The Eucharist (1)

For the next five posts I am going to write about the Eucharist. Three of these posts were composed and published in May 2013 on my Facebook page, the final two posts come from this year. The Fourth was written for Holy Thursday. These posts reflect my engagement with the work of Rene Girard as they apply to this most important (sacramental) meal we Christians engage in (daily, weekly, monthly or occasionally). I hope you find them beneficial.

The Eucharist #1

Let us imagine ourselves back in the past, say 4,000 years ago. No matter where we lived we would have believed in the gods. Now, what was the good news according to religion pre-Abraham? The good news was that if you sacrificed rightly then you would be blessed and the greater the sacrifice, the greater the blessing and there was nothing like a first born to offer a god. Or a virgin girl. Both were highly prized.

To believe in a god meant to sacrifice to a god. This is why people would not ask “What do you believe?” but “To what god do you sacrifice?” The entire principle of religion was summarized and executed in the practice of sacrifice. Modern theorists of religion recognize the role sacrifice plays in archaic religion but it is Rene Girard who sees in sacrifice the mechanism by which culture is formed and religion experienced. The first chapter of his groundbreaking book Violence and the Sacred is on sacrifice. Sacrifice is the institution whereby we offer to the gods something in order to get something in return.

The penal theory of the atonement is nothing more than archaic religious thought translated into Christian-ese. This is why so many people so readily accept this way of thinking as a default position; it meshes rather nicely with their cultural and religious DNA. It argues that Jesus sacrificed himself to God (presumably the Father) in order to effect salvation for us. Oddly enough this is the very language the New Testament writers seek to disavow. Some people go immediately to the Epistle to the Hebrews and say, “Lookee here, this whole letter is about Jesus’ sacrifice.” What they fail to notice is that there is an attempt by the writer (which is not altogether successful) to move away from sacrifice by shifting the vocabulary away from ‘thusia/thuo” to “fero, anaphero. diaphero” and its cognates. “Fero” means to offer and in Hebrews it is used with the reflexive pronoun “himself” as in “Jesus offered himself.” If, as some say, “well you see, he offered himself to God as a sacrifice” they miss the great anti-sacrificial text of Hebrews 10:5-8 where Jesus, according to the author, just prior to the incarnation utters an anti-sacrificial text (Psalm 40) as the rationale for his mission. That is, Jesus comes not be a sacrifice but to undo sacrifice by offering himself. But to whom? Not to God! God neither requires nor demands sacrifice. Rather, it is to us, he offers himself. We are the one’s whose anger needs propitiating; we are those who need sacrifice. We can hardly imagine any way of thinking or living apart from sacrifice.

Jesus’ as our sacrifice (after all we are the ones who ‘break the bread’), allows us to transfer our hostility to him as an innocent victim, as a first born male or virgin girl. We kill him. And yes, there is a benefit. His shed blood becomes our drink, blood shed for our forgiveness. In his death there is only forgiveness. There is no wrath from God here, there is only our human wrath, our need for sacrifice. This is why it is so important to recognize that when we share the Eucharist we are participating in the oldest human ritual in the world: primitive sacrifice, but a ritual that has now been transcended and morphed into a communion meal where we no longer need sacrifice, a meal wherein we no longer need scapegoats, a meal whereby we acknowledge our corporate propensity to hurt others and expel others in order to create our ‘in group.’ And in this meal, as we acknowledge this by ‘breaking bread,’ we are also forgiven as we drink the cup. Now this is good news, news far better than the archaic religious practices of violent human culture. The Eucharist therefore, is the most anti-cultural institution in the world and breaks down our sacrificial religion and turns us to a non-sacrificial spirituality where God is love and where we learn to love one another.