The Myth of Independence

‘You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.’

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A few years ago, I was interviewed for a job as a pastoral assistant at St Albans Cathedral. It was an intense day if recruitment, starting with three short interviews with the canons and minor canons, a tour of the building, a group exercise with the other candidates, a pizza with the very intimidating youth group, and evensong. The final stage of this process was an interview with the dean. Everyone had described him as a kind and considerate man. By that stage, I was exhausted and really hoping that we could get through this quickly so I could get my train home. I sat down on the sofa in his study, and without preamble, he asked me, ‘Naomi, why did Jesus die on the cross?’ So much for an easy ride.
I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember what I answered that day, but I imagine that the panic I experienced in that moment was akin to that experienced by the disciples in our gospel reading today, when their beloved friend and leader stated, ‘the Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.’ Mark says that they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him – I am sympathetic.
So why did Jesus have to die on the cross? When this is asked, it’s rarely meant as an historical question about the historical circumstances of the crucifixion. Instead, what is meant is an inquiry into the theological efficacy of the crucifixion. In turn, this can be broken down into two questions: what was the problem in the first place, and how did the crucifixion solve it? Answers to this pair of questions are known as theories of the atonement. I’m not going to rehearse the whole range of these theories, firstly because this isn’t a lecture in systematic theology (and if it were, I wouldn’t be the person in this church to give it!), and secondly because I want to focus on a single criticism of and alternative to these theories, as proposed by James Allison.
Allison’s position is particularly critical of the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement, which argues that Jesus’ death on the cross functions as a punishment for the sins of all humankind. Sin demands restitution from an infinitely just God, but because God is also infinitely merciful, Jesus is sent to give himself up in our place, and thus God’s wrath is satisfied. The standard liberal response to this theory of the atonement is to wince at the idea of an angry vengeful God. Allison doesn’t do this. Instead, he criticises the idea of a theory of atonement in and of itself. He writes, ‘the principle problem with this conventional account is that it is a theory, and atonement, in the first place, was a liturgy.’
In chapter 16 of Leviticus, we get a description of this liturgy, an ancient ritual in First Temple Judaism, which would involve the High Priest, having made sacrifices for his own sins, casting lots for two goats, one of which was sacrificed to the Lord, and the other of which was sent out into the wilderness as a scapegoat, bearing the sins of the people on it. Now, I know that here at St Mary’s, we like a good liturgy, but you may be wondering what difference it makes to point out this liturgical antecedent for the idea of atonement. The thing that we can so easily forget about liturgy, whether it’s the sacrifice of a goat or the celebration of the Eucharist is that it doesn’t primarily point to something we ourselves are doing. Instead, it is a formalised way of drawing our attention to what God is doing. So the sending of a goat into the wilderness is not about appeasing a bloodthirsty God who really hates goats for some reason. Instead, it was a way for the High Priest, who had gone into the Holy Place carrying all the people’s sins with him, to demonstrate the desire of God to forgive those sins. Thus, when it comes to Jesus’ role in the ultimate act of atonement, he is cast in the role of the ultimate High Priest, enabling that breaking-through of God’s love.
The other half of James Allison’s argument is based on an idea in anthropology, which is called mimetic desire. This is the idea that what we want, we only want because other people want it or have it. And when we can’t have it, we get angry. As the parent of an almost toddler, constantly putting the remote control on a higher shelf, I can confirm that this is a deep human instinct. However, this is not a good basis for a society, because it leads to violence. Look at what James wrote in our epistle today: it’s stated starkly, that ‘you want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.’ This mimetic desire, this violent desire to have what others have, can tear a society apart unless all this rivalry can be directed towards one group of people or one person. If you can blame someone else for the fact you don’t have the things you want, whether that’s the Jews or Haitian immigrants, you feel a little bit better about things. And the liturgy of the atonement is another expression of this, albeit a formalised and controlled one: to avoid this kind of finger pointing, all this anger and violence is poured out, not on other people, but on two poor goats.
So in this understanding, Jesus death on the cross was still a substitution, but not the substitution we might think. Jesus died on the cross to satisfy not God’s bloodlust, but our own bloodlust. He died to protect us from that bottomless desire for everything we cannot have and do not need. But because he was also the High Priest enacting this sacrifice, he was able to declare that the cycle was broken: that God’s love was breaking through and reaching towards us, and that it didn’t have to be this way. The most powerful sign of this is the resurrection, which is an embodied forgiveness. It’s God’s way of saying, ‘You have done the very worst thing to me that could possibly be done, and still, you are forgiven.’ It creates space for the possibility that we ourselves might become vessels of forgiveness, forgiving those who trespass against us. It makes it possible to break the cycle of violent desire, to live without the kind of intense rivalry that is described in our gospel reading today. Because ‘whoever wants to be first must be last and servant of all, and whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’ Amen.