John 11:45-53
March 25, 2018
I.
The justification for killing Jesus, in the words of the High Priest, Caiaphas, is that “it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” In saying this he is making a political calculus: it is better to kill one troublemaker than to risk annoying the Romans so that they destroy the nation and Temple.
Caiaphas thought that if they gave the Romans this Jesus fellow, they would not threaten the rest of the nation. If they rat out one of their own people, the conquerors will let them stay in power. It is the logic of all oppressors, colonialists, slavers, and their collaborators. Everyone who benefits from the status quo will gladly betray and sacrifice whomever jeopardizes their own comfortable gig.
Caiaphas here embraces the religious logic of sacrifice, which is that if we can focus our fear, shame, and anger, and pour it onto one hapless victim in an act of lethal violence, we can prevent the whole nation from collapsing in disunity and conflict. Sacrifice was an act of unifying violence. The theory being that one victim had to be slaughtered for the benefit of all.
In the Old Testament, God coaxes the people away from the barbarity of human sacrifice. Now they would only sacrifice animals, using the detailed rituals we find in Leviticus. Then the people would often eat the meat in special feasts. That is what the Temple was for, after all. This was the High Priest’s job.
But the logic of redemptive violence remained stuck in the human heart. It was still about killing one so many can live. And, if the transference to animals was supposed to mitigate violence against humans, like so much of the Law, it didn’t work. We were supposed to kill animals instead of people. What happened was we killed animals alright… but we kept killing people too. The archetypal power of the myth of sacrifice was too strong.
This is the same foul reasoning that justifies lynching. The mob preserves its unity by taking out its paranoid rage on a selected individual. It identifies a person as a threat which must be eradicated in order to preserve the social order. And it is seen as a good thing. White people in America used to send each other postcards of lynchings, showing the happy, satisfied crowd under the twisted and broken body of the victim.
This was why the Romans crucified people in the first place. They picked individuals to sacrifice for the common good… as it was defined by them. They said, in effect, “Be glad we are inflicting our rage on this poor slob because otherwise we might have to come and slaughter all of you. Oh, and you don’t want to be this guy.”
The logic of redemptive violence is always about killing someone else so we can live. It reduces life to a zero-sum game where some only live because others die. That is the choice we are given: Unless we knock off this enemy, we’re all going to die. This is what terrorists are thinking when they attack Gays or Muslims or immigrants or foreigners or African Americans, as happened just this week in Austin and Sacramento.
II.
Unfortunately, I find that many of us at least unconsciously still buy into the corrosive myth of redemptive violence. We basically agree with Caiaphas here. If our religion and our nation are to survive, someone has to pay, is the thinking. Someone has to die. Someone’s blood has to be shed and offered in sacrifice.
Remember when Caiaphas says this. It is just after Jesus has raised Lazarus from death. Death is the ultimate power. The fear of death is the whole motivation behind the institution of sacrifice which was Caiaphas’ meal ticket as High Priest. Yet Jesus has defeated death. Caiaphas is afraid that Jesus’ subsequent popularity will anger the Romans, and that they will come and demolish the Temple and destroy the nation. All Caiaphas cares about is his religion and his nation. Caiaphas thinks Jesus has to die to preserve his self-serving order, as a sacrifice to Rome, to save the nation and religion from Rome’s wrath.
Jesus’ death is necessary, but not to preserve any nation or religion, and certainly not to maintain a particular social order or way of life. If we think Jesus came to save us from death in the sense of exempting us from change and transformation, then we are completely on board with Caiaphas. That’s what he is hoping for when he says Jesus has to be the one man who dies for the people.
But when the gospel says he will indeed die for the nation, it is not in the sense Caiaphas means about redemptive violence. It means that his death, because of who he is, will save the nation — and all nations — from the lie of redemptive violence itself. His death exposes, swallows up, absorbs, negates, and erases the false and destructive idea in the human heart that violence can ever be redemptive.
His death saves because it reconciles us to God by revealing God’s true nature to us on the cross as the suffering servant, the endless font of love, the ocean of compassion, the infinite well of forgiveness, who pours out eternal life for us. God is revealed in the Word, Jesus Christ. And Jesus never demands payment in blood or coin as the price of forgiveness or redemption or healing or anything. Never.
Not only does God in Jesus not demand someone else’s blood in order to be placated, in Jesus Christ God’s blood is shed, God’s life is given for the life of the world, God takes on the form of a slave, becoming humbly obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross, according to Paul. In Christ, God is on the cross reconciling the world. There is no daylight between God and Jesus. God becomes the ultimate sacrifice, not to reform or replace our sacrifices but to end the whole false myth of sacrifice altogether.
Just as in the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus repeatedly criticizes people using to do evil a Law that God intends for good, so he confronts the whole sacrificial system to which the same thing happened. God does this by becoming the ultimate, absolute, and final sacrifice. The sacrifice in which sacrifice itself is sacrificed, enduring the death in which death itself dies.
III.
Against falsely redemptive violence, Jesus embodies the truth of redemptive suffering that neutralizes, negates, disarms, and dissolves violence. Jesus’ death is indeed necessary, not to placate God’s wrath, which turns God into a monster, but to put an end to ours. Because we are the real monsters here.
The gospel writer tells us that indeed, “Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God.” He dies for the nation first by showing that it is indeed just another nation, oppressed and victimized by Rome. They were not special. His death reveals the truth of their situation as conquered people. But he also dies for the nation in the sense of fulfilling the sacrificial system given in the Torah, and doing in himself what the sacrifices of animals could not do: win for the nation their forgiveness and true identity as God’s people.
His death also gathers the dispersed children of God, who are all people, everyone made in God’s Image, but unaware of their true nature and destiny. In the preaching and witness of the apostles, this dispersed children of God perceive and come to know about the Jesus who is lifted up on the cross. But instead of taking it as a warning of what would happen to them if they didn’t tow the line, as the Romans intended, they would see him as their liberator from Rome’s power. For not even crucifixion is strong enough to keep him dead.
The dispersed children of God would see in him their own suffering and victimization at the hands of cruel powers, and at the same time they would see the awful consequences of their own sinful actions, and feel God’s forgiveness. In him, we come to reject the world of violence that claims to be redemptive because we realize we are a part of that world. Like the hymn says, is it the awareness that “I crucified thee.” Not because we were literally there when he was crucified, but because we participate in the continual victimization and sacrifice of weak and poor people all the time.
And because his being lifted up on the cross is completed and fulfilled in his being lifted up from the tomb in resurrection life, the dispersed children of God would know that to identify with him and share in his death is to gain a share in his life as well. It would be to put death behind them and advance with the Christ into new life. The dispersed children of God would then find their unity not in mutual hatred and murder of a victim, as in the sacrificial system, but in the neutralization of death itself, and its transmutation into new and eternal life.
And these dispersed children of God would find in him a new way of life, without fear, bereft of anger, and shorn of shame. They would gather together in new communities of peace and forgiveness, leaving behind violence and inequality.
IV.
Today we commence our walk through Holy Week, a time of remembrance and appreciation of Jesus’ passion and death for us. In these days, let us see him lifted up as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. Let us pay close attention to the ways we inflict violence on others, and realize that such violence is inflicted on him. Let us identify with him in our own suffering. Let us indeed die with him to the cruelty of our ego-centric and violent ways, join together with all the dispersed children of God, and be ready to share in his resurrection, delivering us to the freedom and love of eternal life, next Sunday.
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