THE KEY MOTIFS OF REDEMPTION

We need to look at some key biblical themes related to the whole area of At-one-ment.  The themes are:

1. Covenant
2. Redemption
3. Sacrifice
4. Expiation
5. Reconciliation

In almost every instance, there will be a meaning attached to the word, that isn’t the obvious or ordinary meaning.  So I wish I could say to you, “Look at, or hear these words, as if you had never come across them in your life before,” because there is so much conditioning with the words, both in our ears and eyes and in our heads.  If we could get behind that, it would be a lot easier.

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1. Covenant.

Let’s start with covenant, because I think it is literally the foundation of all the others.

The word for covenant in Hebrew is berith, and basically in ancient times it means something like a treaty or a pact between various groups or clans or tribes or groups of whatever kind. But, I would like to pick it up, particularly in the fullness of meaning attached to it by the great prophets after the Exile. This is a Jeremiah or Ezekiel fullness of understanding of covenant, and in their vision it is basically an accord. That’s the word I like most. It’s living in accord together. That implies a very profound compatibility between the parties involved in the covenant, a sort of solidarity, which is like a solid form of belonging – a tangible, sensible, touchable, feelable belonging.  And when we are talking about the partners of the covenant, we are talking about God and Israel, or God and humanity, or God and us people, and it really challenges the model of superior and inferior. Don’t put God as superior all the time and us as inferior, and say that’s the relationship, because that ends up inevitability in a dependency. What we are talking about is partnership in a covenant, with “partners” verging on equality, if I could dare to be that heretical. The accord is between God and the people, and the compatibility is between God and the people. That is one of the fundamental things, I think, whereas, in the other model, the assumption is that God and ourselves are not compatible.

In covenant, we are profoundly compatible, and the compatibility is a felt sort of solidarity – so that God sort of smells the way we smell, and we can smell God in our midst, like the smell of our own, if you can say it that way. It’s that sort of thing.

One of the best ways I’ve ever found of trying to describe it a bit, is to say that what we’ve got is the nameless little people, who comprised the beginnings of Israel, the mix-um gatherum of God knows who, from God knows where, which is what Israel was really – a collection of nobodies.  And think of God as the one you cannot name, because God transcends all language and all names. And there is an extraordinary accord between the nameless ones and the unnameable One – they kind of belong. And it’s that sense, of how they kind of belong, that is the whole mystery of covenant for me. And I don’t think this has been grasped very often.

I’ve tried to say sometimes that God and the left-out people of Israel belong to each other by native title, and that there is not a legal title to their belonging. The result is, that they do relate, within that belonging, on terms that I would dare to call equal terms.  There is a sort of lived equality between humans and God in covenant – the result is that God treats humans as if they were divine persons, at least from a functional point of view, and we are allowed to treat God as if God were human like us – and that sort of relationship is extremely difficult to envisage, and it probably doesn’t quite work except with incarnation, but the concept is earlier than incarnation, in Jeremiah.

The result of that bonding is that we function together, God and us, like an active pact for mutual defence, so God is committed to looking after us, and we are committed to looking after God, in that sense. And it’s wholly for defence. It’s for a co-adventure in history, so that history becomes the sort of trajectory that God and ourselves create together, for our own mutual benefit, and that is a very remarkable concept.  And it changes the notion of  Jewish history and Christian history, I would believe. It’s not just that we are around, while things happen around us, but we make things happen, as the appropriate result of God and ourselves being that close together.  Mind you, I don’t think this has ever happened much. But it’s just a lovely idea and ideal, if it ever worked out. But that is, above all, the nature of vision in prophets, and it’s really a profound thing. It’s like shaping a world to be a home for the at-homeness of God with us.  And that’s why, right through, in that prophetic literature, you get the sort of sub-theme of a new creation – and it really is like creating again – or creating, in a fullness, a kind of environment, where this can actually happen, and, just as in the original creation, it ends up with the Sabbath. This should end up in a Sabbath of God with humans, and humans with God – a Sabbath celebrated in Jubilee terms. It all comes out of the literature of Isaiah.

That’s really the very deep notion of covenant, and it’s not possible, I think, to have more than one covenant. We used to talk about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, the Old Testament and the New Testament. I would be happy if that language dropped out. There is only the one covenant, eternally renewed, if you like. You can put it that way. I think it was fundamentally a covenant of creation, going back to the rainbow after the Flood with Noah, and it’s essentially inclusive of everybody, because it is that. So it’s quite wrong to equate covenant with contract, and it’s quite wrong to equate covenant with community, in the public social forms that we’ve discovered as community. It is not that. But covenant is an extraordinary mystery of grace.

The word communion  does go pretty close to it, I’ll have to admit, if you hear it in an intensive sense at least. And even you get it in the words of consecration of the chalice – “This is the cup of my blood – the new and eternally renewed covenant.” It is always new, and it always the same one. But it is covenant thinking that actually has to govern any discussion of any concepts, that would make up a new model. And where we talk about AT-ONE-MENT, it is the kind of AT-ONE-NESS that fits into the covenant, that we’ve been talking about. And if there is covenant, it is inviolable – it’s the emet of ‘hesed, that is lived in covenant, and it’s only in covenant that it is seriously possible.

You see, when the word “covenant” was translated into Greek, it was diatheke. Well that doesn’t quite mean all of what we’ve been talking about. That’s a Greek concept of a negotiated, contracted, legal arrangement, and I think you miss the point, when you slip into that. So it is really very difficult.

In more recent times, and very correctly, we’ve been talking about marriage, not as a contract, but as a covenant, and I don’t know whether the people have heard the dimensions of  the word “covenant”, when they’ve applied it to marriage. It would be nice, if it were spelt out a little bit along those lines, because genuine marriage is like a symbol of the sacrament of that whole, larger notion of covenant.  It is very fundamental to the whole construction of a newness-with-God model, or an at-one-ness with God model.  The other thing is definitely contractual theology. This is covenantal theology. It is a different notion.

Recently I heard Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth, speaking about covenant. He asked: How can we come together to do together what none of us can do alone? He said there were three ways of doing it. One way is by using power, coercion, forcing you to do something. And that is the historical way of politics. Then there’s the market way, the economics way of doing things, which is I pay you to do something for me. But neither of those actually link us in any bond of mutual care. So there’s a third way, the religious way, which he calls the way of covenant.

Covenant, he claims, is what binds you to me, without my using power over you, or without my paying you. Covenant is that bond of mutual responsibility, of which one example is marriage, another example is parenthood. And once you build up from families to communities, to societies, and maybe to humanity as a whole, you have this ever-wider covenantal bond, and that’s what he calls the moral enterprise, as understood by the Hebrew Bible.

Sacks also makes the point that God is not patriarchal at all. God is actually a Jewish mother, and he claims that anyone who has had a Jewish mother will know exactly what that means,  - being concerned, solicitous, and so on. We sometimes talk of God as father. Isaiah called God Father and Mother as well, “Like one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you”, says God. God is not male or female. God is the totality of all there is, and idolatry is worshipping a part instead of the whole.

This reminds me of the revelation of God to Moses as the God of RA’HAMIM. Ra’hamim really refers to that basic gut-level feeling, that wrenching of your inside, when you are literally moved and touched with feeling towards someone. The root of ra’hamim is re’hem  that means the heart of a father and the womb of a mother. It has both masculine and feminine connotations together. It really means that whole, utter touchability, that is the humanity of a human heart. Moses learns from his encounter with God that the name of God is not transcendence but tenderness. What it really means is that God can be infinitely in touch with everyone, no matter where they are coming out of, or where they are going, or who they are. This infinite, unlimited in-touch-ness is RA’HAMIM. And this is the covenant God of the Jews.

The genius of Jewish faith, expressed by the Prophets, was the insight that their God is always negotiable. God is not limited by any one way of doing things, because God is not tied down to formulas. And so God is always open to negotiation. There is always a possibility of genuine newness with God. God can always do something different. Covenant implies the negotiability of all partners, especially God. If we really believed this, one of the consequences would be that we’d never again be afraid of God. We can only ever be radically afraid of someone who is not negotiable.

For the Jew, God is never the distant owner of the football club. God is part of the football team on the field. God is among the Jewish people. God shares their touch and feel and smell. God is one of them. That’s what covenant is all about.

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1. Redemption

The next theme we need to have a look at is Redemption.

Again I wish we had never seen the word before.  The word in Hebrew is G’ullah – no one has seen the word much before, yet it is a better word to look at. It’s a profoundly Semitic notion – even a profoundly Jewish notion.  And , could I say, it is a secular notion. Originally there were no religious connotations whatever. And it’s talking about tribes in the ancient tribal period, and, as you know, tribes operate on an honour and shame paradigm.  They want to protect the honour of  the tribe and increase it. They want to avoid the shame of the tribe and get rid of it, and they never think in terms of individuals, the way we naturally do. They think group-wise, tribe-wise, in all that sense. That’s why, in one sense, guilt has got very little to do with the ancient notion of redemption of the tribe.  They didn’t think in terms of guilt; they thought in terms of shame. It’s a different way of approaching things altogether. Guilt belongs to individuals. They don’t think like that.

Now what I want to say about this is connected with three terms:

1. solidarity, which is a covenant notion in the tribe;
2. vindication;
3. celebration.

We’ll start with solidarity.  A solidarity group is a covenant group. The covenant group has rights of belonging that are profound, and they have a sense of honour that is wonderful, and they definitely have  no shame.

Now, supposing something bad happens to some members of a solidarity group, e.g. some of them might get captured by another tribe, or something like that, what happens is that the whole tribe rises up and vindicates the honour of the group, by going out and bringing these people back home, releasing them from capture. It is publicly, I suppose, the vindication of the honour of the tribe, and it’s a big deal. And when they get home they have a huge celebration, to celebrate how good they were for doing that, and the celebration feeds right into the solidarity.  So you have a very virtuous circle, that really increases the dynamics of the strength of the whole operation all the time, and that’s the sort of group we’re talking about.

Now let me throw in an example or two.  Do you remember about at least 30 years ago, there was a group of Jews, who were captured in Africa, in a place called Entebbe, and the United Nations had a meeting and sat down and thought about what they might do – and while they were still thinking about it, the Israeli air-force took off for Entebbe, grabbed these people, flew back home with them, and had a huge celebration.  That’s exactly vindication. And this sort of thing is still happening at the moment in Israel. This is one of the problems between the Jews and the Arabs. They are solidarity groups with covenant notions, so if one of them throws a petrol bomb and kills three Israelis, they have to go and kill three Arabs to vindicate the honour of Israel. That is why, basically, the western diplomats can’t understand it.  It’s ancient Semitic, solidarity, covenant culture in practice, that demands vindication.

You know that text in Genesis, where Cain killed Abel – “the blood of Abel was crying out to Heaven,”  not for “vengeance”, which is a terrible English translation, but for “vindication” – g’ullah. This is the word for vindication, and the person who performs the g’ullah is the goel. And then they’d have a huge party.

A New Testament example can be found in the story of the Lost Sheep.  We read this too much in a modern context – shepherd goes, out of compassion, and finds the lost sheep – No way! The honour of the whole sheepfold was at stake, so one of the people, who belonged to the whole flock, had to go out and bring back in, for the honour of the flock, the one that had disappeared.  That’s why “I know my sheep and my sheep know me”. It’s covenant-belonging in the whole deal.

Well, the real issue is, that by some unfortunate accident of translation, g’ullah, which means “vindication”, was translated as “redemption”. It’s got nothing to do with the modern English ideas we connect around “redemption”. It is a very powerful ancient Semitic notion of re-inclusion of those who’ve been excluded.  It is a vindication process.  You see, in the ancient days, basically there were two big issues, viz. blood and land. Blood meant the murder or capture of somebody. So if they murdered three of yours, you’d murder three of theirs to restore the balance of the tribes. If they imprisoned three of yours, you’d imprison three of theirs. It was that kind of deal. If they stole some of our land, we’d steal some of their land, to make the thing look right again.  And it was really a function of a practical balance of the clans, which was good for everybody, if you grasped it that way.   At some stage they used to do this through an exchange of money, but that’s later on, and the exchange of money that righted things like that was called a kofer. I suspect kofer is behind the English expression “in our coffers” – it’s the same idea, if not the same word, literally. It’s not paying money to atone for something. It’s actually achieving the strength of the group again, by positive actions, and that’s called redeeming.

You get those texts again in II Isaiah: “Do not be afraid. I will redeem you. Do not be afraid. I will vindicate you, if you are in trouble, says your God, your vindicator, (which is your redeemer.)”

You have a similar text in Job… “I know that my redeemer liveth. And even beyond death, my redeemer liveth.”  There is vindication, even after death.  And death cannot even knock the strength of this group, of this covenant.

After the Exile, the Jews looked at redemption slightly differently, because they are back from the exile, and they are saying “the exile must never happen to us again” – so what we need are good political leaders who will avoid the structural malaise of the whole system and create a strength that other nations will not be able to weaken.

These new political leaders were called goellim or redeemers – and they were there to vindicate Israel in this new political and historical situation.  This is still a completely secular notion. It’s active politics.  Now, it’s only when you get to II Isaiah, that you actually spiritualise  the notion of redemption. It doesn’t happen before that, and II Isaiah does not speak of “atonement for sin” but of the fact that God will always be the vindicator, and if God’s servant gets into trouble by human accident, God will be there and make good come out of the trouble, even if the trouble is death.

So when you get to Jesus in the New Testament, they tend to apply the spiritualised notion of redeemer to Jesus – but it happens in a kind of trinitarian model. You can almost say that, in the New Testament vision, we’ve got three redeemers  – there’s Jesus, there’s God the Father, and there’s the Holy Spirit.  And what Jesus does, is identify with the peasants in Galilee, and implicitly with marginal people everywhere, because they’ve been put down, and their rights have been trampled upon, and Jesus says: “I will vindicate your rights in justice”, and he becomes their vindicator, their goel. He claims them as his own, and when Jesus does that, by his own tears and by his blood, God the Father rises up and says: “Well, I’m your vindicator too – and I will protect you, because you are my very own”, and in that case, God is also the vindicator and the redeemer. And then, when Jesus and God have done that, they breathe this Holy Spirit of new energy into the people, and include them into their own energy, and transform them and transfigure them as a result, and the Spirit given them is also a redeemer. And of course the unity of God is the unity of those three redeemers – Jesus, God the Father and the Holy Spirit.  We don’t do things to atone for our sins.  Father, Son and Spirit are our vindicators.

I know I’m talking here about notions of redemption that most people do not connect with the word “redemption”, and that’s one of the trouble, isn’t it?  Most people think of paying a price to someone to buy someone back. Most people think of us atoning for our sins to God to make up for our sins. The price isn’t money. The price is doing things that are hard, and taking on sufferings and things like that. This is a totally different model – a model we were at in the previous lectures.

So, in many ways, I’d like to drop the word “redemption” entirely, because I don’t think it is redeemable, in present English listening anyway. I would like to use a word like “inclusion”, or something like that. It’s a more belonging word, than a make-up-from-a-distance word. It puts a different pattern in front of us, as the way we are supposed to think. But we’re stuck, I think, with the word “redemption”. It’s been around too long to kick out of the window fast, but if I knew how, I would.

[Redemptorists will have to become “the holy includers”! – in the covenant of the wholly integrated Includer!]

There is something in the language, that is running counter to the meaning we want to convey by using the word. Again this is not the model we were at earlier, but it is very much a covenant model.

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1. Sacrifice

Let’s look at the third theme, sacrifice.

Now sacrifice is an ungodly thing, if I might say so. There’s been theology of sacrifice around for ever and ever; but it is so messed up that, even more than redemption, you could wish that nobody had ever heard of the word and we could drop it for something else.  But it’s there. It’s been part of out Eucharistic liturgy and language for nearly 2000 years, and though the concept of sacrifice was extremely positive in its Jewish context, it has acquired quite negative overtones, especially during the second millennium.

It’s also doubly difficult, because the current culture we live in is consumerist, and a consumerist culture is exactly the opposite of a sacrifice culture. So it is hard to sell this positive sacrifice culture these days. But let’s try.

The way I like to work on it is that there are two understandings of sacrifice, one pagan, and one Jewish. I like to call the pagan understanding a destructive one, and the Jewish understanding a constructive one.

A.        The pagan model.

Now the pagan one is historically (much) earlier – but still alive and well. Sacrifice grows up originally in pagan groups and in pagan environments. Sacrifice does not naturally fit with the Jewish faith.  The Jews picked up practices from their pagan neighbours and then tried to give them a more positive interpretation - I don’t think ever with complete success.  But that’s the way it goes.

Let’s start with the pagan destructive notion. Now, the assumption behind it is that:

their god is a distant god, not close to them;

their god is an offended god – (offended by them);

their god is unwilling to forgive them – so their god has to be cajoled into forgiving them.

Now how do you do that?  Well, the assumption also is that their god has every right to kill the people because they deserve to be wiped out and annihilated, for what they did. But they come to an arrangement with their god, that their god won’t annihilate them, if they come up with a ritual that will satisfy their god’s needs. And the ritual is, that you take hold of an animal and you extend your hands over it and you identify with it. That’s a gesture of identification between the people and the animal.  And then you do to the animal what the god is entitled to do to you. And the god calls it quits. The god’s needs - the god’s anger and need for legitimate violence - are satisfied, by the god’s doing-in the animal, instead of doing-in the whole people. By the way, this assumes an extraordinarily angry and violent kind of god, doesn’t it? But this is pure paganism, that I’m trying to talk about.

Pagan sacrifice happens in three steps:

1.                  You kill the animal, in the name of your god, and that’s symbolically killing the whole people.

2.                  Then, having killed the animal, you burn it to a cinder, like a holocaust, and that again is symbolically annihilating the whole people in the name of the god.

3.                  And, if there is anything left, you have a BBQ and you consume the lot to get rid of absolutely every bit of flesh that was left, and that’s removing the whole material part of the animal. That is symbolically removing the entire people, and equivalently making the god satisfied.

Now, I think you’ll find that you’ll recognize that notion of sacrifice. I think that’s the one that’s been operative in most, if not all, of our theology of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. And this is why we do him in, in such a barbarous way through crucifixion. And this is applied to the sacrifice of the Mass, and this is applied to the spiritual sacrifice of our own selves in the spiritual life, kind of stuff.  It’s that model.

I don’t want to keep harping on it, but I think it is paganism. It always was paganism. And that’s why I think there is a different model of sacrifice.

B.         The Jewish model

The different model is a Jewish one.

We need to focus on the Jewish context of sacrifice and on rituals that are unbloody. Despite failures in practice and in some forms of interpretation, there is present in the core  mystery of Israel something that is not only open to the more positive mystery of sacrifice, but that transforms even the practice of bloody sacrifice. With Jesus, there was a change in the idea of sacrifice, but this continued a change that had already been present in the ancient times of Israel.

The Jews originally had no need for sacrifice, because their god was so close to them always, and so on side with them always, and so positive to them always. You remember that text: “No other nation has its gods as close to it as our god is to us.” This expresses profoundly the whole genius of Israel, who, as a people, believed in covenant. Their God was bound to them in the covenant bond. They lived always with a keen sense of their living and immediate access to God. Even when they broke the covenant rules, their God never abandoned the covenant relationship with them. They didn’t need to cajole God into being present to them or forgiving them. This was assumed as given already and permanently. They always had the right and privilege of access to their God, who would look after them. It is this faith that changed the meaning and interpretation of what they did, when they copied the externals of the bloody sacrificial rituals of their gentile neighbours.

So if you asked the Jews-of-old: “Why do you want rituals?” They’d say: “We don’t, if we believe in a God like that, but the neighbours have rituals, so we have to keep up with the neighbours. So we’ve decided to copy some of the things the neighbours do, and twist the interpretation to fit our own set of beliefs and the way we act everything out. So let’s do that, and make each one of the pagan rituals, that we take over, express our kind of relationship with God, and our nearness to God, and the closeness of God to us. So let’s get hold of an animal, a bull or a lamb or whatever. Now we’ll put our hands on the animal and, as a people, symbolically identify with the animal.”

Now this is where the action starts. The pagans would say: “Kill it” because their god kills the people. The Jews say: “No, no! God doesn’t do that. What we’ll do is get the blood out of the animal, and then we’ll use the blood in a ritual to express our nearness to God.” You might argue that it’s hard to get blood out of an animal without killing it. Well, that’s bad luck for the animal. But if they had known how to get the blood without killing the animal , they probably would have done it that way.  They were not into violence, especially with animals.

So the Jews do slit the throat of the animal, and they do put the blood in a bowl. Now the blood was considered to contain the life of the animal, and so to be sacred – that’s what they used to think in the old days – that the life was in the blood – the blood was, as it were, alive – and that stands symbolically for the life in the whole people.  So, they take this blood, standing for the life of the whole people, and they take it to a place where God is specially considered to be – the Temple, the Holy of Holies, the place of the presence, above the Ark of the Covenant, the altar – and they sprinkled it at the place of the presence or  poured it on the altar. And that gesture says: the life of the people, symbolized by the life in this blood, and the life of God present here, touch one another and they are one life. It’s a covenant symbolism, and it expresses  a symbiosis between God and the people. In this way they were renewing the covenant that bonded God’s life and their life into one. And it’s got a very different signification from the pagan signification of doing materially much the same thing.  It is not annihilating a life, because a bad god wants it to be.  It’s expressing the unity of one life with another – the people’s life and God’s life.  And that is a remarkably beautiful gesture and ritual.  Can you see the difference?

Well, then they said,  “We’ve got a carcass left on our hands. What are we going to do with it?” They said the pagans would set it on fire and have a holocaust. So the Jews said: “Well, let’s do that.” But having a holocaust was not going to burn it out of existence. It was going to convert it into smoke. You might say that, that is a fairly subtle distinction, but there was a real point in it.  The smoke, in the Jewish mind, was holy, because it had the power to rise up in little puffs, up to heaven, where God was, so if you could convert this whole animal into smoke, you converted it  into a prayer that lifted up and touched God. And again it’s a symbol of unification of our life and God’s – not a symbol of annihilation or destruction or separation. It’s a beautiful idea.

You know this has liturgical ramifications.  In the tamid  sacrifice in the Temple, they used to do this with incense in the evening prayer, and it was like “Let  my prayer rise up like incense before you.” They used to put a little prayer of petition on each puff of the smoke, and so go up to God that way.

That was the basis of Vespers or Evening Prayer in the Church, until people said: “Well, it’s a bit messy lighting fires, so let’s leave all that out, and say some prayers instead.”  That was really the roots of all that.

And the third bit – not only to get the blood instead of killing, and to turn it into smoke instead of burning to a cinder,  -  if you had anything left that was edible, you didn’t eat it in order to get rid of it. You ate it in order to have a communion meal with your God, who would sit there banqueting with you. The Jews believed that they as God’s people and God ate together in the same meal, because they shared the same covenant life, which again was a beautiful idea.  In Hebrew history, communion or thanksgiving is earliest form of sacrifice, earlier than holocausts. Expiatory sacrifice emerges after the Exile. After some time, holocausts took on an expiatory meaning.

There was never a question of inflicting suffering, but of expressing union with God. Destroying the victim (called immolation) was not essential to sacrifice at all, and was not done by the offerer but by the priest ‘butcher’.  The Hebrew God was against anything destructive. The point of the sacrifice was not death. It was a ritual of redistribution of the body of the animal. Among those who ate it, there were set up new lines of kinship, that created new ‘family’ relations.  This was for men only. Women entered the kinship relationship through the blood of childbirth.

All these changes, in interpreting the symbols of the bloody sacrifice, go as far as possible towards a real change in the meaning of the sacrifice itself.

But can you see that that notion of sacrifice is very germane to Jewish belief, with that nearness of God, with the covenant thing, and with the assurance of God’s vindication, no matter what you did? I think this is a far better notion of sacrifice itself. Can you hear the difference?

One of the sad things, I believe, is that, when we’ve done our theology and catechesis, we haven’t actually used that Jewish notion of sacrifice much  - we haven’t used it as an interpretation of how we could say that what happened at Calvary was a sacrifice. And we haven’t used it to interpret the Eucharist. If we did, it would come out in a healthier and cleaner kind of way than the other way. But the other notion of sacrifice is in people’s bloodstream imaginatively, and that’s what we’re fighting against.

That’s why I said earlier that, no matter how often you try to explain how wrong is the atonement model, every time people go to Mass, they are going to think that an atonement sacrifice is taking place,  -  a sacrifice, yes, but not an atonement sacrifice in that sense.

So I think, what Jesus does, is offer to God his own blood, as the living expression of the life of all his own  people, and it is literally sprinkled, if you like, at the door posts of God, and it shows the oneness of God, with all of that life, and that oneness expresses itself in resurrection.  It is a much more powerful idea.

Regarding the Eucharist, really I think we’ve vastly overdone the notion that by having separate consecrations of the bread and wine we have a symbolic killing of Jesus in the Eucharist. This is not what Eucharist is about – it’s a symbolic re-enacting of what Jesus did,  in offering his very life for us, out of love for us, not in substitution for us, to the God, who is always with us, and in union with us, in a living kind of a way. I think that would be a vast improvement. That’s an at-one-ment model of sacrifice.

Sacrifice: its language

I’ve mentioned that it is very hard to convince many Catholics that sacrifice can be a positive celebration of praise and thanks for the loving kindness of our God. The need to sacrifice to make amends to God seems to be in our very bloodstream. Why?

It is said that communities with a large sense of non-negotiated guilt tend to practise sacrifice. The collective unconscious would seem to prefer to do sacrificial acts, rather than look at the guilt and do something about it. The roots of violence could lie here. Violence implies action without persons being consciously aware of why they act.

A living victim, like an animal, is offered to the deity. It passes over to the exclusive domain of the god and so is made “sacred”. It then becomes legitimate for society to treat the animal as a victim. An office, like priesthood, is then socially instituted to perform the ritual sacrifice. Sacrifice is in this way institutionalised, and a sanctioned form of violence to the victim is ritually justified.

People use the language of sacrifice metaphorically. We speak today of the way capitalism ‘sacrifices’ lower-income earners to the interests of the propertied class, for the sake of progress.

We speak of the way Nazism ‘sacrificed’ the Jewish people, for the sake of the myth of racial purity.

We speak of the way many people become self-effacing victims, who sacrifice themselves for those they love, or for those to whom they have commitments, as in family life.

A certain spiritual language applauds the idea of ‘self-immolation’, of presenting oneself as a willing? Victim, by sacrificing self-interest for the sake of altruism. The advent of feminism has highlighted the way women were abused when such a mentality was glorified.

Sacrifice: historical framework

There are three dominant historical frameworks for sacrifice as legitimised violent victimisation – two Christian, one Jewish.

1.                  Christian – 19^th-20^th centuries

The first framework is a certain stream of Catholic theology of the past one hundred years and more, that comes from the spirituality of the French Oratory.  It was a spirituality of self-emptying or self-annihilation for the sake of others. It was the climax of a peculiarly French reaction to the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Entire theologies of Jesus, redemption and Eucharist have been built on it.  Roman Catholicism strongly emphasised Eucharistic sacrifice.

Flowing from the Council of Trent in 16^th century, a strong sacrificial imagery confirmed an exclusively male and celibate priesthood, and left women and children in a relatively subordinate role. In this framework, there was insistence that the Eucharist was a true sacrifice, that of Christ on Calvary, and not simply a meal, and that the Last Supper should be studied without being located in the context of the ongoing meals of Jesus.

2.                  Christian from 4^th century

The second framework comes from the Christian 4^th century.  At that time there were some ego-weak males who, in developing their devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, were expressing a desire for their mother, i.e. for an identification with the feminine.  They unconsciously repressed these desires, and unconscious conflict resulted.  They wanted to identify with the Blessed Virgin Mary, and at the same time become sacrificing priests. They wanted to perform a ritual, designed to subordinate and eliminate women from positions of significance in the community, whilst giving the supreme place of honour in the Church to Mary. To cope with this incongruent situation, these males punished themselves by attempting self-emasculation, from which emerged celibacy. The male sacrificers were forbidden access to women to avoid any violence towards them. They also lived ascetical lives of spiritual sacrifice.

Studies have revealed that many of these men came from father-ineffective families, and from a relatively low status in society, viz. from the ‘proletariat’. It is suggested that these men created a ‘bourgeois’ social Christianity in which the patterns of patriarchy became hardened. Unwittingly they set up a situation for themselves, in which social and internal conflict existed.

The social conflict was between their real ‘proletariat’ character and the ‘bourgeois’ system, that they’d made for themselves. They hoped to find in this higher level of society a prestige to which they were not naturally accustomed.

The internal conflict was between their claim to be priests,  and their duty to be victims, who lived lives of spiritual sacrifice. They resolved the conflict by synthesizing the priesthood and victimhood of Christ in the Eucharist. If Christ was simultaneously priest and victim, then they, his ministers, could be the same.

This meant they were adopting what psychologically could be a paranoid position. It demanded submission to the bourgeois patriarchy of the ecclesiastical establishment in the name of imitation of Christ and devotion to Mother Church.

3.                  Jewish framework

The third framework is Jewish. According to the Jewish scholar, J. Levenson, though people have assumed there were no ‘pagan’ approaches to sacrifice among the Jewish people in ancient times, it now seems that human and child sacrifices, especially the ritual killing of a first born son, were historically conducted in Israel, and the impulse to do them never died out.  Levenson has shown that the binding of Isaac is modelled on these things, and that the notion of Passover itself depends on the theories of sacrifice implied in them.  We know that Israel transformed the pagan idea of human sacrifice, by redeeming or saving the intended victim, by substituting an alternative victim(such as an animal). This resulted in a focus on religious identity as a ‘spared victim’. This becomes the ‘supreme paradigm of religious life’ in Jewish and subsequently Christian tradition. To be a person is to be at best a rescued Isaac. Hence people feel guilty and want to make atonement to the victim who substituted for them.

Much of the language of sacrifice used today comes, without our knowing it, from the meaning of this word, in each of these three historical situations which still affect us.

Sacrifice: various negative theories

Psychoanalyst, W. Beers, sees the male, firstly as a child, and later as an adult, threatened by his difference in identity from his mother. In later life, he fears being engulfed by the feminine, which is a danger to his self-esteem, integrity and capacity to act. Hence, some unintegrated males can fear, control, degrade and even abuse women. They are trapped in their own Narcissism, and experience profound conflict.

Beers extends this model to ritual sacrifice. Men, not women, perform this ritual. He sees  the male investment in sacrificial rituals as an example of their strong desire to separate from mothers, women and ideals. The anxiety of the male is so deep that men, in the classic example of sacrifice, tend to negate their own gender by sacrificing their firstborn sons. This results in the sacrificial model of ‘negated identity’. The male act of performing sacrifice runs the risk of the extinction of the male altogether, through the murder of the firstborn.

In all these critical theories of sacrifice, there is a common thread. It is a particular notion of the human person. This notion is Narcissistic, self-punishing, closed to relationship with others and with God, even with itself. There is an individualism here which opens the way to a non-relational view of life.  Historically, this has led to extreme separation of church and state, to the triumph of the technological and to the elevation of economics (not kinship or even politics) as the focus of social institutions. The whole overall approach to sacrifice is depressive in the face of an excessive negativity in human life. There are real links between this view of person and some telling analyses of human culture. Jesus has often been made the carrier of all these negative notions of sacrifice, all of which shows how much an alternative approach to sacrifice is needed.

Sacrifice: a positive theory

A positive approach to sacrifice is rooted in ‘gift-giving’.  The Latin word, sacrificere, means to make sacred or holy,  and there  is something sacred about the process of gift-giving. It is not a thing but a person who gives and is given. In giving a gift, we give ourselves as givers to the other. The act of giving does not imply alienation but overture.  One transfers one’s very self to the enjoyed delight of the self and the other.

Gift-giving implies a giving and a thanks-giving.  There is pure joy and a sense of sacredness. This is a sacrificial act in the sense of enacting something very sacred. There is nothing  negative or destructive here. The focus is on positive persons, positively interacting. This interpersonal communication is a holy mystery.

The act of offering a gift is an act of agape, not  eros.

Agape suggests love in the sense of altruism, generosity, kindly concern, devotedness.

Eros suggests narcissism, more self-interest in sexual, earthy love.

Agape goes beyond desire and opens up a mysterious access between person and person.

This is much more true when a human person makes a gift to God. A divine person can infinitely be present to the offerer, receive and welcome the offerer, and reciprocate with the infinity of the divine self to the giver. A divine person enjoys the event, longs for it, and is always in the posture of someone accessible and available for its happening.

This positive vision of sacrifice does not sit well with rituals that involve the killing of a living being. The vision of priesthood does not sit very congruently with identifying the priest as a butcher. Asian cultures have a much gentler approach with their offerings of rice or barley cakes, flowers and fruit. It stems from the attitude of non-injury or non-violence which suggests, in the domain of ritual sacrifice, a higher level of civilization than that yet achieved in the West.

In both ancient Jewish and Greek cultures there were rituals of sacrifice other than those known as ‘expiatory’ – they were called sacrifices of celebration and festivity.  In some ways they share something of the higher gentleness of the Asian world.

Sacrifice is meant to be a joyful expression of union with God. It is a gift from us to the God, who is always present , and is  a communion granted to us by that same God.  The thanksgiving element is primary. It thanks for life in God. Blood is the locus. It is the sign of life. So blood us used in sacrifice because it is dynamic, vivifying. It is a feast - a song of love – an exceptional wine. There is a profound joy in mutual recognition. The whole point of it is love, that comes from holy desire and is achieved in delight, in the drawing by God that  makes this possible.  This results in an incorporation into the people of God, and into the communional will of both the God and the people together.

4.                  Expiation

Let’s turn now to Expiation, where the point gets unfortunately incredibly clear.  How there are two notions of expiation, one pagan and one Jewish

A.        Pagan notion of expiation

In the pagan notion of  expiation, you’ve got a people that recognizes it has done something wrong by its god, and wants to make up for it.  So it does something to atone for or expiate its wrong-doing. The subject of the verb in the doing-something is the people, who did wrong, viz. us. The beneficiary of the action is god, who is made up to, and the purpose of it all is to persuade god to forgive us. This view is still very prevalent in the catholic church.

B.        Jewish notion of expiation

The Jewish notion of expiation is completely different. First of all, why would you need it, if your god is so much with you? – good point!- but you’ve got to copy the neighbours, so you give it a go. But in the Jewish transposition of what the pagan neighbours did, the subject of the verb is god, not us, and the beneficiary is us, not god, and the purpose of it all, and the meaning of it all, is that it is to cleanse us.  God cleanses us and makes us beautiful again, and it’s a very different notion. You see, the word that is used for “expiation” in Hebrew is kipper.

The word kipper linguistically means to cover or recover something, to repair a hole, to cure a sickness, to mend a rift, to make good a torn or broken covering. The object of the verb in ancient times was not a person or a sin, but a place or a thing thought to be contaminated and in need of cleansing.  The high priest in the Temple symbolised and stood for God. What the high priest did was considered to be actually done by God.

1.                  The Lord was believed to be purifying and cleansing the cosmos, as the high priest cleansed and purified the temple by sprinkling it with blood, and pouring blood, i.e. life, on its significant places.

2.                  Having cleansed the Temple, the high priest absorbed the negative effects of the failings of the people by eating the flesh of the victim, which symbolically represented the contaminated people: he assimilated them and took them into himself. The mythic understanding was that God was prepared to do exactly what the high priest had done.

3.                  The priest then transferred the iniquity he had taken upon himself to the goat, called the scapegoat. ( This was not the animal who’d been slain.) He did this by laying his hands on the goat. He then the banished the scapegoat, that bore the iniquity, and thus removed both the goat and the      contamination from the people.

We know the words yom kippur, (a  derivative of kipper). It means in English the day of expiation or the day of atonement. Kipper is the verb, and God is the subject of the verb.  We are the beneficiaries. This is expressed in the beautiful way the Hebrews have.

Let’s link this to the sacrifice idea.  Earlier we were talking about the blood in the sacrifice. The blood contains the life of the animal. The life was in the blood. The blood was a very special juice, as the Rabbis used to say.

But the blood was more than that. The Jews regarded the blood as cleansing fluid, like the  fluid with which you’d clean a window. God took hold of the cleansing fluid offered to God, as it were on a rag, and God smeared it across the people – that was called kipper, not expiation. It was a beautiful, gracious cleansing deed of God – not a tentative thing the people did to persuade God to be decent – a very different concept.

“Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”, who smears out the stains of the people, you could say. It is exactly the same idea. I think it is a very beautiful notion. And all these notions are very congruent. They fit together and they are all on a covenant assumption or an at-one-ment set of assumptions.

It is a pity that the ancient Hebrew word kipper has been translated into English as ‘atone’ or ‘expiate’. It makes one think that the subject of the verb was the human person who has sinned, and not the Lord, working through the high priest. It also causes us to think that the object of the whole exercise was to appease the divine anger. Whereas kipper is all about cleansing humanity, and removing iniquity and its traces, from the human world.  The result is that the thematics of cleansing (kipper) have been changed into those expiation, and the negative, destructive theories of sacrifice have been established.

Logically, we would want to see the mindset of this theology of access and positivity in the gift-offering of sacrifice, extended to the situation of unbloody sacrifice, especially to that of the family meal. Historically this did not happen in Israel, at least in times prior to Jesus. Sociologist, Bruce Malina suggests that domestic sacrifice was virtually eliminated and all recognized forms of sacrifice became public and political. There is no evidence that the extension of the constructive theory of sacrifice to the meal has actually occurred.

Links with theologies of Eucharist

Sadly this positive notion of sacrifice has been lost in approaches to the Eucharist. The original meaning of the meals of Jesus and their special sacrificial dimensions have been obscured.  Vatican II tried to revive them, but latterly those efforts have been discounted.

Three tendencies have led to this loss:

1.                  Emphasis was given to the separate rituals for the bread and the cup at Mass. People saw the separation of body from blood as a symbol of death. Though this interpretation was not present in the earliest biblical texts, its presence in the liturgical tradition has opened the door to destruction theories of sacrifice as applied to the Eucharist and closed the door to any understanding of the Mass as a meal.

2.                  The Western church, in contrast with the Eastern church, placed all its emphasis in the Mass on the words of consecration, which were seen to contain dimensions of sacrifice. The Eastern prominence given to the role of the Holy Spirit in the Eucharist was minimised. This removed the congruence of seeing the rite in any sense as a meal. A meal is not primarily a formula of sacred words.

3.                  The third tendency was to focus on the real presence of Jesus as an objective reality.  This was seen as more important than what the whole ritual and its symbols signified. Again the primacy of the meal and the positive notion of sacrifice was lost.

The basic problem with all these tendencies is that the divine action – the coming of the Kingdom – is not included nor given sufficient prominence in the Eucharistic event.  By focussing on the double ritual and the real presence of the risen Jesus, people have forgotten the most important dimension of all: the actual coming of the God of the poor. Something is lost to the theological synthesis, and something is lost to the historical reality of what Jesus did.

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5.Reconciliation

And when you get to reconciliation, it is not what we nowadays call or think of as reconciliation. It is really a togethering of all of us in that given positivity of God, and that is different.

The best description of it, that I’ve found, is in II Corinthians from Paul himself, who got hold of  all this beautifully. In chapter 5, he says something like:

“from now on, we regard no one from a human view, or the way we used to look at them – but if anyone is in Christ, that person is a new creation – and is created in a new way. The old has  passed away, the new has come.”

What he means by “the old” is the world of division and separation, where things are not united as they should be – say, in our terms:  racial discrimination, violence, competition, abuse, elimination of those we don’t want – that world – a world, living with an anxiety that it is divided from a distant god.

Now, Paul says that the old view of the world is passed away; the new is come – and the new is a world, where God says: “I’m with you; I claim you; I own you; I care for you; I love you; I protect you; I include you into my life; I live my life with you. You live your life with me.”  It’s a world of communion and relationship. It’s a world that cannot tolerate divisions and separation,  and the word that Paul uses for getting into a world like that is “to get persons together” – katalassein in Greek – as we saw earlier.  I like translating it as the verb “to together in God”.

In chapter 5, 17-21, Paul says:  “All this is from God, who through Christ has togethered us to himself, and given to us the ministry of togethering – that is, God was in Christ, togethering the universe to the Godself, not counting trespasses against anyone, and entrusting to us the message of togethering.  So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making God’s appeal through us.  We beseech you, on behalf of Christ, be togethered with God.”

I think that says it so clearly for me, that you don’t need to say it in any other way.

But that notion of togethering has been translated classically by “reconciliation”. I think it misses the point by a mile. It is not a restoration of individual relationship – it is rather a cosmic bringing together of all there is. I think a better translation would have yielded a better result, frankly.

In all this, I often feel that I keep saying to you: “Translators have done a terrible job!” – and I believe they actually have – we can’t get past that, and I think it is only the patience of a lot of the modern scholars, who have slowly done their Greek at home, and line by line have shown us that we have suffered from bad translations.

For example, there is a classic one in the “Song of Songs”, where the Hebrew reads: “I am black and beautiful”. St Jerome has translated this as “ I am black but beautiful!”  There was more going on in Jerome than a good knowledge of languages!

But this is what has happened so many times through so many instances.

There is another classic line, that I’ve discovered myself only in the past decade, through good Greek scholars, in Luke’s Annunciation text. “Be it done to me according to you word” says Mary. Fiat in Latin. She never said a word of that. If Luke had meant that, Luke would have used a different variant of the verb, than he actually used in he text. He used genoito, which is an intensive optative form of the verb. What Mary is saying, is: “I certainly agree! What a marvellous idea! Let’s go!”  Well, you can’t get away with that today in our churches.

There would be an enormous difference in, say, the spirituality of women if the translation had been right.

A comment. The translation reflects a world view at the time. It is possible to make a translation suit a particular view you wish to impose. It is a real manipulation of a text for a political reason.

And that’s what has happened all along the track. You see “covenant” got a wrong translation, really. So did “redemption” and “expiation”. Although “sacrifice” has probably got the verbally correct translation, the meaning has not been right.

And right through, you are in a series of things that shouldn’t have been that way. But they were, and they are in our blood stream.

If you want to put an alternative model, I would think the correctly read and translated concepts there, are the basis for what you’d be trying to do.