to read carefully to notice this, but you will find Enoch using "Satan" and "Azazel" interchangeably - for example, in chapter 53, verse 5 mentions the "host of Azazel" and then goes on in verse 6 to speak of this same group as the "ministers of Satan". And furthermore, whenever the "father of all evil" is mentioned within this book, it is "Satan" or "Azazel" interchangeably.

A model of the temple.

So keep this in mind as we explore the liturgy of Leviticus 16:1-28. Back to this ceremony - so the High Priest has cast the lots, identifying one goat to represent the Lord and one to represent Azazel. Then he would take the goat that was representative of the Lord into the Holy of Holies. He would do this dressed in a white robe, which represented the robe of an angel. This signified that at this point he was no longer merely a human, but a son of God. Not only this, but once he had put this robe on, he would put on a phylactery - a small leather box containing Hebrew texts that was fastened onto the priest by a leather strap. In this ceremony, the phylactery would contain...the Name. This was not any name - it was "the name which could not be pronounced". The tetragrammaton - YHVH. He would then enter the Holy of Holies wearing...the Name of the Lord. Do you recall the phrase "blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord"? (See Psalm 118:26 and Matthew 23:39.)

So the priest - wearing the name of the Lord and representing a son of God - would enter the Holy of Holies with a goat representing the Lord. And then he would sacrifice this goat, and sprinkle its blood all over the place. James Alison explains:

The purpose of this was to remove all the impurities that had accrued in what was meant to be a microcosm of creation, because the Holy of Holies, in the understanding of the Temple, was the place where the Creator dwelt. The rite of atonement was about the Lord himself, the Creator, emerging from the Holy of Holies so as to set the people free from their impurities and sins and transgression. In other words, the whole rite was exactly the reverse of what we typically imagine a priestly rite to be about.

The high priest - representing the Lord and wearing the name of the Lord - would then emerge from the Holy of Holies. He would pierce the veil between this place and the rest of the temple - this represented God breaking through the separation between Himself and the rest of Creation. He would then sprinkle the rest of the blood outside. What's interesting about this is that at this point, the priest himself represented God, and it was God's blood being sprinkled. This would purify "Creation" and set it free!

After this point, he would take the Azazel goat, and this goat would be driven off of a cliff by the people and die - and this represented the people's sin being taken away.

If you keep all of this in mind when you read the story of Jesus, you'll notice something very interesting. When Jesus was hung on the cross, Christianity proposes that he was the one "who comes in the name of the Lord." But you might notice something odd - Jesus is also the representative for humanity's sins. And you might also notice a suspicious absence - where's the scapegoat? Where's the Azazel?

In the ritual of Atonement, the scapegoat was taken outside the city, and killed there. When Romans would crucify someone, it happened outside the city. In "The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction", Peter Rollins writes:

For Roman citizens crucifixion was the most potent sign of someone being rejected by the cultural, political, and religious systems of the day, all of which were seen as divinely established. Those who were crucified were treated as complete outsiders. They were to die naked, alone, and in agony. But the execution meant more than torture and death; it was a sign that the one being killed stood outside of the divinely given order.

In contrast the Crucifixion of Christ today is seen as a key justification of a cultural, political, and religious matrix, a matrix that Kierkegaard called “Christendom.” It is difficult for us today to understand the extent to which this mode of execution signaled the exclusion of the victim from all systems of meaning, because it is so much a part of one for us. The Cross is so integrated into our religious, political, and cultural imagination that its reality as a mode of execution that placed the victim outside of these realms is utterly eclipsed. Instead of being a symbol of standing outside all systems of meaning, the Cross is now integrated into a system of meaning.

Atonement theories have to contend with the fact that the Jewish ritual involved two goats - one for God and one for the people: the scapegoat, or "Azazel" goat. The latter represented the people, and it was through the death of this goat that the people's sins were atoned. In the act of the cross, Jesus represented both.

In Jewish theology, when someone was "hung from a tree", they were cursed. Deuteronomy 21:23 says that they were cursed...by God. However, the apostle Paul picked up on the imagery of Jesus on the cross, and wrote in Galatians 3:13:

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”.

Paul is alluding to Deuteronomy 21:23 here. But did you notice something? Paul left out the "by God" part of that quote. That's because the cross is supposed to reveal something: God doesn't curse. We do. But God - in His mercy - takes those curses without offering any violence in return, and in so doing, He shows us that our curses only hurt ourselves.

The cross was where Jesus became the outsider and lost all meaning. And when he was near the point of death, he cried "my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mt. 27:46, Mk. 15:34). Some may try to turn this into some sort of theater - like Jesus was just quoting a Psalm (Ps. 22:1) in order to fulfill a prophecy, but he didn't really think God had forsaken him (as if it were said with a wink at the camera). But the problem with this interpretation is that Jesus spoke this in Aramaic - which was his native tongue - while the verse was written in Hebrew. Yes, I'm sure that the author of the gospel narrative meant to give a nod to the Psalm, but he deliberately did it in the wrong language, indicating that Jesus actually felt this way!

In the Jewish ritual of Atonement, there was one goat inside the Holy of Holies, and one on the outside of the city. But when Jesus dies, there is only one sacrifice - the one Who is outside. In the temple ritual, after the sacrifice is offered, the High Priest comes through the curtain. But when Jesus dies, the curtain is torn in two (Mk. 15:38 and Mt. 25:51). The Holy of Holies represented access to God, for the Jews. And many theologians have tried to turn the tearing of the veil into a message of Jesus giving us access to God.

But what if it were indicating something else? What if the Jewish audience would have realized that this indicated that God was not there. There was no man behind the curtain - just an empty space. Where was God? Out there on that hill; the scapegoat; the outsider; dying from the wounds that the Priestly class had demanded be inflicted on Him; doubting Himself and His own faith.

By offering himself as the scapegoat, Jesus revealed the scapegoat mechanism for what it was - empty and meaningless. Instead, Jesus instructs us to offer ourselves in acts of extravagant mercy - because this is what God would do. Jesus instructed us to "take up our cross" (Mt. 16:24), and the apostle Paul instructed us to offer ourselves as living sacrifices (Rom. 12:1). And even the symbolism of Eucharist points to this truth! The message couldn't be clearer - we are to stop projecting our violence upon scapegoats, and instead offer ourselves in acts of extravagant mercy! This is the way to defeat sin and violence - a complete rejection of accusation and the violence that always results from it!

Before Jesus - a completely innocent victim - died on the cross, he said: "Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing." If anyone had a right to accuse, it was Jesus! But he completely refuses to do this, and reveals that this is the only way to defeat the Accuser!

And consider the story of the Prodigal Son and his brother (Luke 15:11-32). The Penal Substitutionary theory insists that before we can receive God's forgiveness, we must feel really bad about ourselves and truly believe that God killed His son to pay off the balance of our sin. But this doesn't fit well with the portrait Jesus paints of the father in the story of these two brothers. When the Prodigal returns, he has a whole speech planned out to convince his father to take him as a servant. And it should be noted that this is not true repentance - the son doesn't seem to feel horrible about how he's insulted his father by demanding his inheritance before the father died (basically telling the father: "I wish you were dead"). He's just hungry, and thinks his dad can give him a more comfortable way of life. But he doesn't even get a chance to give his half-heartedly repentant speech - the father interrupts him in the middle of his speech, ignoring everything he's saying and calls for a robe, a ring, and to kill the fattened calf in celebration. Imagine how this story would play out in Penal Substitution land - the father would have to say "hold on, we need your older brother to come out here and be killed and you need to accept this before I can forgive you."

And what about the older brother? The older brother is rarely focused on - but he is a major part of the point of the whole story, as Jesus is telling this story with the background of "the Pharisees and the scribes [...] grumbling and saying, 'This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.'" (Lk. 15:2) The whole point of the story is that Jesus is trying to get these Pharisees and scribes to see the sin of unforgiveness. But how does the father respond to the older brother's unforgiveness? "His father came out and began to plead with him." (Lk. 15:28) The father pleads with the grudge-holding older brother - he doesn't demand blood before he can forgive this sin! But Penal Substitution turns the father into the grudge bearer.

The whole concept of Penal Substitution makes no sense at all, and it doesn't mesh at all with the picture that Jesus paints for us - a picture of the heavenly Father unconditionally and continually extending forgiveness!

Yeah, Penal Substitution is kind of ridiculous if you think about it.

The Penal Substitution model tries to make the very violence that Jesus' death exposes as meaningless into something sacred - it tries to tell is that God Himself sanctions acts of violence! Indeed, this God cannot forgive if He does not get his pound of flesh! In "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination", Walter Wink writes:

The God whom Jesus revealed as no longer our rival, no longer threatening and vengeful, but unconditionally loving and forgiving, who needed no satisfaction by blood - this God of infinite mercy was metamorphosed by the church into the image of a wrathful God whose demand for blood atonement leads to God's requiring of his own Son a death on behalf of us all. The nonviolent God of Jesus comes to be depicted as a God of unequaled violence, since God not only allegedly demands the blood of the victim who is closest and most precious to him, but also holds the whole of humanity accountable for a death that God both anticipated and required. Against such an image of God the revolt of atheism is an act of pure religion.

The Christus Victor theory of atonement shows us that it is not God being reconciled to us, but God reconciling us to Him (2 Cor. 5:18). God breaks down the wall by reaching across to us and allowing us to take everything from Him - and He gives this perfect gift gladly and with no demand for anything in return, and in the process demonstrates to us "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Rom. 8:38-39 - whereas Penal Substitution states that we are separated from the love of God until and unless we say the magic wordies.) But to be one with Him, we must enter into this way of being - we must “take up our cross” as well. The cross was a tool of the Domination System - using fear and shame to control the people. And when we make death the ultimate evil and survival the highest goal, we play right into the Domination System, as we begin to justify more and more in the name of survival.

But Jesus taught that we must live the way of the cross - or the way of "no-self" (as the Buddha teaches) and the renunciation of ego (to put it in psychological terminology). And by entering into the ego-less state which Jesus modeled through the cross, we have defeated death itself - which by default includes a victory over the Domination System, as death is its only tool of enforcement. But when we say that God had to kill someone - that God demanded death just as Caesar does - we empty the cross of its power.

Anselm's logic for vicarious or substitutionary atonement seems very persuasive - but it relies on faulty presuppositions. One of these presuppositions is that God's justice involves external punishments rather than internal and natural consequences - as John Dominic Crossan points out in "The Greatest Prayer". External punishments involve prescribing painful actions that would not have normally occurred in order to frighten someone (and manipulate them) into behaving a certain way in the future - and if you believe that God does this, then penal substitution might make sense to you. But if your image of God is a loving Father rather than a demanding and legalistic judge, this might not make as much sense any more. And if the problems created by sin were internal and natural consequences, then what does sacrifice and atonement mean in that context? Crossan gives the following example to illustrate what sacrifice means:

[L]ate in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 13, 1982, Air Florida flight 90 took off from Washington National Airport and almost immediately plunged into the icy Potomac off the 14th Street Bridge. Of the seventy-nine people on board that Boeing 737 only six managed to escape onto the tail as it stuck up above the surface of the river. The rescue helicopter repeatedly dropped lines to them. Arland D. Williams Jr. repeatedly passed the lines to others and, by the time five were saved, he had slipped under the water from hypothermia.

He was the only passenger who died from drowning, and the only adequate headline for his death would not have been “Man Drowns,” but “Man Sacrifices His Life.” All human life, and all human death, is sacred, but, by giving up his life for others, he had made it specially, emphatically, and particularly sacred, and “to make sacred” is “to sacrifice.” He risked, and unfortunately lost, his life to save others, but gift, not substitution, is the proper interpretation of his action.

The natural consequences of our sin led to a bloodthirsty Domination System - a system where power hungry people sought control over each other and killed those whom in any way threatened that control. Jesus' death was not a payment to God to satisfy his wrath, but when he forgave those who hung him on the cross, he showed that he was giving his life as a gift in order to demonstrate the futility of Accusation.

Another one of the major issues I have with Penal Substitution is that there is a tendency to make Christianity all about having the right ideas. It's not enough that God killed His son (according to the adherents to Penal Substitution) - I must accept within my head that it makes sense that He did so.

Jesus didn't say we will know whom his disciples are by what theories of atonement they intellectually assent to - he said that they will know by the love his disciples show for each other (Jn. 13:35). And Jesus also said that if you love him, you will keep his commandments (Jn. 14:15). The sign of a disciple is not the ideas one claims, but their character, as exemplified by the way they treat others.

George MacDonald - one of the Inklings, and a mentor to C.S. Lewis (who wrote that MacDonald was his "master") - wrote of this problem in one of his "Unspoken Sermons" named "The Truth in Jesus":

Even if your plan, your theories, were absolutely true, the holding of them with sincerity, the trusting in this or that about Christ, or in anything he did or could do, the trusting in anything but himself, his own living self, is a delusion. Many will grant this heartily, and yet the moment you come to talk with them, you find they insist that to believe in Christ is to believe in the atonement, meaning by that only and altogether their special theory about the atonement; and when you say we must believe in the atoning Christ, and cannot possibly believe in any theory concerning the atonement, they go away and denounce you, saying, "He does not believe in the atonement!" If I explain the atonement otherwise than they explain it, they assert that I deny the atonement; nor count it of any consequence that I say I believe in the atoner with my whole heart, and soul, and strength, and mind. This they call contending for the truth! Because I refuse an explanation which is not in the New Testament, though they believe it is, because they can think of no other, one which seems to me as false in logic as detestable in morals, not to say that there is no spirituality in it whatever, therefore I am not a Christian!

Later on in the same sermon, he writes:

It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ. The work of Christ is not the Working Christ, any more than the clothing of Christ is the body of Christ. If the woman who touched the hem of his garment had trusted in the garment and not in him who wore it, would she have been healed? And the reason that so many who believe about Christ rather than in him, get the comfort they do, is that, touching thus the mere hem of his garment, they cannot help believing a little in the live man inside the garment.

Walter Wink writes in "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination" of how the Christus Victor theory began to fall out of favor:

With the conversion of Constantine, however, the empire assumed from the church the role of God's providential agent in history. Once Christianity became the religion of the empire, notes J. Denny Weaver, its success was linked to the success of the empire, and preservation of the empire became the decisive criterion for ethical behavior. The Christus Victor theology fell out of favor, not because of intrinsic inadequacies, but because it was subversive to the church's role as state religion. The church no longer saw the demonic as lodged in the empire, but in the empire's enemies. Atonement became a highly individual transaction between the believer and God; society was assumed to be Christian, so the idea that the work of Christ entails the radical critique of society was largely abandoned.

God did not demand a price, but our resentment and will to kill is what made the cross necessary in the first place - as John 15:25 illustrates. Raymund Schwager said: “It is not God who must be appeased, but humans who must be delivered from their hatred.” And the only way to continue to break down and resist this demonic way of life is to enter into the way of Jesus - the way of the Cross.

We find this idea that God does not demand a price back in the book of Job as well. In Job 25, Bildad argues that "dominion and fear are with God", and declares that mere mortals - maggots, he calls them - cannot be righteous and pure. But Job maintains his integrity, and later on Elihu contradicts Bildad in chapter 35 - he asks in verse 6:

If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against him? And if your transgressions are multiplied, what do you do to him?

And then, in verse 8:

Your wickedness affects others like you, and your righteousness, other human beings.

Elihu then proceeds to introduce the Storm of God, and when God is done speaking to Job, He rebukes Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, "for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has done" - and they go offer sacrifices in repentance (see Job 42:7-9). But notice that Elihu, who said that our sins do not affect God, was not rebuked as having been one of the ones who misrepresented God! This makes it difficult to present an atonement theory which states that God must be "paid" for our sins in some sort of pseudo-economic transaction.

By identifying with the symbol of the Azazel goat, Jesus is showing us that when we accuse, we accuse God - because every man and woman is made in the image of God - and we accuse ourselves. "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Mk. 12:31, Mt. 22:39) combined with the principle taught in the parable of the sheep and goats (Mt. 25:40 - "to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of Mine, even the least of them, you did it to Me") and "love your enemies" (Mt. 5:44, Lk. 6:35) reveals that every rule, teaching, and doctrine is summed up in Universal Love (Gal. 5:14). Jesus has just reversed the dualistic model Man adopted in the Garden of Eden, and rendered all of its effects null and void! By taking on the symbol of the "one who comes in the name of the Lord" and the Azazel goat, he has completely reversed all effects of the fall (I Cor. 15:22, Rom. 5:18-19, Rom. 11:32, Col. 1:19-20, I John 2:2), rendered all labels and categories null and void (Gal. 3:28), and shown us that all are sons of God (1 John 3:1) and partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:3-4)!

René Girard writes:

Jesus’ death is a source of grace not because the Father is “avenged” by it, but because Jesus lived and died in the manner that, if adopted by all, would do away with scandals and the victimization that follows from scandals. Jesus lived as all men should live in order to be united with a God Whose true nature he reveals.

Scapegoating and Mimetic Theory
French born historian, philosopher of social science, and anthropologist René Girard has devoted much of his career to studying the scapegoat mechanism, and what he calls Mimetic Theory. Girard highlights how the accusing nature is the father of lies:

They [speaking of myths that portray violence towards a scapegoat character or group who serves as the guilt-bearer for that society] are lies, certainly, but the specific kind of lie called for by mimetic contagion... the false accusation that spreads mimetically throughout a disturbed human community at the climax when scandals polarize against the single scapegoat whose death reunites the community.

I'd like to quickly highlight the main ideas behind Girard's Mimetic Theory of the scapegoating process in order to unpack this idea. Girard's Mimetic Theory of scapegoating consists of 6 steps:

Mimetic Desire
Humans learn by imitating their elders - it's one of our greatest strengths! But it can also be our greatest weakness. You see, we learn what to desire by imitation. And so often, we pick up harmful desires in the process of our growth.
Mimetic Rivalry
This learned desire often turns into a rivalry, when we end up desiring the same things as the ones we imitate, and thus end up preventing each other from obtaining these things. So this turns into a vicious cycle - the one we imitate first said “be like me: value this object.” But when we reach out to take it, the one we imitate says “Do not be like me - the object is mine.”
The Crisis of Distinctions
Through mimetic rivalry, the distinctions that formerly separated persons and groups of persons into classes disappear, resulting from them desiring the same things and from the classes ending up with the same pain from not being able to obtain the objects of their desire. Walter Wink summarizes in "Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination":
Students seize the administration building, demanding a share in decision-making power that has previously been the sole prerogative of the administrators. Mill workers shut down the plant, insisting on a voice in shaping their new contract. The hierarchical barriers that society has so carefully erected, unjust as they may be, dike society against the flood of anarchy. When these distinctions collapse (as when soldiers in Vietnam refused to obey orders from their officers), that social system faces the possibility of collapse. Collapse can be averted, however, if society can find a scapegoat.
The Necessary Victim
In order to “save” society from the chaos that results from steps 1-3, a victim must be found - towards which all the violence of that society is then directed and released upon. In order to do this, the society must find a victim which they can all agree is guilty - Girard explains:
The violent process is not effective unless it fools all witnesses, and the proof that it does, in the case of myths, is the harmonious and cathartic conclusion, rooted in a perfectly unanimous murder.
Often the victim must have defining characteristics that make them different - a foreigner, a cripple, an eccentric, a communist, a witch, a carrier of the plague, a homosexual, someone who challenges the system (a prophet), etc. This victim then serves as a release valve - releasing the “steam” of the society’s violence. If the gospels are revealing the scapegoat mechanism as illegitimate, this will explain Matthew 10:34 ("I have not come to bring peace, but a sword"), as doing so will dissolve the false peace that comes through the scapegoat mechanism. But to reach the “peace that surpasses understanding” (Phil. 4:7), we must renounce the victimization mechanisms of the old world order in order to join the kingdom of God - in which there is no victimization, even for legitimate offenses. Do you recall how Jesus instructed his disciples to forgive "seventy times seven" (Mt. 18:22), and the story of the attempted stoning of the adulteress in John 8:1-11?
Sacralizing the Victim
The scapegoat is made sacred by being simultaneously regarded as cursed and life-bringing. The violence has been survived, and the religious and political structures did not collapse - so the story of the scapegoat becomes sacred and cannot be challenged, or it is a threat to society itself.
Sacrificial Repetition
The violence directed towards a scapegoat releases pressure on society, but only for a time. And so the type of person who was made the scapegoat in step 4 must be repeatedly victimized and used as a release valve in order to control society’s violence. This becomes a religious structure of organized violence in the interest of social tranquility.

If you keep this theory in mind, it is fascinating to watch how it plays out during Jesus' trial and execution. For example, when Peter denies Jesus, we get a window into how violence can act as a contagion through fear - when Peter denies Jesus for the third time, in the accounts of Mark (14:66-72) and Matthew (26:58-75), Peter curses and demonstrates violent anger in his reaction. It is as if he’s saying “see? I’m part of your group, because we share the same scapegoat!” Peter is giving in to fear (peer pressure), and saying "look! The enemy of my enemy is my friend...."

René Girard writes in regard to this:

Peter spectacularly illustrates this mimetic contagion. When surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. He obeys the same mimetic force, ultimately, as Pilate and Herod. Even the thieves crucified with Jesus obey that force and feel compelled to join the crowd. And yet, I think, the Gospels do not seek to stigmatize Peter, or the thieves, or the crowd as a whole, or the Jews as a people, but to reveal the enormous power of mimetic contagion - a revelation valid for the entire chain of murders stretching from the Passion back to “the foundation of the world.”

Also, during Jesus' trial, no one wants to accept the blame for Jesus' execution - in the depiction of the trial before Pilate, the gospels place the blame squarely on the shoulders of the mob, as Pilate is reported to say “I find no basis for a charge against him” (see Luke 23:4, John 19:4). This is a stunning picture of how the Accuser becomes the corporate spirit of a group, and in light of Peter’s denial, one must question how many in the crowd may have also felt that Jesus was innocent, but joined in the accusations because they were afraid of the consequences if they did not. We might wonder if the “majority” who accused Jesus, in this case, were not even truly a majority, but were merely pressured by a very vocal minority to comply with the accusation. Or if we accept that this was truly a majority, at the very least we must wonder how it is possible that the same crowd which a few days ago had led Jesus in a triumphant procession through the city (in essence proclaiming him their king) could have so quickly and decidedly reversed their view of this man. Is it possible that even those who believed in the accusation were unaware of the ways in which they were unconsciously coerced into playing a part in the accusation of the mob? This seems to be the conclusion of Jesus, as he cried “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34), and the sentiment is later echoed by Peter when he says “I know you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders” (Acts 3:17).

So often, this unconscious coercion works against our own interests! In "Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces That Determine Human Existence", Walter Wink writes:

Why have women allowed themselves to be despoiled of their rights, generation after generation, despite often being a majority? Why did so many women oppose the Equal Rights Amendment? How can six million whites subjugate the twenty-nine million other South Africans? Why did the lower and middle classes sit supinely by and watch the Reagan administration scuttle the graduated income tax, providing massive tax relief to a tiny fraction of wealthy people while the real incomes of everyone else were in sharp decline? Why do the poor and homeless not unite to form a powerful political bloc to win their universal human right to adequate food and housing?

Could this mimetic behavior be the answer to these types of questions?

As we continue to explore instances in the Bible where the Accuser and demons appear, you will notice that the themes of this post will reappear again and again. We will continue to explore how Jesus confronted the scapegoating mechanism.

But at this point, we are going to take another break, and in the next post I will begin exploring the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Satan: Lifting the Veil - Part 8: God’s Sifter

Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?

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Satan: God’s Sifter
In my earlier posts within this series, some of my readers may have been surprised to discover a picture of Satan as a “son of God” in Job, and not only that, but serving as an official in God’s courtroom. Well, if this surprised you, you might also be surprised to find that in the New Testament, Satan is still being portrayed as God’s servant - playing a necessary function for God! There are a number of examples of this.

Before we get into the first example of this theme, it should be noted that Jesus’ ministry is full of agrarian metaphors. Farming was much more common of a profession back then, and Jesus often used farming metaphors to teach spiritual principles. Another common theme within the Bible is the concept of purity - and the Bible would often use metaphors to convey this concept: like sorting through the weeds and the harvest, the refiner’s fire, sorting the sheep and the goats, etc. In Luke 22:31-34, Satan appears in one of these metaphors - before Jesus prophesies that Peter will deny him, he says in this passage “Satan has demanded permission to sift you as wheat.” An observant reader will have noticed a similarity between this Satan and the Satan of Job - Satan cannot do anything without first acquiring God’s permission! But even more so, what Satan is asking to do is not evil - it is a necessary function! An agrarian society would have immediately recognized that this is so - wheat has to be sifted in order to remove the chaff, which is tough and not at all enjoyable to eat. So here Satan is still a servant of God! He is serving a function as God’s sifter - straining out the impurities of the disciples through trial by fire. If Peter had been more aware of his frailty (displayed in his denial of Jesus the night of the trial), he would not have been so quick to respond with his egocentric bravado. Peter needed to be humbled by a trial, and Satan serves this function, to humble Peter - which results in more gentleness and self-control.

The second example of Satan serving a necessary function comes in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians - in chapter 5 of this letter, we discover that one of the members of this church has been engaging in “immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.” Interestingly enough, Paul immediately follows this up with a rebuke of the congregation - saying that they have become arrogant, rather than mourning. Paul then places the blame for the necessity of the consequences upon the congregation! And he states in verse 5:

I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

Once again, we see that Satan is serving a necessary function - sifting this member of the congregation in much the same way that Peter was sifted. And the hope is that through this process, this member will be saved!

But there is a follow-up to this story in the next letter to the Corinthians - in 2 Corinthians 2:5-11, it seems that Paul is gently alluding to this same member. He says that the punishment was sufficient, and they should forgive, comfort, and reaffirm their love for this man! It seems that “the Accuser” has become the church’s inner spirit of self-righteous judgment and accusation here - they became overzealous in their application of the law, and when the excommunication worked and the member tried to come back, the congregation would not let him! This is a striking parallel to the overzealous prosecuting attorney of Job and Zechariah 3! And Paul notices this - he urges the congregation to forgive, so that “the Accuser” will not take advantage of them! So once again, we see that “Satan” is not a being of pure evil - but often grows from a correct application of the law that gets out of control and becomes overly-enthusiastic because it is lacking in mercy!

There is a very similar case briefly mentioned in I Timothy 1:20, where Paul mentions two members who were similarly “handed over to the Accuser, so that they will be taught not to blaspheme.” Here Paul is advocating a sort of passive justice - releasing these men out of his community in order that they may face the true consequences of their ways. From within the community, the consequences of these mens’ sin might not have been clear. The waters would have been muddied - they would have tried to blame any consequences of their actions on other factors, and the church itself would have suffered the accusation of these men and might have fallen into self-doubt. But by releasing these men out of the community, Paul is putting them out where they cannot blame any consequences of their actions on other factors - they only have themselves to blame if things go wrong. But as in 2 Cor. 2:5-11, Paul surely must be hoping that the men will return to the community after repenting.

Satan’s Desire for World Domination

What are we going to do tonight, Brain?

I started the last section with an example of Peter’s ego-centrism. Before I get into a parallel story demonstrating this characteristic, I feel that the reader might wish to remind themselves: Peter was a beloved disciple of Jesus, despite this character flaw! And, I think, Jesus even taught Peter how to use this as a strength - to use his enthusiasm as fuel, driving him forward through hardships as he went about the work of building the kingdom.

Nevertheless, we have another appearance of “Satan” in connection to Peter in Matthew 16:21-28. The passage starts with Jesus informing his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer at the hands of the authorities there, and even be killed. Peter’s ego shines through once again, and he takes Jesus aside to rebuke him. The reasons behind this might be missed for the reader who already knows the end of the story - why wouldn’t Peter understand Jesus’ purposes if Jesus was going to be resurrected? But Peter didn’t think this way - Peter was living within the thought world of a conventional Jewish messiah.

You see, Jesus was not the only - nor the first - Jewish messiah figure. There were dozens of Jewish Messiah claimants within the history surrounding Jesus. And almost all of them tried to establish the “kingdom of God” through violent means. They thought that the kingdom of God was going to come about as all kingdoms did: by overthrowing the current power structure through military might. And in every case, when these messiah claimants died, their following dispersed - a dead messiah was a failed messiah. So when Jesus says he’s going to die, Peter hears this as Jesus giving up on his mission to establish the kingdom of God. So Peter thinks he’s doing Jesus a favor by rebuking him here - “this will never happen to you!”, he says.

But Jesus whips right around and says (verse 23):

“Get behind me, Satan*! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”
* [A more accurate translation might use the word “adversary” here, as you’ll find in the YLT version.]

Now, I think that this verse is a huge clue to identifying Satan - because we have to ask: if Satan is a literal being who is pure evil, why is Jesus calling his beloved disciple Peter by that name? Are we to believe that Peter is Satan? Or is Satan thrusting his hand into Peter, puppet-style, and controlling him through supernatural ventriloquism?

In one of my earlier posts in this series, I alluded to the possibility that Satan is a literary device - much like “Sophia” in the Proverbs. “Sophia” is not only a female name, but is also Greek for “wisdom”, and so, since Proverbs speaks of God’s wisdom as a woman calling in the streets (see Proverbs 1:20 and 8:1) many scholars have taken up the practice of substituting “Sophia” when talking about the wisdom of God. And if we began to profess belief that “Sophia” was an entity with her own free will and her own personality, we might be doing the same thing that has happened to “Satan” (the accuser). But this passage practically demands to be taken poetically! Jesus is not saying that Peter is a dark demon from the nether realms with supernatural powers - he is using poetic personification to illustrate a spiritual reality! In this passage, Peter shows that he believes Jesus should be acting as the other Jewish Messiah claimants have always done, and is trying to instill the worldly ambition of the Domination System into Jesus, and Jesus is rejecting it! Because violent rivalry only produces further violent rivalry - as any historian will tell you! Rene Girard wrote:

A seductive tempter who suggests to us the desires most likely to generate rivalries, Satan prevents us from reaching whatever he simultaneously incites us to desire. He turns into a diabolos (another word that designates the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry). Satan is skandalon personified, as Jesus makes explicit in his rebuke of Peter.

So in this passage, we might say that “Satan” actually represents the Domination System itself - and this should come as no surprise, as the accusing nature of humanity often produces a desire for domination, and despises the loss of ego. But here we can find a curious reversal - Jesus uses the word “skandalon” (translated “stumbling block”) in verse 23. And this word is also used in I Corinthians 1:23 to describe how Jesus’ death functions for the Jews, paralleled with the way it is seen as foolish by the Gentiles ("stumbling block" in this verse is "skandalon"). And if we continue reading the Matthew passage, verses 24-25 show that death by crucifixion is not only a strategy for Jesus, but he actually wishes for his disciples to follow him in this strategy! Death by crucifixion is Jesus’ strategy for conquering Rome - a complete reversal! Caesar conquers by hoisting people up on crosses - but king Jesus conquers by offering himself up to be crucified! And this remarkable loss of attachment to one’s very own life seems to be the only way to defeat the accusing nature - for the Accuser feeds on ego, and so in order to defeat "him", one must experience a loss of ego.

This passage - and many others - are meant to expose to us the complete worthlessness of the myth of redemptive violence. But so often, theologians come up with ways to twist the Bible in order to affirm this myth and render violence itself as sacred - as the so-called “Penal Substitutionary Atonement” theology of Anselm does (and, by the way, the church got along fine without this theory for the first thousand years of its existence and I don’t think its invention has helped it much since, either). This theory renders the skandalon of Jesus’ death empty - rather than scandalizing us, it affirms our violence. God himself could find no way to solve evil without using violence, and so He killed His own son! But the theory of Penal Substitution falls apart when you realize its self-contradicting nature - God, in this theory, plays both the role of the victimizer and the victimized. How can a perfect being - devoid of neurotic tendencies - scapegoat Himself?

But Penal Substitution relies on a selective reading of the scriptures, and fails to account for verses like John 15:25, which places the blame solely on those who crucified Jesus, and states that they hated Jesus without a cause. How can they hate Jesus without a cause if God needed them to kill Jesus? Wouldn’t God be the cause?

And if this was really how it went down, then how is it that the author of 1st John can declare that God is love? (I John 4:8, 16) How can a being who personifies love be a worse father than most earthly fathers? I mean, if you heard a story about a Dad who had one son that did something that made him angry, and so he turned around and killed the other so he wouldn't be angry any more, would you say "wow, what a loving father!", or "that guy is abusive and needs anger management classes"?

In Matthew 5:48, Jesus says to "be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" - this comes immediately after a teaching to love enemies (see Mt. 5:43-48). So if we believe that the way God loves enemies is to displace all his righteous anger towards them onto his son, does that mean whenever someone hurts us we have to kill our own children in response? Actually, if you think about that one, this is often what happens - we often take the frustrations we have from dealing with our jobs out on our families. And I don't think Jesus was endorsing this.

But if God really wanted sins to be "paid for", why did Jesus quote Hosea 6:6 in Matthew 9:13 when he said: "But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’"? And in case you missed the importance of this statement, Jesus quotes the same verse again in Matthew 12:7! And why would the author of Hebrews say (in 10:8): "Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them"? Why would the writer of Psalm 40:6 declare that God does not desire sacrifice nor require burnt offering? This is affirmed again and again in passages like Ps. 50:8-15, 51:16-18, 69:30, Isaiah 1:11, and Jeremiah 6:20. And perhaps the biggest challenge to the idea that God could not be satisfied without a blood sacrifice is Micah 6:7-8:

Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
    with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
    the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
    and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
    and to walk humbly with your God?

While substitutionary atonement theories declare that violence was necessary in order to satisfy God, a non-violent atonement theory such as Christus Victor allows us to see violence for what it is - completely pointless! By presenting a completely innocent victim, and declaring that we still hated him - without reason - the scapegoat mechanism is revealed, and we can cast it aside. And then our innocent victim - Jesus - points outward at our enemies and reveals that there is never a good reason to hate, and there is never a good reason for violence of any kind. Rather than legitimizing violence and making the scapegoat mechanism sacred, the Gospels are supposed to reveal the true nature of violence and show us how it destroys us just as we destroy the victims that we choose.

And it is only through this revealing of violence as empty and meaningless that we are also able to unveil and dethrone the Accuser. It is only through this unveiling that we can see how - through the mechanisms of the Accuser - we actually hurt ourselves as much as we hurt our enemies.

Rene Girard demonstrates this idea later on in the same article I cited earlier:

On the one hand, Satan is the instigator of scandal, the force that disintegrates communities; on the other hand, he is the resolution of scandal in unanimous victimization. This trick of last resort enables the prince of this world to rescue his possessions in extremis, when they are too badly threatened by his own disorder. Being both a principle of disorder and a principle of order, Satan is truly divided against himself.

In the last line of this quote, Girard references a saying of Jesus - Mark 3:26:

If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished!

When we accuse our neighbors and treat them as enemies, we rise up against ourselves, and in so doing we become self-defeating. And as long as we make our violence sacred - as long as we believe that some problems can only be solved through violence - we will fail to unveil this truth. We will continue to try to dominate and conquer others, and this will continue to contribute to cycles of violence which are ultimately self-defeating chaos.

The message of Jesus, which he carried out even to the point of death, was that loving our enemies is the way to defeat them. Thich Nhat Hanh writes about this:

When Gandhi said that love is the force that can liberate, he meant we have to love our enemy. Even if our enemy is cruel, even if he is crushing us, sowing terror and injustice, we have to love him. This is the message of Jesus. But how can we love our enemy? There is only one way – to understand him. We have to understand why he is that way, how he has come to be like that, why he does not see things the way we do. Understanding a person brings us the power to love and accept him. And the moment we love and accept him, he ceases to be our enemy. To “love our enemy” is impossible, because the moment we love him, he is no longer our enemy.

MLK and Thich Nhat Hanh

Could it be that we're even called to love our...Accusers?

At this point, we need to take a closer look at the act of Jesus' atonement, and its meaning, before we go back to examining the appearances of the Accuser and his demons. In my next post, we will examine the scapegoat mechanism and its connection to Satan.

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Table of Contents:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Two Case Studies
Part 3: Serpent = Satan?
Part 4: What is Satan's Real Name?
Part 5: Accuser
Part 6: A Son of God?
Part 7: God's State Prosecutor
Part 8: God’s Sifter
Part 9: Azazel
Part 10: Desert Temptation
Part 11: What Does a Jewish Messiah Look Like?
Part 12: Bow Down to the Domination System
Part 13: Proclaiming Jubilee
Part 14: The Evil One
Part 15: The Angels of the Nations
Part 16: The Gerasene Demoniac
Part 17: Further Lessons on Exorcism in the Bible
Part 18: Driving Satan from Heaven
Part 19: The Unveiling of the Beast of Rome
Part 20: Unveiling the Beast Today
Part 21: Jesus and the Domination System
Part 22: Violence
Part 23: Death
Part 24: The Advocate
Part 25: Conclusions?