God Has Showed Me...

When someone asks him if they are few who are saved, Jesus gives a non-reply:

Strive to enter in by the narrow gate. (Luke 13:24)

And also from east and west, from north and south will they come to recline at banquet in the Kingdom of God. (Luke 13:29)

He is worthy that you should do this, for he loves our nation, and it was he who built us our synagogue. (Luke 7:5)

At the end of the apostolic witness, once again with attention fixed on the slaughtered lamb, we read this:

Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof, for thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people and nation. (Rev. 5:9)

After this I beheld, and lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.

Well now, what relation does the presence of the people of this quartet have with the slaughtered lamb, the victim seated at the right hand of the Father? There is a certain way of treating the passage from Judaism to Christianity which suggests that Judaism was a religion of rites and sacred places, requiring circumcision and the observance of a whole series of laws, and that God no longer wanted anything to do with all that, and so Jesus was sent to teach a religion of interiority and grace, teaching that now the Father is to be worshiped in Spirit and in Truth, reducing all that went before to the commandment of love. From that moment onwards there has been no real need for anything that is exterior and visible in religion. And of course, an interior and invisible religion can be lived by people of any race, people, nation or tongue. The universality of the Church would be owed to God having decreed that now He is universally accessible, and has nothing to do with a chosen people. Do you buy this package? If you do buy it, I suggest that what you have bought is the religion sometimes called "liberal Protestantism," ⁽¹⁾ and which is to be found not only among the children of the Reformation, but within the Catholic Church, and even under cassocks and religious habits which seem to suggest that their wearers attribute some importance to the exterior and visible element of religion.

What I am going to propose to you is that this model of understanding the passage from Judaism to Christianity is deeply inadequate, natural though it may seem. And this is because it has not understood the relationship between the multitude out of every nation and race and people and tongue, and the slaughtered lamb. We have seen Jesus' prophecy that at the banquet there will be people from the four winds, and then we looked at what was glimpsed by the Seer of Revelation: that is, the beginning and the end of the process. Now let us look at the midpoint, at the moment when the possibility was opened up that Jesus' prophecy would be fulfilled.

Peter is on the rooftop, praying, when he falls into a trance, and sees heaven opened, and out of heaven something comes down which he finds repulsive: a sheet full of every kind of beast, and not exactly the cuddly ones, since it includes reptiles and all. Three times he is told to kill and eat, and he, as a good Jew, refuses, for the beasts are profane and impure (here we perhaps have a reminder of another triple negation of Peter's). So the voice says to him:

What God has cleansed, do not you call impure. (Acts 10:15)

You know that it is unlawful for a Jew to have dealings with foreigners or enter their houses, but God has shown me not to call any person profane or impure. (Acts 10:28)

His declaration is even more interesting, because he does not say: "God has revealed to me that there's no such thing as that which is impure or profane," but rather not to call any person profane or impure. Maybe this distinction doesn't seem important to you. It does to me, for it suggests that in matters human reality is not something which is just there, independently of what we think it to be: it is not as though we were to say, for example, that in objective point of fact there is nothing profane or impure, but that there are some people who think that there is, and God is saying that they are wrong. No, what Peter says shows a much more subtle understanding than that. Human reality is a human linguistic construct, and we all form part of it by our reception and use of words, by the way in which we speak of others. If we describe someone with a certain terminology, our description is not independent of reality, but forms part of the construction of the reality in question. When we call someone something, we're helping to make that person actually be that thing: "give a dog a bad name..."

So, for example, it used to be said in the United States that black people were more stupid and lazy than white people, and this position was justified with recourse to a whole series of arguments about the supposed differences between the sort of cranium proper to Caucasian and to African-American people. Nobody denies that, when this was said, black people did not in fact present such brilliant school results, and there were not so many black people in responsible and well-remunerated jobs, realities which are only just beginning to be modified. However, and this is the fundamental thing which Peter also saw: the social status of black people is a human linguistic construction. And what is said about them serves as a pretext to justify a whole series of separations and discriminations which may be economically convenient for a whole lot of people, but corresponds to no reality at all about some supposed essential difference between black and white people. The difference is created artificially by language, and believed as much by black as by white, for the former, before the black consciousness movements, tended to introject into themselves the hatred masked by the separatist language, to consider themselves inferior, not beautiful, not intelligent, and so on. The creation in many cultures of a category of impurity for women, taking as its basis the undeniable biological fact of menstruation, and going on from there to posit a supposedly objective foundation for the discrimination produced by the ever-present ambivalence and insecurity of males with relation to women, partakes of exactly the same mechanism.

Well, what Peter is saying when he affirms that God has revealed to him not to call anyone profane or impure is that the heavenly counter-history, the subversion from within of the story of this world, has an indispensable grammatical rule: that no discrimination against any sort of repugnant person can resist the crucible of learning not to call them profane or impure. The story of heaven is the story of how we learn not to call anyone profane or impure, so that a story is created in which there are, in fact, no impure or profane people, where not even disgusting people consider themselves disgusting, but rather where we have learnt to disbelieve, and to help them to disbelieve, in their own repugnancy. I keep to words like "disgusting" because it seems to me more useful for our understanding: what Peter saw in his vision seemed to him to be disgusting, and it was so unnecessarily. Our question as we receive the eschatological imagination must be: who are, for me, the repugnant beasts, or for whom am I a repugnant beast? In this way we'll be able to begin to knock down the same wall as Peter.

How then is this vision of the beast-filled sheet coming down out of the open heaven related to the vision of the Son of man seated at the right hand of God? That is exactly the same question as the one about the link between the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and the coming into existence of the possibility of an universal access to God. In fact, Peter gives us a hint, for he interprets the beasts not in terms of the food which appeared to be their purpose, but as people. He didn't say: God has shown me not to call any food impure. He already knew that, because Jesus had taught it (Mark 7:19). He came to understand that, if no food were impure, much less any person of whatever kind or degree. And more especially, there was a particular impure man who was not. Of course, we're talking about Jesus. The dead and risen Son of man would have been impure in his rôle as an expelled transgressor, and impure as dead. However in fact he was not impure under either of those rubrics, but rather, precisely by having been thrown out, had been constituted mediator of the truth of God.

We can come up to this question from another angle: the angle that was revealed by the innocent victim. Call to mind our original model, which I described in the first chapter, the model of the scapegoat mechanism, the mechanism of the randomly-chosen victim, which forms part of mimetic theory. According to this model the group constructs its peace and its goodness by means of the expulsion of someone, or some group, held to be responsible for all the problems and dissensions in the group. The vital element in this construction of group frontiers is that people genuinely believe in the dangerousness of the excluded one. Everyone had to be in agreement about the exclusion, about the unbearable nature of the pollution brought about by that element. They may differ about many things; there may be a great diversity of opinions about other matters, but there is a fundamental agreement about the wickedness of the excluded one. This fundamental agreement is, itself, a linguistic construction of human reality over against the expelled one, and it is a self-deceived linguistic construction, which is the same as saying that it is a reality based on a lie, and a violent lie.

What I wanted to suggest is that Jesus' resurrection is at the same time the revelation of that lie: the victim is innocent, and is hated without cause. That is to say, the mechanism which founds social order stands exposed, and for this reason it begins to become impossible to believe in the real blameworthiness of the victim. However, and here is the problem, if I can no longer believe in the guilt of the victim, then no more can I believe in the linguistic construction of the reality which has given order to my group. That is, if the victim was innocent after all, then all group boundaries are arbitrary and mendacious, all form part of the violent deceit. And if that is true, and those of "our" group are not essentially different from those of any other group, then there is the threat of the collapse of order; the coming about of that which is most feared: absolute lack of differentiation, which means violence out of all control.

There are two possible reactions in the face of the revelation of the innocence of the victim. The first, which is perhaps the most common, is to change victims. That is: we come to see that such and such a person or group is not really dangerous or polluting. But quickly, with a kind of radar antenna, we detect another dangerous group, or person, and repeat the same construction of "our" goodness, cleanness and purity, by contrast with this other group. When I quoted to you the remarks of the Cardinal Archbishop of Buenos Aires, we were talking about something similar. He made his call for the obligatory segregation of the gay population on the same day that he presided, in the presence of the Chief Rabbi of Argentina, at a large public Mass of reparation for a bomb explosion at a Jewish center. It didn't seem to have occurred to him that this capacity to fraternize with Jews, especially during a Mass, would have been utterly repugnant to many of his predecessors, and the fraternity became possible thanks to the fact that the size of the murderous expulsion which was the holocaust revealed the lie in an unimaginable way. Before the holocaust, few would have been surprised to hear a Cardinal Archbishop demanding that the Jewish population be confined to a ghetto, and it was in fact common practice in many countries for centuries. Now we can fraternize with the Jews and prescribe the same medicine which used to be prescribed for them, the sending to the ghetto of the semi-different, but apply it to some other group. This is the reaction of someone who changes instrument but carries on playing the same old tune.

The second reaction is the one we see in the case of Peter: that of understanding that the resurrection of the crucified victim does not reveal a particular case of injustice, but the whole founding mechanism of social order. That is, it is not the declaration that, from now on, a certain class of people, previously considered impure, will be considered acceptable, but rather that the whole mechanism which creates impure or profane people of any category will now be deliberately dismantled. And this is very radical, much more radical than it might seem at first sight. This is because, if it is true that what the risen victim reveals is the lie at the heart of the social order that is built over against, or by contrast with, some other, then it is the excluded one who defines me as good by contrast with him or her. It is the existence of the prostitute that makes the pharisee feel good about himself. If there were no evil, impure, people, who would give me my sense of goodness, my security? This question is too evident in the world after the cold war: it was the enemy twin who made us feel safe. Now who are the goodies and who the baddies? Apparently the worst favor you can do to someone is to take away the crutch furnished them by their enemy twin.

Now, here we have something fundamental. Peter's phrase:

God has shown me not to call any person profane or impure. (Acts 10:28)

When we describe the collapse of group frontiers we are describing the collapse of the sacred, for the sacred in human cultures is disguised violence. And if we were to carry on with the model of change which I called "liberal Protestant," we would see Christianity as quite simply a force for secularization, which tends to introduce a certain disbelief in the sacredness of human differences established by violence. There are many modern interpretations which see Christianity simply in this light: as the secularizing force par excellence. Of course, if we follow on in that vein, then the Church makes no sense, except as a force which has misunderstood the Christian revelation, and which is effectively acting as a shock-absorber against the impact of secularization, that is, as something which strives to hold back, or brake the process of secularization, but which is on the side of the violent sacred. It would be useless to deny that, in fact, this understanding of the Church has been current, both on the part of those hostile to it, and on that of many of its faithful children. The Protestant critique of the Catholic Church from the Reformation onwards conceived it as the Anti-Christ, the way of keeping alive the forms of the ancient Roman empire, opposed at every step to what was truly of the Gospel: what was truly of the Gospel would destroy the sacred, revealing it for the myth that it is. And of course there's no shortage of representatives of the Church (and, nowadays, of Protestants, and others who share the same principles) who have considered their task exactly as a struggle against the secularization which grows and spreads on all sides, taking seriously the duty of shoring up, until the bitter end, the sacred, sacred differences, conceived as things which are of God.

We will see once again that both this critique in favor of secularization and its opposite, the attempt to shore up or restore the sacred, miss the mark. The critique which I have called, for want of a more convenient label, "liberal protestant" is right to perceive that, on a social level, the tendency of the Christian revelation is to produce a certain secularization, precisely because it produces a disbelief in the guilt of victims. The world seems more sacred, more religious, closer to God, fuller of faith, if, from time to time, we burn witches; because, burning witches means that people believe in the efficacy of their arts, in the much-to-be-feared presence of the devil and of other such invisible realities. However, as the Christian revelation advances, people come no longer to believe in the guilt of witches, but rather come to perceive that what leads to their death are certain social mechanisms to which certain ugly old ladies fall victim. The old ladies may of course be somewhat perturbed, and themselves introject the belief, thinking themselves really to be witches. The question is whether what Jesus came to inaugurate corresponds exactly with its sociologically visible consequences, that is, whether what Jesus wanted was, simply, to do away with the sacred.

On the other hand, the certain Catholicism which I have described, along with its traveling companions, are right to believe that Jesus didn't come merely to abolish the sacred, but that his mission was itself sacred, and that he did not come merely to unleash the forces of human violence which had previously remained disguised, functioning modestly in such a way that for many people, most of the time, there was a certain social harmony, thanks precisely to their mechanisms of expulsion and of order. In fact Jesus did come to bring about something sacred, proceeding from God, and was not a simple secularizer. The question is whether this "certain Catholicism" does not tend to link too closely that which is sacred in the order of this world, whose secret is the murderous lie, with the sacred which Jesus sought to bring about.

You will have realized, of course, that, once again, we're dealing with the two tendencies opposed to the principle of analogy: either the heavenly story has nothing to do with the story of this world, and because of that the Gospel essentially has the function of razing this latter story to the ground; or, on the other hand, there is too close an identification between the heavenly and the earthly stories, with the result that we remain trapped in our violence. Now, I would like to suggest that Jesus did indeed come to create something sacred, that this sacred something is the subversion from within of the traditional sacred, and is a positive and creative construction of the sacred. However it is a non-violent sacred.

So as to see this, let us return to Peter and his vision: the revelation not to call any person profane or impure works at the same time as an agent of secularization, pulling down the frontiers not only of Judaism but of all cultures, for every group maintains its frontiers in similar ways. However this instruction not to call also works as a rule of grammar for the building of a new sacred order, the order which is built without victims, in flexible imitation of the self-giving of the heavenly victim. That is to say, the task of not calling anyone profane or impure obliges us to the subversion from within of every human culture and society, risking the wrath of the threatened frontiers so as to un-cover, dis-cover, the innocence of the victim. That is to say: the kingdom comes not as a bulldozing universal force of secularization, but as the task of building, on every violent frontier, a little tale of the overcoming of the particularity of the group, by recovering its victims. In this way there is, in fact, being produced a new sort of sacred, the non-violent sacred, the true sacred which was first put before our eyes by the impure corpse of a dead "transgressor," and which is the definitive un-throning and relocation of all the violent sacred. It is for this reason that in the vision of the new Jerusalem which we saw in the last chapter there is no temple: the order of sacred violence has passed away. In place of the temple there is the slaughtered lamb: not less, but much more, sacred than the temple, for through it God's light flows unhindered.

What I'm trying to say with all this is that the vision of the open heaven, and of the slaughtered lamb includes, as an intrinsic part of the vision, people of every race, tribe, nation, and tongue, who have washed white their garments in the blood of the lamb. That is, the universality, what we call the catholicity, of what Jesus came to bring about, is an indispensable part of the eschatological imagination, and it is so not as a decree of universality, but because the task of the construction of the Kingdom, in flexible imitation of Jesus, bears with it the absolute need to build a multitude of particular stories of the overcoming of violent particularity: the adorers of the lamb taken from out of every nation had not merely received their garments, but in every case they had washed them in the blood of the lamb. Those who have their eyes fixed on the open heaven are empowered not merely to stand by and watch the slow secularization of human culture; that is for the birds who take advantage of the mustard bush that they would themselves have eaten if they had found it as seed. Those who have their eyes fixed are writing with their lives the story of the coming into being of an unimagined catholicity, summoned out of all local particularities, around the risen cadaver of the self-giving victim. And this is the great secret of catholicity: while every local culture tends to build its frontiers by means of victims, it is only if we begin from the forgiving victim that we can build a culture which has no frontiers, because we no longer have to build any order, security, or identity over against some excluded person, but the excluded one himself gives the identity by allowing us to share in the gratuity of his self-giving.

This can also be understood exactly as part of our vision of the slow pruning of violence from God. As it comes to be seen that God is without violence, then God has nothing to do with the shoring up of sacred frontiers of exclusion, which are part of the same violent mechanism that took Jesus to his death. It was their grasping this which obliged the first Christians to the huge and extraordinary change of cultural mentality which led them to understand that God had indeed chosen the people of Israel, but not so that they should forge their identity over against other cultures, but so that God might be revealed as God is, as victim, through them. It was the particular story of Israel which made it humanly possible to come to an understanding that God is among us as someone whom we lynch, the slow working out of that particular story of the subversion from within of the surrounding myths and stories. As it came to be evident that even Israel lynches God, then it became clear that God has nothing to do even with the sacred frontiers of Israel, and God called some Jews to take this new perception of God, which could only have come into being thanks to centuries of Jewish history, outside the frontiers of Israel, opening up the possibility of an universal access to God through the self-giving victim.

If all of this seems to have taken us very far from the texts of the apostolic witness, then I would ask you to consider one of the shake-ups to the imagination which Jesus left us in one of his parables. There is a story told by Jesus in which all the elements which I have sketched out here are present: the pure, the impure, a disgusting foreigner, a subversion from within of the understanding of goodness, the re-location of the sacred, the collapse of group frontiers, and a victim. And, if that were not enough, the parable is to be found in Luke. I'm thinking, of course, of the parable of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). Consider that story in the light of what you've just read: allow its own elements to subvert your imagination. Wheresoever that story is told, it empowers our eschatological imagination for the arduous construction of catholicity. The inner dynamic between this parable, Peter's declaration, and what the Seer of the Apocalypse saw, is seamless.

Note

1. I was perplexed as to whether or not to use this label. However, having failed to find a better one, I have dared to use it only because of the freedom with which many Christians from the Reformed traditions apply this term to themselves and to their own theological history.