2023.04.06 | Saved from Sacrifice
Saved from Sacrifice
Acts 8:26-35
Preached by
Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
06 April 2023
Good evening church. I especially enjoy the Maundy Thursday worship service. The word “Maundy” is a derivative of Latin meaning “commandment,” in commemoration of Jesus’ commandment to “love one another even as I have loved you.” This service also commemorates the Last Supper. Jewish Passover began last night. Though our meal tonight has roots in the ancient Passover tradition, it is not a Passover meal. In tonight’s message we will journey from this table back to the beginnings of the Passover and before, examining the origins of its practice, and also a particular significance of Jesus’ death, which I hope challenges some of our notions of sacrifice and theologies of the cross.
Many of the interpretations that I will be sharing with you tonight are taken from two books. The first, Professor of Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School, Jon Levenson’s book The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. The second book is from Professor of Christian Theology at Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School, Mark Heim, entitled “Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross,” from which this sermon’s title derives.
Pastor Arlene has exhorted us to hear the whole story in order to really understand the Gospel, so following her lead, tonight we will reach far back into our religious psyches to excavate both myth and ritual in order to better approach the cross. We’ll start with the Canaanites, but before we do, you may be asking yourself or have asked yourself in the past, “What is violence doing in the Bible, a sacred book, anyway?” Heim would state that it is there to show us the nature of mimetic or reciprocal conflict that threatens to destroy human community. Sacrifice then is one solution to this perpetual problem. We’ll get to an alternative later on. Before we do, let’s try to understand the function of sacrifice and trace it biblically.
Sacrifice & the Scapegoat
Have you ever said something to the effect of “I had to give my first born to cancel my gym membership.” The concept of giving of the first-born child is to this day etched within our psyche. And ritual human sacrifice is still actually practiced in 2023. Heim, following the French philosopher and Stanford Professor René Girard, states that the contagious escalation of violence is the archetypal social disease. The ritual cure uses violence to drive out violence, or scapegoating. “Scapegoating is the collective uniting in hatred of one person (or people group) and their sacrifice that discharges the pending acts of retribution between members of the group or groups.” So, ritual sacrifice serves a very social purpose, it throws a circuit breaker if you will, and suspends the contagion of reciprocal violence.
The term scapegoat actually comes from a real goat. In ancient Israel, on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement, a goat, Azazel, was loaded up with the community’s sin and then driven out of Jerusalem. People cursed it, spit upon it, and struck it. Rabbinic lore states that when the goat was driven off a cliff and died, a scarlet thread on the door of the temple would turn white, indicating the removal of sins (cf. Isa. 1:18).
Joseph Campbell observed that the death and resurrection of a savior figure is a common motif in the myths of agricultural societies. Oftentimes, after the killing of a god, food is received from the dead savior. “Campbell believed that first there was the myth, using the metaphor of dying and rising to describe nature, and then people started to actually act out the metaphor in ritual sacrifice. However, Girard contended that first there was the actual violent scapegoating, and then came the mythologizing of this practice, using themes like the agricultural cycle, to make human violence as natural and unexceptionable as the seasons.” Therefore, sacrifice is a real solution to a real problem, revenge, through collective violence it offers a form of social reconciliation. If sacrifice had no social import, it would have no importance for us today, but unfortunately it does work and continues to work. And this is concerning. Do the means justify the ends, and is there another path toward reconciliation? This is a concern I think Jesus approaches and offers us such another path. This is especially important as his own death takes on a dimension of scapegoating, the execution of a victim to reconcile a community in crisis.
Still today, we have an impulse to scapegoat. And some entire people groups continue to be scapegoated by the crowds. Nero scapegoated the Christians. Jews have been scapegoated for centuries. Recall the Salem Witch Trials. What happened after the Great Depression? More than a million Mexican Americans were forced from their homes to Mexico. What happened after Pearl Harbor? Japanese Internment camps. Even today, singling out a specific group in the outlawing of drag shows for political expediency stinks of scapegoating.
Pre-Israel
My professor of archaeology, the late Larry Stager of Harvard University, excavated an area of Carthage in modern-day Tunisia in Northern Africa, containing as many as 20,000 urns. Many of the urns contain young children ages four and younger. Many urns also contained the charred bones of animals. Given the consistency in ages, Stager interpreted that animals were considered a substitute sacrifice for some children. In the 7th century BCE, one out of every three urns contained animal remains, by the fourth century, only one out of ten. Therefore, child sacrifice flourished at the height of urbanity in Carthage, just a few centuries before Jesus, much to our surprise, it did not decrease with the passage of time. This seems to substantiate Girard’s claim that sacrifice has endured because it had real social effects.
Before Carthage, the Old Phonecian or Canaanite God, El, who is referred to by name throughout the Hebrew Bible, often interchangeably with the LORD, actually sacrificed his only begotten son Iedoud. There also exists Ugaritic material, from the ancient city of Ugarit in modern-day Syria that point to El’s rejoicing at the resurrection of his dead beloved son. This may sound familiar to us.
Levenson astutely connects the name “Iedoud” with the very rare Hebrew word “Yadîd,” meaning “beloved.” This term is also applied to Isaac, who is almost sacrificed save but for the sheep. A Jewish audience hearing “You are my beloved son; with you I am well pleased,” (Mk 1:11) from the Gospels would have immediately recalled Isaac, and perhaps even heard the echoes of the Canaanite God El and his beloved son. So, there are striking similarities to Jesus and Isaac.
Aqedah
The story of the almost-sacrifice of Isaac is found in Genesis 22 and is known as the Aqedah in Jewish tradition, or the binding of Isaac. Many take this story to be an etiological narrative of the replacement of the firstborn with a sheep or the ending of child sacrifice; however, Levenson takes a more nuanced approach.
To be sure child sacrifice happened in Phoenicia, Canaan, Israel, and neighboring areas, both before the time of this narrative and after. The Prophet Ezekiel channels divine disgust, in the 6th century BCE, “Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live. I defiled them through their very gifts, in their offering up all their firstborn, in order that I might horrify them, so that they might know that I am the Lord.” (Ezek 20:25-26; cf. Jer 32:35). What Ezekiel might have been referring to is the statute found in Exodus 22:29, “The firstborn of your sons you shall give to me.”
So, perhaps Abraham was not operating outside of the norm when he responded in the affirmative to God’s request that he sacrifice his only begotten beloved son. The ask was neither unique nor peculiar. Of note, Isaac participates of his own volition, offering himself as the victim, and Abraham is commended by the Angel for intending to go through with the sacrifice.
Levenson observes that the Aqedah or Gen 22 then is not an etiology of a shift from child sacrifice to animal sacrifice, but one that explains the God-approved ritual substitution of the animal for the beloved son. As the Prophets proclaim to us, child sacrifice continued alongside other forms of burnt offerings. Similarly, the latin inscription Agnum pro vikario, “lamb as a substitute” has been unearthed at many nearby ritual sites.
Levenson finds an unmistakable affinity with the Aqedah and the story of the Passover in which the blood of a lamb saves the Israelite first-born. (Ex 12:1-28). What happened to Isaac, happened to all Israelites. Isaac became the lamb of God and Passover became the commemoration of Abraham’s refusal to spare his beloved son when God demanded he be sacrificed. The Intertestamental book of Jubilees, which takes very seriously the lunar calendar, dates, times, and origins of festivals, actually ties the Aqedah to the initiation of a seven day joyous feast of the LORD, presumably Passover.
David
Recall Pastor Arlene’s sermon last month “Who Sinned?” Was it the blind man or his parents? While we ultimately concluded neither, most in that day and culture would have gone with his parents. Micah acknowledges this when he exclaims, “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for my sins?” (Micah 6:7). And this is exactly what the prophet Nathan tells King David centuries prior, when David confesses killing Uriah in order to kidnap and rape his wife Bathsheeba. Nathan tells him, “Now the Lord has put away your sin; you shall not die. Nevertheless, because by this deed you have utterly scorned the LORD, the child born to you shall die.” (2 Sam 12:13-14). And so it came to pass. Following many other ancient myths, the beloved son is sacrificed to expiate the sin of the Father-King. David’s next son’s name, Solomon or Shelomoh, actually means “his replacement.” Another much later descendent of David will bear the burden of victim for the deliverance of many.
Job
Up to this point our victims have either gone along with their chosen fate or have been too young to contest it. Heim describes the book of Job as an interview with a scapegoat. One who doesn’t go quietly of his own volition. Job raises his complaint directly with God. Unlike, the psalms of persecution, wherein the scapegoated victim cries out to God pleading for either vengeance against or deliverance from the persecutors, Job, however, is cognizant of the fact that God is actually their assumed ally or even instigator. Job realizes the horrifying truth that he must appeal for help against God. He lodges a complaint in a cosmic courtroom, whose exhibits take us back to the very days of creation itself. Patterned off of an old Akkadian Babylonian story of Mesopotamian wisdom and theodicy, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer, the book of Job asks how God allows bad things to happen to good people.
Heim understands the book of Job as a failed sacrificial event where the victim inexplicably has the stage and is interrogating his persecutors, including the divine. It has as its focus the victim, not the sacrifice. Had Job listened to his so-called friends and his wife and cursed God and died, the story would have followed conventions, but in the end, God eventually sides with Job, the victim, even though Job retracts his complaint after beholding the wonders of the creative God. Sacrifice is successful when no one takes the side of the suffering one. Here we begin to see solidarity with the scapegoated victim.
The Suffering Servant
Similar to Job, in Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs, of which Philip and the Eunuch were reading, the victim was innocent and his prosecutor’s wrong, and his victimization served a social reconciliatory function. It should also not be lost on us that the Eunuch, a person of a minority sexual identity, and perhaps even gender expression, would have been at high risk for scapegoating themselves. Heim reminds us that the victim has been chosen and will suffer because of our problem and our collective disease of rivalry and conflict. Reconciled and freed by this violence, even though the victim is wrongly charged, we are the actual guilty ones. Our scripture reading reflects this perversion of justice:
“Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases, yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; Like a sheep that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice he was taken away. Who could have imagined his future?” (Isa. 53:4-8)
Now a person has become Azazel, the scapegoat for the entire community. But Heim observes that God is doing something different than what the persecutors are doing. The victim’s cause will be upheld in a way that will startle the rulers and the nations:
“Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with affliction. When you make his life an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring and shall prolong his days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. Out of his anguish he shall see; he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out himself to death and was numbered with the transgressors, yet he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.” (Isa. 53:10-12)
This is the good news that Philip was to share with the Eunuch. That God was doing something differently than what the persecutors intended. This was the good news of the cross. “Jesus’ death saves the world, yet it ought not happen,” as Heim puts it, “it is God’s plan and an evil act; it is a good bad thing.” Just as Joseph, the other nearly-sacrificed son, told his brothers, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to save many people.” (Gen 50:20).
Jesus
As in the book of Job, with the Passion narratives we see the scapegoating process unfold from the side of the victim. Jesus was of humble origin, an immigrant, innocent, the perfect scapegoat. In the Gospels this is foreshadowed with the divine designation, “You are my beloved son.” (Mk 1:11). The beloved son is the chosen one singled out for both exaltation and humiliation. Little by little, all abandon Jesus. Peter denies him three times.
When he is scapegoated, on the cross, he cries out to God, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” (Lk 23:34). He is aware of their crowd mentality, of our impulse to sacrifice.
Another utterance on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” is from Psalm 22, a psalm of persecution. Generally, there exist two options for the direction of these psalms in the psalter, a cry for vengeance, or hope for deliverance. Psalm 22 does not end in vengeance. Psalm 22 then is imperative for understanding the cross. Revenge is replaced with rejection of the reciprocal sacrificial model. Jesus understood that an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
The writer of Hebrews declares that Jesus is the mediator of a new covenant, based in “the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Heb. 12:24). The original victim, Abel’s blood, called out for vengeance. Rather, Jesus’ blood calls for us to, as the writer of Hebrews states, “to do good and share what you have” (Heb. 13:16). Jesus’ sacrifice then was to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. It completes what started with the beloved son Isaac.
Paul equates Christ with the paschal lamb (1 Cor 5:7). For Paul, who used to be Saul, persecutor of a new religious minority, to accept Jesus is to be converted from scapegoating persecution to identify with those against whom he had practiced it. The good news then is to not multiply martyrs but convert persecutors, to stop scapegoating.
Communion
We come full circle to the practice that we commemorate tonight, the last supper that took place in the upper room. At the Last Supper, Jesus established a new covenant to follow. To share the bread and the wine, “in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19-20). This means that, in light of Jesus’ crucifixion, recollection of Jesus’ death is all that is needed. No other death or sacrifice is necessary, no violence needed to expiate anybody.
Understood in this way then, the bread and wine now substitute sacrifice itself. Each time we partake in communion we are saved from sacrifice. The table is the ultimate interrupter of reciprocal violence. Do THIS in remembrance of me, break bread; not THAT which we’ve always done, break bodies. Jesus said it himself, quoting the Prophet Hosea (6:6), “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Mt 9:13). At the communion table we find reconciliation, of a better sort than any sacrificial violence could offer.
A closer inspection of communion shows that it mirrors sacrifice and subverts it. It gathers the community as a crowd around the altar, but it gathers to remember the victim’s innocence, to make peace non-violently. As Heim observes, the crowd does not gather around a body, but to become Christ’s body in the world. An inclusive table, a wider table, with a radical welcome, that follows Jesus’ ethic of boundary crossing, perhaps also enables us to relate to those whom we might otherwise would be scapegoating. Everytime we partake, we do so in remembrance of justice perverted. And state, never again. In taking the bread and the wine, we place ourselves in solidarity with the victim. “To be reconciled to God then, is to, like Paul, convert from the crowd that gathers around victims, and to be reconciled with one another.” For this is our commandment, to love one another, and share the agape love feast. May it be ever so. Amen.