Notes towards an understanding of sacrifice

[Thomas]

"I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power:
and the earth was enlightened with his glory.
And he cried out with a strong voice, saying:
Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen;
and is become the habitation of devils,
and the hold of every unclean spirit ... "
(Apocalypse of John 18:1-2)

In Revelation 18, John describes the fall of Babylon the Great Whore, and the great shedding of tears at her passing –

"Because all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication;
and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her;
and the merchants of the earth have been made rich by the power of her delicacies."
(v3)

And so it goes on. John is describing, in graphic terms, the collapse of a 'global economy'. But heaven doesn't lament, heaven rejoices.

The contrast is dramatic. Earth mourns the death of a market. Heaven celebrates the end of a system built on human exploitation. John's cargo list is extensive, ending in καὶ σώματα καὶ ψυχὰς ἀνθρώπων "and the bodies and souls of human beings." (v13)

That final entry reveals everything. The trade is not merely goods, but traffic in human beings.

Abraham accrued massive wealth:
"The slave of Abraham am I. And the Master has blessed greatly my master, and he has become great; and he has given to him flocks and herds and silver and gold and male slaves and female slaves and camels and donkeys." (Genesis 24:35 emphasis mine. Note also that Abraham's slave – "the oldest of his house, who ruled over all that belonged to him" – doesn’t even have a name.

In his Homilies on Ecclesiastes, St Gregory of Nyssa says:
"God said, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness.' If he is in the likeness of God and rules over the whole earth, who is his buyer? Who is his seller? Since humanity bears the image of God, Gregory argues, no human being can be reduced to property. Human beings are not commodities. Souls are not merchandise.

Slavery – the reduction of human to mere economic entities, to be commodified and traded, in whatever form – is a great evil.

 

[Thomas]

Yet Babylon is inexorable. It always has a logic, a way to make the unthinkable appear natural.

St John said: "The merchants of the earth grew rich from the power of her luxury." (Revelation 18:3)
Luxury isn’t just a lifestyle, it is a power, a dynamis (δύναμις). It is attractive, and it is addictive. Systems are driven by it, and the ultimate commodity becomes human lives. This luxury is not about comfort. It's a system that devours human beings.

The French philosopher René Girard proposed "mimetic desire". He said:
"In addition to the appetites we share with animals, we have a more problematic yearning that lacks any instinctual object: desire. We literally do not know what to desire and, in order to find out, we watch the people we admire: we imitate their desires."

I am not totally schooled in Girard's theories; he has his critics, but Social Media platforms and channels very much runs on this pattern.

He goes on: "That is, I desire what you desire, and soon you desire what I desire. Prestige spreads by imitation; desire multiplies by rivalry. Entire economies can be built by inflaming the sense that someone else possesses the life you want. Babylon’s marketplace runs on the imitation of desire." (Influencers take note).

The New Testament calls these forces "the principalities and powers". They are not merely governments, or markets, or temples. They are the spiritualised systems – egregores – in which power and money, goods and gods, reinforce one another.

 

[Thomas]

Rene Girard's mimetic theory of desire is an explanation of human behavior in relation to culture. In mimetic theory, mimesis refers to human desire, which Girard thought was not linear but the product of a mimetic process in which people imitate models who endow objects with value.

"Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires."

Mimetic theory has two main parts – the desire itself, and the resulting scapegoating. Girard's idea proposes that all desire is merely an imitation of another's desire, and the desire only occurs because others have deemed said object as worthwhile. This means that a desirable object is only desired because of societal ideas, and is not based on personal preference like most believe. The mimetic desire is triangular, based on the subject, model, and object. The subject mimics the model, and both desire the object. Subject and model thus form a rivalry, which eventually leads to competition and violence, and threatens the peace and harmony of the whole. There needs be some order of sacrifice to arrive at a peaceful solution, and restore harmony and balance.

The sacrifice is the scapegoat.

The scapegoat carries the burden of guilt for the whole. They are either driven from the community, or killed. Once gone, harmony, balance and peace is restored. Thus the resulting peace is borne from violence – directed towards the scapegoat – and this form of violence controlling violence has existed since the beginning of civilizations.

To be continued ...

 

[Thomas]

"For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice;
and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."
Hosea 6:6

"This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you." Jesus says in John 14:12, and then, "No one has greater love than this: that he should lay down his soul for his friends." (14:13)

Girard's philosophical link between sacrifice and violence means that peace and harmony in community is achieved by the suppression of desire, and then when the ill-effects of desire become inescapable, its transference onto a scapegoat.

Such sacrifice is evident in the histories of ordered society. It is a necessary to ensure peace and social cohesion. Christ’s sacrificial death, on the other hand, unmasks the barbarity of sacrifice for what it is.

According to John:
"So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a Council and said, 'What do we do now that this man is performing many signs? If we allow him to continue thus, everyone will have faith in him, and the Romans will come and will take away both our holy place and our nation.' But a certain one of them, Caiaphas, who was that year’s chief priest, said to them, 'You know nothing; you do not realize that it is expedient for us that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation not perish.'" (11:47-50)

Clearly, then, John offers that the Jewish authorities saw Christ's death as "expedient" to avoid confrontation with Rome.

At his arrest, Caiphas and others condemn him. Pilate sees no fault in him (18:38 & 19:6), but the mob want his crucifixion ...

The crucifixion then is the tragic consequence of the clash between the perfect love of God and the dreadful reality of the world’s need for blood.

That said, does the Cross reflect at all something of the love of God? Something of the Divine Nature? Put bluntly: does Christ's sacrifice as sacrifice tell us anything essential about God?

+++

Obviously, there's a huge theological problem if we say the Cross tells us nothing about who God is. Yet the idea that sacrifice – and the violence attached to it – sits somewhere in the infinite depths of the Trinitarian life raises serious problems, as it suggests a certain violence, suffering, and negation in the Godhead itself – we end up with some order of dualism, suggesting an eternal and endless struggle between light and dark, bliss and violence.

If we accept that sacrifice is fundamentally a negative reality, then that would suggest a struggle between God’s eternal being and the temporal unfolding of creation.

If, however, we seek to posit the Cross not as a negative reality, but a positive one, then that cuts against the grain of the prevailing concept of sacrifice. Those theories and theologies of sacrifice are deeply entrenched in the Christian psyche. For much ancient and modern thought, sacrifice is, one way or another, about violence.

Theologians generally assume the sacrifice as negative. For the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann (1926-2024), Christ is "the Crucified God". The sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross is a temporal event on earth and an eternal state in the Trinity – the Son's self-annihilation in obedience to the Father.

The 17th-century German philosopher and mystic Jakob Boehme held that good and evil are co-eternal, and that darkness and light remain forever unresolved.

 

[Longfellow]

The goat might have died or suffered in the wilderness but that was not the point, and in fact, was that ritual ever called “sacrifice”?

Girard's model requires:

• a victim
• who is blamed
• who is expelled or killed
• whose death restores social order

But the Levitical scapegoat:

• is not a victim
• is not blamed
• is not killed
• does not restore social order
• does not atone by dying

 

[RJM]

Those who know the secret of sacrifice, and engaging in it, partake of its remnants that are like nectar, advance toward the Absolute Truth. O best of the Kurus, those who perform no sacrifice find no happiness either in this world or the next.
Bhagavad Gita 4:31

If one offers to me with devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or even water, I delightfully partake of that item offered with love by my devotee in pure consciousness.
BG 9:26

 

[Thomas]

So ... either sacrifice is a dark and negative reality deep in the heart of the Trinity, or it is a positive reality, which throws the whole nature of sacrifice in history into sharp relief.

For the Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov, sacrifice is an eternal reality in the life of the Holy Trinity, and thus before its outworking in the missio Dei, the oikonomia of Salvation.

In Bulgakov (in The Lamb of God, published 1933) the relationship between the three Divine Hypostases is one of sacrifice. He writes:
"The Father has Himself in His nature as the hypostatic Word, His Word, and the Father is the one who speaks the Word. Thus, in the first place, God's hypostatic nature is the Father's hypostatic Word, which is uttered by the Father in the Son. 'All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son' (Matthew 11:27)."
(The Lamb of God, trans. Boris Jakim, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008, p98)

In His obedience, the Son has Himself and His own not as Himself and His own, but as the Father’s. In this way, the Son’s hypostatic life in the Trinity is eternal "dispossession".

"The sacrifice of love, in its reality, is pre-eternal suffering – not the suffering of limitation (which is incompatible with the absoluteness of divine life) but the suffering of the authenticity of sacrifice and of its immensity. This suffering of sacrifice not only does not contradict the Divine all-blessedness but, on the contrary, is its foundation, for this all-blessedness would be empty and unreal if it were not based on authentic sacrifice, on the reality of suffering. If God is love, He is also sacrifice, which manifests the victorious power of love and its joy only through suffering."
(Ibid. p99)

Here Bulgakov begins to locate sacrifice in the eternal, but understood radically other than our creaturely understanding, but something both benefical and 'immense'. In this sense, then, the Father's sacrifice is in giving everything He is to the Son, so the Father's begetting is a sacrifice because He gives and asks for nothing in return. It is all gift, and gift without expectation or obligation, which is what true love is.

"The Father begets; the Son is begotten... However, that which on the part of the Father is active begetting is, on the part of the Son, passive and obedient "begottenness." The Son, as the Son, has Himself and His own not as Himself and His own but as the Father's, in the image of the Father... Sonhood is already eternal kenosis... The Son's love is the sacrificial, self-renouncing humility of the Lamb of God, "foreordained before the foundation of the world" (1 Peter 1:20)... the Son too does not desire to have Himself for Himself: He offers His personal selfhood in sacrifice to the Father, and being the Word, He becomes mute for Himself, as it were, making Himself the Father's Word. Being rich, he makes Himself poor, becoming sacrificially silent in the bosom of the Father."
(ibid, p99)

One might say that Father realises Himself in the Son, and the Son, in receiving everything the Father is, realises Himself as Son in the return of the gift to the Father, in no less a manner than the Fathers pours Himself into the Son.

The relation of Father to Son, of begetter to begotten, is an eternal one, not momentary, but ever-so, a dynamic. "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9); "I am in the Father, and the Father in me" (14:10).

This mutual kenosis, this surrender of the Self entirely to the Other, this sacrifice, is not underpinned by violence, but by love, and this Divine bliss cannot be understood as purely as an act of self-loving, as mere self-admiration or self-pleasure, analogous to egotistical human happiness. There is Father and there is Son, but in that love there is another, for the love is all the Father is, and is all the Son is, being neither Father nor Son, but equal to them both, it constitutes a third, the Holy Spirit.

To be continued