from origen's commentary on the gospel of saint matthew / book ii (fragment)

I have often said that the liberal and the fundamentalist approaches to biblical criticism are two sides of the same coin. To (mis)appropriate something Girard has said (on science and apocalypse, quoted here recently): "In both cases, the Christian text is interpreted as having already said its last word; it is there behind us, not in front of us." Origen has the following incisive bit on the proper handling of the Word of God which, as the author of Hebrews famously says, "is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart" (Heb. 4.12).

The Unity and Harmony of Scripture

Blessed are the peacemakers.... (Matthew 5:9) To the man who is a peacemaker in either sense there is in the Divine oracles nothing crooked or perverse, for they are all plain to those who understand. (Proverbs 8:8-9) And because to such an one there is nothing crooked or perverse, he sees therefore abundance of peace in all the Scriptures, even in those which seem to be at conflict, and in contradiction with one another. And likewise he becomes a third peacemaker as he demonstrates that that which appears to others to be a conflict in the Scriptures is no conflict, and exhibits their concord and peace, whether of the Old Scriptures with the New, or of the Law with the Prophets, or of the Gospels with the Apostolic Scriptures, or of the Apostolic Scriptures with each other. For, also, according to the Preacher, all the Scriptures are words of the wise like goads, and as nails firmly fixed which were given by agreement from one shepherd; (Ecclesiastes 12:11) and there is nothing superfluous in them. But the Word is the one Shepherd of things rational which may have an appearance of discord to those who have not ears to hear, but are truly at perfect concord. For as the different chords of the psalter or the lyre, each of which gives forth a certain sound of its own which seems unlike the sound of another chord, are thought by a man who is not musical and ignorant of the principle of musical harmony, to be inharmonious, because of the dissimilarity of the sounds, so those who are not skilled in hearing the harmony of God in the sacred Scriptures think that the Old is not in harmony with the New, or the Prophets with the Law, or the Gospels with one another, or the Apostle with the Gospel, or with himself, or with the other Apostles. But he who comes instructed in the music of God, being a man wise in word and deed, and, on this account, like another David— which is, by interpretation, skilful with the hand— will bring out the sound of the music of God, having learned from this at the right time to strike the chords, now the chords of the Law, now the Gospel chords in harmony with them, and again the Prophetic chords, and, when reason demands it, the Apostolic chords which are in harmony with the Prophetic, and likewise the Apostolic with those of the Gospels. For he knows that all the Scripture is the one perfect and harmonised instrument of God, which from different sounds gives forth one saving voice to those willing to learn, which stops and restrains every working of an evil spirit, just as the music of David laid to rest the evil spirit in Saul, which also was choking him. (1 Samuel 16:14) You see, then, that he is in the third place a peacemaker, who sees in accordance with the Scripture the peace of it all, and implants this peace in those who rightly seek and make nice distinctions in a genuine spirit.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 21 / year b / proper 25 october 25 2009

Mark 10.46-52

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Today’s readings set before us the mystery of suffering, sin and salvation. In the Old Testament reading, from the prophet Isaiah, we hear how we can come to experience separation from God. In the first verses of the reading, the prophet writes: “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear; but YOUR INIQUITIES have made a separation between you and your God, and YOUR SINS have hid his face from you so that he does not hear” (Isaiah 1.2).

Sin removes us from the free-flowing stream of God’s grace. Jesus says in St. Matthew’s Gospel that the Father “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5.45). And it is true that God is favorably disposed towards every person he ever created. He has nothing but love, mercy, and compassion for each and every single person, and he sends to each of us nothing but blessing. Nevertheless, to sin is to remove ourselves from this free-flowing stream of God’s love. It is important to note that God never stops loving us. Never. He never punishes. He always forgives, he always loves, he has nothing but compassion and mercy. But we may reject it. We may turn away from it. And when we do, we bring ourselves into darkness and suffering – because apart from God there is only darkness. What we experience as punishment, or the wrath of God, is always the result of our own choice. Therefore Isaiah says “your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you so that he does not hear.” To sin is to remove ourselves from God’s love, from his light, from his mercy.

And this is why sin is often described not as an action, but as a condition or a state of being. This doesn’t mean that there are not sinful actions. It does not mean that we can do whatever we want so long as we try to cultivate the correct state of being. That is a twisted form of legalism. Particular sins, the kinds of actions we normally think of as sins – theft, murder, sexual impurity, lying, and that sort of thing – all LEAD TO the condition of sin. Through indulging in these sorts of things, we wander away from God, and find ourselves without light and love. And then we experience sin as a state of being – a spiritual place – and we experience it as things like bitterness, anger, and eventually despair.

Isaiah describes this state of being in today’s reading. He says “we look for light, and behold, darkness, and for brightness, but we walk in gloom. We grope for the wall like the blind, we grope like those who have no eyes; we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among those in full vigor we are like dead men” (Isaiah 1.9f). This is the state of being to which sinful action eventually leads us: a place of darkness and helplessness, of bitterness, anger, and despair. Sin may begin with our simply wanting to have fun, or to make ourselves happy, or to make ourselves better off. But there is no joy, no happiness, no goodness, apart from God. So every attempt to give these gifts to ourselves is doomed to failure. And it is at the point where we realize that our sinfulness has not made us happy, that we have not gotten the satisfaction we were seeking, that sin as a state of being sets in – where our lives become permeated by the nothingness that flows in sin’s wake: the bitterness, anger, and despair. And because this is an interior state of being – because this process unfolds in our hearts – there is no thing and no circumstance that can change it, that can help us. That’s why Isaiah says “we stumble at noon as in the twilight.” The sun may be shining, the birds chirping, but if there is darkness within us, it doesn’t matter. We are like dead men among those in full vigor. If nothing is done about this, this state of being becomes leads to – it literally becomes – hell.

What is the solution? First of all, we have to be honest about the situation. Human beings are proud creatures. All of us. We don’t like to admit it when we have done wrong, when we’ve done something stupid, or when we’ve gotten ourselves into trouble. And this is why humility is crucial. We have got to admit it. We have got to have the courage to admit that through our own fault, we have brought ourselves into darkness. This is not easy. And the fact that it is so difficult speaks to the depth of our pride – that we have very hard hearts and very hard heads. But unless we can admit our faults, we will only go on spinning our wheels, making our situation worse and worse, until eventually we are dead forever. And the world and the devil conspire against us in this way. They keep holding out to us alternatives to God, who is in truth the only solution. The world and the devil keep encouraging us to look for the answer anywhere other than the place where it can be found – at the feet of Jesus.

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Mark is about this very dynamic. The surface story about Jesus healing a blind man conceals a truer story about each one of us – about sin as a state of being, and about the way out of the darkness to which sin leads. As Jesus is leaving the town of Jericho, on his way to Jerusalem, a blind beggar named Bartimaeus hears that Jesus is passing by, and begins to cry out, saying “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” This prayer should be the cornerstone of our own prayer life: “Jesus, have mercy on me.” Like Bartimaeus, we are all blind beggars, because we have all sinned, and we all labor, to one degree or another, under the condition of sin. Our hearts and minds are darkened, and Jesus is the only one who can help. We are in constant need of his mercy, and therefore we should constantly ask for it in prayer.

Mark goes on to say that “many [in the crowd] rebuked [Bartimaeus], telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’” (v. 48). This verse is about the conspiracy of the world and the devil, both of which bombard us with the message of infidelity (faithlessness) – that is, both of which constantly attempt to convince us that Jesus cannot save us, for whatever reason. One of most popular reasons bandied about these days, is that Jesus can’t save us because he was a nice, wise philosopher like Buddha. He has lots of nice things to say, but he can’t actually help us, because as wise and as nice as he was, he died two thousand years ago. That’s a lie. A popular lie, but no less of a lie for that. Jesus CAN help us because he rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of the Father. He is alive, and he has received all authority in heaven and on earth (Matthew 28.18). Not only can he save us, but he is in point of fact the ONLY one who can save us, because he is the only living person with all power and all authority. Therefore, like the blind beggar, Bartimaeus, we should ignore the urgings of the crowd, which tell us that prayer is useless. Like Bartimaeus, we should cry out all the more, imploring Jesus to have mercy.

The ancient scriptural commentator Pseudo-Jerome wrote about this passage, saying the same thing: “Many rebuke [the blind beggar] that he may hold his peace, [and this means that] sins and devils restrain the cry of the poor; [but] he cried all the more, because when the battle waxes great, hands are to be lifted up with crying out to the Rock of help, that is, [to] Jesus of Nazareth.”

Jesus hears his cry. The Gospel says, “Jesus stopped and said [to his disciples], ‘Call him.’ And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart; rise, he is calling you.’” (v. 49). Note that Jesus doesn’t call the man himself, but tells his disciples to call him. Often, when we are in sin and darkness, we are deaf to his voice, even as we are blind to his light. So he calls to us through his servants and his ministers. Likewise, sometimes we find ourselves in the position not of the blind beggar, but of one of Jesus’s servants and ministers. And in such a case, our word to those who suffer in sin and darkness, and who are looking for a way out, should be the words from this passage: “Take heart; rise, Jesus is calling you.”

“And throwing off his mantle [Bartimaeus] sprang up and came to Jesus” (v. 50). Jesus calls to us in our blindness. He answers our prayers for mercy. And like Bartimaeus, we must throw off our mantle, and run to Jesus. What does it mean to “throw off our mantle”? St. Bede says “[the one who] throws away his garment and leaps, [is the one] who, [throws] aside the bands of the world, and with unencumbered pace hastens to the Giver of eternal light.” If we want to receive light, we have to be willing to leave behind everything in the world to come to the Giver of light. But what does that mean? It means that we must acknowledge every circumstance, every thing, every human relationship, to have come to us from the Lord. Therefore we must acknowledge that none of it belongs to us ultimately, and that if anyone or anything stands between us and Jesus, we must abandon the impediment and keep running toward the Lord.

“And Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ And the blind man said to him, ‘Master, let me receive my sight,’ (vv. 51-52). Two critical elements are brought out in these verses: 1) honesty and 2) faith. Bartimaeus has the humility to acknowledge his problem: he is blind – “Master, let me receive my sight.” We too must stop pretending that we are fine just as we are. We are not. If we would be healed and delivered from our suffering and mediocrity, we must admit it. And secondly, we must believe that Jesus has the power to heal us, and ask him for it: “Master, let me receive my sight.”

“And Jesus said to him, ‘Go your way; your faith has made you well.’ And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.” Bartimaeus receives illumination and healing from Jesus, and Jesus says to him, “Go your way…” and the passage concludes by saying that Bartimaeus “followed Jesus on the way.” Notice that Bartimaeus’ way has become the way of Jesus, who said “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life” (John 14.6). Bartimaeus follows Jesus. This is how we may know we have been enlightened and healed: we become followers of Jesus. His way becomes our way. Again, St. Bede says the one who “follows Jesus, [is the one] who understands and executes what is good, who imitates [Jesus], who had no wish to prosper in this world, [but] bore reproach and derision.” And where does this way lead? The next verses in Mark’s Gospel says that they drew near to Jerusalem (Mark 11.1), to the city of gold, to the place where God’s glory dwells.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 20 / year b / proper 24 / october 18, 2009

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s readings the central, challenging mystery of the Gospel begins to become clear, a mystery hidden since the foundation of the world, but one that had been becoming clearer and clearer throughout the history of Israel, and by the revelation of the prophets: that God is a god of love; that, as Jesus says elsewhere, quoting the prophet Hosea, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice” (Matt. 9.13, cf. Hosea 6.6). This is the most central theological truth, and the one that makes Christianity totally unique in the catalogue of religions: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4.16).

The whole edifice of our faith, Christian spiritual praxis, as well as what we like to think of as the “moral” or “ethical” code by which we are bound as disciples of Jesus, can be rightly understood only as a marinating in, and a living-out of this truth. To inhabit this mystery is what it means to be saved, what it means to become like God. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

In today’s Gospel lesson, two of the disciples make a reasonable request of the Lord: “And James and John, the sons of Zeb'edee, came forward to him, and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.’ And he said to them, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’” (Mark 10.35-37). It might perhaps annoy us a little bit when we read this, the presumption of these two disciples and their attempt to cut to the front of the line. But if it annoys us – and it probably should – it does so because the same impulse lies in our own hearts.

It becomes clear that James and John have misunderstood the meaning of the coming of the Kingdom, which Jesus had spent several years proclaiming. And its really no surprise: the whole purpose of his coming might, in a sense, be understood to be to clear up of this confusion which is built into the human condition and which colors our conception of ourselves and of the world and of our relationships to one another. It is the self-seeking and violence that lies in our hearts, and on the foundation of which we organize our individual lives, as well as our cultural forms.

It is for this reason that the eyes of James and John were veiled to the truth. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” We ask the Lord for the same thing, and in the same spirit, when we ask him for earthly goods – for temporal fulfillment of whatever sort, when we ask him that he grant us to “win” – to become successful – on the world’s terms.

“But Jesus said to them, ‘You do not know what you are asking,’” (v. 38). We do not know what we are asking. As Jesus told Pilate, the Kingdom of God is not of this world (cf. John 18.36). And its coming is according neither to the expectations of the world nor of the flesh.

“Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?” The Lord is here indicating the cup of his suffering and the baptism of his death, which are bearing down on him, and he indicates this when he points out that James and John will indeed both drink his cup and share his baptism, though not in the way that they suppose. But the Lord will be crowned, robed, sceptered, and hailed as a king, when he comes to the cross. And on his right hand and on his left there will be two thieves, “those for whom it has been prepared” (v. 40).

The cross is indeed a scandal to all who look on it. And we must confess that the spectacle of Golgotha is not the kingdom of God we have come to expect, nursing as we do the notions of the world and the flesh in our hearts. We expect God to triumph through some progressive ascendency, and we expect our participation in his triumph to be by means of some vindication in the world’s eyes, some victory that all can see and recognize. At the level of human society, we expect the Messiah to come riding an army tank or administering a social program.

We do well to expect the Lord’s vindication to be brought forth as the light, and his just-dealing as the noonday (Ps. 37.6). But we do poorly to assume that our eyes are such that can see it, or our ears such that can hear it. Nevertheless: there are the Lord’s vindication and his justice, reigning from the tree. And the perception of an open heart, a broken and contrite heart, looks on this spectacle, sees the truth, and weeps tears of penitence, realizing that this is the means by which:

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. [Realizing that] he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; [that] upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. [That] all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [That] he was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; [and] like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is [mute], so he opened not his mouth. [Realizing that] by oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?”

Jesus came precisely to deliver us from these delusions of ours with respect to the Kingdom, the power, and the glory; from the lies we tell ourselves about the genesis of our desire; from the government of envy and violence, and from the despair and the death to which these cycles give rise.

But – thanks be to God! – “we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4.15-16).

Jesus not only diagnoses the problem, but he gives us the means of overcoming it: by drinking his cup, and being baptized with his baptism. Or, as he says succinctly elsewhere, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8.34). Envy and pride, the roots of our problem, are overcome by humility and self-emptying. In the value-system within which we live, humility and self-emptying are almost inevitably met with violent opposition, because they shed light on the deception by which this world’s Kingdom of violence and death holds sway.

The solution is, as ever, to come to Jesus and allow him to make us like him, by the gift of the Holy Spirit. We see this in the Gospel reading today: “And Jesus CALLED THEM TO HIM… and said to them, ‘You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of man also came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’” (Mark 10.42ff).

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

more and more girard...

In the course of declaiming on "science and apocalypse" we find the following....

The Gospels can serve as a foundation for a new culture, similar to all the previous cultures only as a result of a certain distortion of the original message....

Like every history within the sacrificial system, the course of historical Christianity consists in a gradual loosening of legal constraints in proportion to the declining efficacy of ritual mechanisms. We have argued that this development cannot simply be seen as decadence and decomposition. It is also incorrect to view the process as a liberating opening to a future of unlimited 'progress'. In both cases, the Christian text is interpreted as having already said its last word; it is there behind us, not in front of us.

girard on the betrayal of jesus by judas

To prove beyond a doubt that in the Gospels we should not overemphasize the classic structure of betrayal, we can show that the final element in this structure is not to be found -- the punishment of the traitor. The only difference between Judas and Peter resides, not in the betrayal, but in Judas's inability to come back to Jesus. Judas is not condemned by anyone; he commits suicide, despairing of himself and seeking to make the rupture definitive. The underlying factor here is the idea (a truly evangelical one) that men are never condemned by God: they condemn themselves by their despair. When he takes himself to be solely and uniquely responsible for the death of Jesus, Judas makes a mistake that is the exact opposite (though in the end the equivalent) of Peter's, when Peter states that even if all the other disciples are scandalized, he never will be. Basically, the same pride governs all people; they refuse to recognize that they are all equal in relation to the murder of Jesus, and therefore that they all take part in it in a more or less equivalent way -- however much external factors may appear to differ.

rené girard on the virgin birth

As readers of this blog (if there are any) will have deduced, I have become a Girardian. The following is a lengthy excerpt from Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. It explains much.

R.G. : Let us turn to the gospel themes that are on the surface most mythical in character, like the virgin birth of Jesus as it appears in Matthew and Luke. We notice at once that behind a superficial appearance of recounting fabulous events, the Gospels are always giving us a message exactly opposite to the one conveyed by mythology: the message of a non-violent deity, who has nothing in common with the epiphanies of the sacred.

Everything that is born of the world and of the 'flesh', as the prologue of John's Gospel puts it, is tainted by violence and ends up by reverting to violence. Every man is the brother of Cain, who was the first to bear the mark of this original violence.

In innumerable episodes of mythical birth, the god copulates with a mortal woman in order to give birth to a hero. Stories of this kind always involve more than a hint of violence. Zeus bears down on Semele, the mother of Dionysus, like a beast of prey upon its victim, and in effect strikes her with lightening. The birth of the gods is always a kind of rape. In every case we rediscover various structural features that have already been touched upon; in particular, the feature of monstrosity. In every case we find the doubling effects, the mad oscillation of difference, and the psychotic alternation between all and nothing. These monstrous couplings between men, gods and beasts are in close correspondence with the phenomenon of reciprocal violence and its method of working itself out. The orgasm that appeases the god is a metaphor for collective violence.

G.L. : And not the other way round, as psychoanalysis would have us believe!

R.G. : Monstrous births provide mythology with a way of alluding to the violence which always haunts it and that gives rise to the most varied meanings. The child whose birth is at the same time human and divine is a particularly relevant metaphor for the thunderous resolution of reciprocal violence as it passes into unanimous, reconciliatory violence and gives birth to a new cultural order.

To put its message across, no doubt the virgin birth of Jesus still resorts to the same 'code' as do the monstrous births of mythology. But precisely because the codes are parallel, we should be able to understand the message and appreciate what is unique to it -- what makes it radically different from the message of mythology.

No relationship of violence exists between those who take part in the virgin birth: the Angel, the Virgin and the Almighty. No one here is playing the role of the mimetic antagonist, in the sense of the 'enemy twins': no one becomes the fascinating obstacle that one is tempted to remove or shatter by violence. The complete absence of any sexual element has nothing to do with repression -- an explanation thought up at the end of the nineteenth century and worthy of the degraded puritanism that produced it. The fact that sexuality is not part of the picture corresponds to the absence of violent mimesis with which myth acquaints us in the form of rape by the gods. This idol -- what we have called the model-obstacle -- is completely different.

In fact, all the themes and terms associated with the virgin bith convey to us a perfect submission to the non-violent will of the God of the Gospels, who in this way prefigures Christ himself:

'Hail, O favoured one, the Lord is with you!' (Luke 1, 28)

The unprecented [sic] event brings no scandal with it. Mary does not set up any obstacle between herself and the Word of God:

'Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word' (Luke 1, 38)

The various episodes around the birth of Christ, make palpable the humble beginnings of the revelation, its complete insignificance from the standpoint of the mighty. Right from the start the child Jesus is excluded and dismissed -- he is a wanderer who does not even have a stone on which to lay his head. The inn has no room for him. Informed by the Magi, Herod searches everywhere for him in order to put him to death.

Throughout these episodes, the Gospels and the Christian tradition, taking their cue from the Old Testament, place in the foreground beings foredoomed to play the part of the victim -- the child, the woman, the pauper and domestic animals.

The Gospels can make use of a mythological code in this account of the birth of JEsus without being brought down to the level of the clumsy mystification and 'mystical naivety', which our philosophers customarily see in them.

Our own period's summary dismissal of them is in fact quite revealing, because reactions have become outmoded for the violent mythologies. We may congratulate ourselves on having made some progress, but this still leaves the message of non-violence out of account -- among all the others, the Christian message alone is universally despised and rejected.

G.L. : So the only religion it is still permissible to disdain and ridicule, in intellectual circles, is also the only one that expresses something different from violence and a failure to come to terms with violence. We can hardly fail to ask ourselves what such a blind spot might imply in a world dominated by nuclear weapons and industrial pollution. Are the beliefs of our intellectuals as out of tune as they themselves like to think with the world that has brought them into being?

R.G. : There is no more telling feature than the inability of the greatest minds in the modern world to grasp the difference between the Christian crib at Christmas-time and the bestial monstrosities of mythological births. Here, for example, is what Nietzsche writes in The Anti-Christ, after he has drawn attention, as a good follower of Hegel, to what he terms the 'atemporal symbolism' of Father and Son that in his view dominates the Christian text:

I am ashamed to recall what the Church has made of this symbolism: has it not placed an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian 'faith'?

We could well ask why Nietzsche might be ashamed to discover in the Gospels something he acclaims enthusiastically when he comes across it somewhere else. After all, the Amphitryon myth is one of the most splendidly Dionysiac myths of all. The birth of Hercules seems to me to square very well with the will to power, and indeed it contains all the elements that Nietzsche praises in the The Birth of Tragedy and other writings.

It is important to try and explain the reason for this shame. It tells us a good deal about the double standard that all modern thought -- taking after Nietzsche and his rivals -- applies to the study of Christian 'mythology'.

A great many modern theologians succumb to the terrorism of modern thought and condemn without a hearing something they are not capable of experiencing even as 'poetry' any more -- the final trace in the world of a spiritual intuition that is fast fading. So Paul Tillich dismisses in the most peremptory way the theme of the virgin birth because of what he calls 'the inadequacy of its internal symbolism'.

In Luke the theme of the virgin birth is not all that different when you come down to it, from the PAuline thesis defining Christ as the second Adam, or the perfect Adam. Saying that Christ is God, born of God, and saying that he has been conceived without sin is stating over again that he is completely alien to the world of violence within which humankind has been imprisoned ever since the foundation of the world: that is to say, ever since Adam. The first Adam was himself also without sin, and it was he who, in becoming the first sinner, caused humankind to enter the vicious circle from which it has never been able to break out. Christ is thus in the same situation as Adam, facing the same temptations as he did -- the same temptations as all humanity, in effect. But he wins the struggle against violence; he wins, on behalf of all humankind, the paradoxical struggle that all people, in the succession of Adam, have always been fated to lose.

If Christ alone is innocent, then Adam is not the only one to be guilty. All men share in this archetypal state of blame, but only to the extent that the chance of becoming free has been offered to them and they have let it slip away. We can say that this sin is indeed original but only becomes actual when knowledge about violence is placed at humanity's disposition.

holy cross sermon for pentecost 19 / year b / proper 23 / october 11 2009

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In today’s Gospel, the Lord again confronts us with a difficult truth, namely “How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God” (v. 23). Again, let us not attempt to diminish the Lord’s words, nor look for a clever, critical workaround. As if this saying of the Lord’s were not austere enough, he broadens the scope of the difficulty with his clarification to the disciples: “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God!” (v. 24). So the rich among us should take heart. Apparently entry into the Kingdom of God is difficult for the general population as well. But Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (v. 25).

If this seems harsh to us, the disciples thought so too, and once again we are in good company. Mark says that they were exceedingly astonished and asked Jesus, “Then who can be saved?” And Jesus looked at them and said, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God” (vv. 26-27).

So the discourse ends, as it were, on a hopeful note: all things are possible with God, even the salvation of the rich. But what is so bad about riches? We might plausibly ask ourselves if it isn’t, in fact, possible to do a great deal of good with money. If we have money we can give it away. We can help those who don’t have money. If we have lots of money, we can build hospitals and orphanages and schools. Wherein therefore is the innate iniquity of wealth?

St. Bede points out that a number of saints have been rich people – among them, in the New Testament, St. Joseph of Arimathea. And Bede therefore asks how it is – given Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel – that such people seemingly found their way into the kingdom of God, unless it be, he says, that “they learned to count their riches as nothing, or to quit them altogether.”

As we see time and time again in the witness of Scripture, God looks on the heart. Jesus teaches this lesson many times over in the gospels. The Lord speaks of the irrelevancy of external things when he says that nothing that comes from outside of a man can defile him. But “from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man” (Mark 7.20ff). Just so, the Lord draws an equivalency between evil thoughts and evil actions when he teaches that anger is the same thing as murder (Matt. 5.22), lust the same thing as adultery (Matt. 5.28).

The Epistle of Titus puts it succinctly: “To the pure all things are pure, but to the corrupt and unbelieving nothing is pure; their very minds and consciences are corrupted” (Titus 1.15).

It is the disposition of our hearts that will be the material condition of our salvation or the loss of our souls. What do we desire? In what do we place our trust? What satisfies us? What brings us joy? Whom do we love? What motivates our action?

The “impossibility” of a rich man entering the kingdom of God does not speak to some magical, innate evil residing in money or even the possession of it. Still less does it speak to God’s antipathy toward a particular class of people (the rich). It speaks rather to the near inevitability of wealth’s corrosion of the heart. It speaks to our weakness in the face of the world’s blandishments. This weakness, this susceptibility of our hearts to corruption, is at the bottom of various categories of sinfulness: envy, jealousy, covetousness: all matters of the heart.

Again St. Bede gives what at first glance may seem a fanciful exposition of what the Lord meant by the camel passing through the eye of a needle. Bede says, “in a higher sense, it is easier for Christ to suffer for those who love Him, than for the lovers of this world to turn to Christ; for under the name of camel, he wished HIMSELF to be understood, because he bore the burden our weakness; and by the needle, he understands the prickings, that is, the pains of his passion. By the eye of a needle, therefore, he means the straits of his passion, by which he, as it were, deigned to mend the torn garments of our nature.”

But perhaps this exposition isn’t so fanciful after all, as it gets right to the heart of the matter: the impossibility of salvation from the vantage point of the world, from the vantage point of what is merely human. As WH Auden put it (from “For the Time Being” from his “Christmas Oratorio”): “nothing can save us that is possible / we who must die demand a miracle.” And that miracle is the coming of eternity into history in the person of Jesus Christ, the advent of pure love – pure self-gift – right in the midst of this world of envy and violence we have made for ourselves. But the coming of Jesus means the destruction of every vain attempt to make a life for ourselves, to earn a living from the world’s resources.

Jesus is the poor man. The man who holds onto absolutely nothing, but lets everything go. He is the one who gives to everyone who asks of him. He seeks nothing of his own, desires to possess nothing for himself, but he pursues only the good of those whom he loves. And because of the logic of love (which really is the divine economy), we find in Jesus the true heir divinity, the only-begotten Son of God. And so “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10.29-30). Why persecutions? Because the Gospel – and the love of God which it reveals – is subversive. It exposes the futility and emptiness of the world’s means as well as its ends, and the world hates that.

When we encounter Jesus – animated as he is at every moment of his existence by divine love, which is a consuming fire (Heb. 12.29) – when we come to him, we are faced with a choice. What do we do? Do we return to our acquisitiveness? Do we spend ourselves in the pursuit of what in truth will never make us happy, of what is ephemeral, of what will in the end melt like wax at the fire? Do we return to our petty, bourgeois, do-gooder religiosity? …But God demands a LIFE (cf. Gen. 9.5, et passim). And so in the light of the truth which is Christ, we are faced with a choice. What will we do? Where will we look for life? Will we continue spinning our wheels, thinking that happiness is just around some next corner? Or will we have the courage to let go of ourselves and the silly identities we have constructed in our weakness, the houses we have built on sand? Will we have the courage to become empty for the sake of Christ, and so be consumed by the fire of God’s love?

There is an ancient Christian text, from the fifth century, called “The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.” One of the stories from it goes like this:

“Father Lot went to see Father Joseph and said to him, ‘Father as far as I can I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and, as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘IF YOU WILL, YOU CAN BECOME ALL FLAME.’”

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

yet more girard

To recognize Christ as God is to recognize him as the only being capable of rising above the violence that had, up to that point, absolutely transcended mankind. Violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. This is the only hypothesis that enables us to account for the revelation in the Gospel of what violence does to us and the accompanying power of that revelation to deconstruct the whole range of cultural texts, without exception. We do not have to adopt the hypothesis of Christ's divinity because it has always been accepted by orthodox Christians. Instead, this hypothesis is orthodox because in the first years of Christianity there existed a rigorous (though not yet explicit) intuition of the logic determining the gospel text.

more girard

Violence is unable to bear the presence of a being that owes it nothing -- that pays it no homage and threatens its kingship in the only way possible. What violence does not and cannot comprehend is that, in getting rid of Jesus by the usual means, it falls into a trap[ that could only be laid by innocence of such a kind because it is not really a trap: there is nothing hidden. Violence reveals its own game in such a way that its workings are compromised at their very source; the more it tries to conceal its ridiculous secret from now on, by forcing itself into action, the more it will succeed in revealing itself.

We can see why the Passion is found between the preaching of the Kingdom and the Apocalypse. It is an event that is ignored by historians, who have much more serious topics, with their Tiberius and their Caligula; it is a phenomenon that has no importance in the eyes of the world -- incapable, at least in principle, of setting up or reinstating a cultural order but very effective, in spite of those who know better, in carrying out subversion. In the long run, it is quite capable of undermining and overturning the whole cultural order and supplying the secret motive force of all subsequent history.

(again from Things Hidden...)

girard on matthew 23.27

Deep within the individual, as within the religious and cultural
systems that fashion the individual, something is hidden, and this is
not merely the individual 'sin' of modern religiosity or the
'complexes' of psychoanalysis. It is invariably a corpse that as it
rots spreads it's 'uncleanness' everywhere.

yet more girard

There can be no question of producing more pious vows and hypocritical formulae. Rather, we will more and more often find ourselves faced with an implacable necessity. The definitive renuniation of violence, without any second thoughts, will become for us the condition sine qua non for the survival of humanity itself and for each one of us.

another from girard....

I am fully in favor of the major liquidation of philosophy and the sciences of man that is currently taking place. The grave-digger's work is necessary, for what is being buried is truly dead -- even if there is too much ceremony. There is no need to exaggerate the task and make the undertaker the prototype of all future cultural life. We ought to let the dead bury the dead, and move on to other things.

The danger today, in fact, is that as the public becomes weary of these interminable funerary rites for meaning and of the funerary metaphysics it has swallowed for so long now, it will lose sight of the real accomplishments of modern thought, all of which are critical and negative. I subscribe to many facets of this criticism and find it indispensable. I simply refuse to admit that there is nothing more to be done from now on than to mull over past failures.

(From Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, as below)

rené girard on violence and the contemporary situation

...the process that leads to the discovery of the victimage mechanism cannot possibly be a smooth, peaceful process. At this point we already know enough about the paradoxical and violent cultural remedies for violence to understand that any increase in our knowledge of the victimage mechanism, anything that tends to disengage or reveal violence, represents considerable progress, at least potentially, in intellectual and ethical respects, but that also, in the short term, it will mean a terrible recrudescence of that same violence, often in odious and atrocious forms, since sacrificial mechanisms become progressively less efficient and less capable of renewal. One can imagine that human beings, confronted with this situation, will be tempted to restore the lost effectiveness of the traditional remedy by forever increasing the dosage, immolating more and more victims in holocausts that are meant to be sacrificial but that are progressively less so. The always arbitrary but culturally real difference between legitimate and illegitimate violence will weaken. Its power of illusion diminishes, and henceforth there are only enemy brothers to confront one another in its name, which all will claim to embody but which in reality no longer exists; cultural difference will be distinguished less and less from the mimetic crisis to which it returns. Any sense of legality will be lost.