Zechariah 9:9-10

Resources

1. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pages 59, 74.

Reflections and Questions

1. I'm not sure why this Palm Sunday classic is paired with this week's gospel. My best guess would be relating to the theme of rejoicing with the depiction of Jesus being about celebration more than mourning. But Jesus' brand of joy is not easily understood, either. During his life, he was criticized for celebrating with the wrong people. In his death, he was made to be one of those wrong people. It is only in light of the resurrection that we can see that his brand of loving service among the "losers" of society is the true way of life, the only way of life worth celebrating.

Romans 7:15-25a

Resources

1. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, opening pages. St. Paul ends up focusing his discussion of the relation between the Law and sin on the tenth commandment:

What then should we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet, if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, "You shall not covet." (Romans 7:7)

2. Gil Bailie, "Paul's Letter to the Romans" audio tape series, tape #4.

3. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong; for an excellent reading of Paul on the nature of our slavery to fallen desire, link to this excerpt of "The Pauline Understanding of Desire."

4. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 166-167, 191. Here are several paragraphs:

Starting from the presuppositions mentioned above, we can now attempt an interpretation of those utterances of Paul in which he describes reconciliation on the cross as a judgment. In Romans 8:3 he says, as we have already seen, that "God sent his Son in the form of sinful flesh" and "he condemned sin in the flesh" (en to sarki). By the emphasis on the "flesh of sin" and on judgment "in the flesh," a connection is established with the theme of anger, as this is also fulfilled in the flesh. According to Romans 1:18-32, this is not merely the outward place where the angry action of God takes place, but it is more that active and boundless force which holds people imprisoned in its own dynamic and ruins their life. The boundless desire which springs from sin, with all the consequences from which people suffer, is identical with the anger of God, and it is identical with the law of the flesh which holds people prisoners (Rom. 7:7-25). Through these connections it should become clear that in Romans 8:3 the flesh in which judgment on sin occurred is not thought of as a purely passive substance, on which the action of divine judgment had its effect as the only active factor. As it bears within itself a boundless dynamic of desire, it must have played a part also in the condemnation of sin that took place in it. If, according to Paul, Christ was sent into the boundless and destructive dynamic of the flesh, this should in consequence mean that also the judgment on sin was achieved thereby.

The interpretation which suggests itself so far is supported in addition by a linguistic hint in Romans 8:32. There we find: "He [God] did not spare his own Son, but gave him up [paradidonai] for us all... " (Rom. 4:25). The mission of the Son in the form of the flesh (Rom. 8:3) includes not sparing and surrendering or handing over (Rom. 8:32). Paul uses exactly the same word (paradidonai) for this giving over by the Father as he does to describe the working of the divine anger (Rom. 1:24-32). This linguistic link consequently shows how one would be justified in interpreting the judgment on sin in Romans 8:3 in the light of Romans 1:18-32.

Taking into account the outcome so far, we can now turn to 2 Corinthians 5:21: "[God] has made the one who knew no sin to become sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him." As we interpret this text, the final decision must be made as to how Paul's view of the judgment on sin is to be understood and whether one may and ought to speak of an angry and destructive direct action of God toward the crucified one. Certainly, it is hardly to be supposed that Paul is here directed by completely different concepts than in Romans 1:18-32 and Romans 8:3. But the question must once again be looked at afresh, and the essential point is whether the utterance "he has . . . made to become sin" is to be interpreted as an exclusive activity of God or whether it means that God sent the one pure of sin into that event in which he was made to be sin by sinners. This latter interpretation is suggested by the Old Testament background. But can this be confirmed from the context?

Just as 2 Corinthians 5:21 says that Christ was made into sin, so Galatians 3:13 says that he became for us a curse (katara). Both utterances entirely match up in subject matter. However, in Galatians 3:13, Paul additionally indicates in what way this happened, namely, through the law. All who live according to the law stand under its curse if they do not keep all its prescriptions (Gal. 3:10). It further declares each one accursed who -- like the crucified one -- hangs on a tree (Gal. 3:13). Galatians serves as an important complement to 2 Corinthians 5:21, and the question of how Christ was made into sin and a curse must be seen and decided from this viewpoint in conjunction with the problematic of the law, so we must also briefly go into this subject.

The letter to the Romans presents the relationship between law and sin as a complex interaction. The law is of itself "holy, just and good," and it is supposed to "lead to life" (Rom. 7:10, 12). Nevertheless, its effect in fact is the opposite, and it brings death (Rom. 7:10). This contradiction can be clarified as sin taking possession of the law and perverting its sense. Sin is so powerful that it can make use of what is good: "Did something good become death to me? By no means! But sin was bringing about my death through what is good so that it might be revealed as sin. For it was through the commandment that sin showed itself in its full measure as sin" (Rom. 7:13). If the law, which in itself is good, actually leads to death, then it follows that the law itself is not the real initiator of the event, and still less is it God, from whom it comes. What really takes action is sin, which shows its excess in knowing how to use even the good as its means and as its cover. If now even Christ became a curse through the law, then it was not the law itself and still less God who was the actor responsible. Within the Pauline world of ideas, the utterance of Galatians 3:13 can only mean that Christ became a curse through the power of sin, which made use of the law. With this insight the decision about the interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:21 should be resolved. God was not the direct actor, but he sent his Son into the world ruled by sin, and thus, through the excess of sin making use of the law, he became sin and a curse. But who were the immediate actors in this event?

Paul's understanding of the law was conditioned by his own experience. Since he himself, in his zeal for the law, persecuted Jesus' disciples and at his conversion on the way to Damascus had to acknowledge the error of his ways, he remained throughout the course of his life constantly confronted by the fact that in his zeal for the good law he had done evil. But he could not estimate from his own experience the consequences of this fact, for that experience prevented him from developing a fundamental position toward the law. If nevertheless the apostle came to make statements concerning the law as such, he can only have drawn them where he found his new confidence in faith: in Christ. In the light of his own experience he was able to understand more deeply the fate of the crucified and exalted one. As he himself had persecuted Jesus' disciples, so had his brothers in faith already in the name of the law condemned as a blasphemer and driven out the preacher from Galilee, who at his trial made the claim to be the Messiah and Son of Man (1 Thess. 2:15). But since this claim, as his own experience on the road to Damascus confirmed, was authenticated by God, the consequence must have pressed itself on Paul that the law had totally failed not only in his life but also at the most decisive moment, namely, in the encounter with the Son of God. It had not led people to a full knowledge of the will of God, i.e., of the Son, but on the contrary it contributed to his rejection and condemnation.

The power of sin is so cunning that it can get completely within its grasp the good and holy law and can so distort it that it works against God and his envoy. If Jesus in the name of the divine law was condemned as a "blasphemer" and thus was made into a curse, even into Satan (John 10:33; 19:7), it was consequently not God, the originator of the law, who cursed his Son. The power of evil rather turned back the command which came from God against the Son. Working from this insight, we are finally led to the interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:21, that God did not himself destroy Christ in judgment. Certainly, he sent him into the world of sin, but entirely with the aim of saving humankind. However, the power of sin was so great that it was able by means of its own mechanism and dynamic to draw him into its world and thus to make him into sin. (pp. 166-168)

6. N. T. Wright, The New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 10, on Romans.

Reflections and Questions

1. For a more adequate Girardian understanding of this passage I would begin, as I have above, with Paul's selected focus on coveting in 7:7. In the opening chapter of I See Satan, I think we can see where the internal struggle comes from to which Paul is giving expression in these verses. We cannot do the things we most want to do, and end up doing many things we don't, because we act under the illusion that our desires are our own. We think we should be in control of our desires and thus be able to act on them straightforwardly. The fact that we can't derives from the reality that our desires are not, in fact, our own. And the kind of spiral into scandal that Girard elucidates from the Gospel describes the exacerbation of this internal struggle, i.e., the more I get frustrated at not being able to straightforwardly act on my desires because they are not mine in the first place. Scandal leads not only to external conflict with our neighbors but also internal conflict with ourselves, because we live by illusory, inflated notions of ourselves. Jesus seeks to save us from such scandal by leading us into a true desiring in the Spirit, into the non-rivalrous desire of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father. When we find ourselves living in the Spirit of such loving desire, we find ourselves truly becoming children of God. (See what follows in Romans 8!)

2. St. Paul is especially sensitive to the social dimension of our desire not being our own as it comes to us through our culture. For him as a Jew that meant as it came to him through the Torah. Sin takes charge of the gift of Torah and distorts it into a life of being scandalized by not being able to live up to the demands of the Law -- most especially others!

This brings us to the next step in mimetic theory -- the step where Girard leaves us at the end of chapter 1 of I See Satan. Lives caught up in scandal bring us into what he refers to as mimetic crises, an increasing spiral into what Thomas Hobbes anticipated as the war of all against all. But the human mechanism that comes into play to stem the crises is far from Hobbes' rationalistic hypothesis of a monarchical contract. The mechanism that stems the tide of crisis is what Girard calls the victimage mechanism: the war of all against all is mimetically converted into a conflict of all against one by virtue of the mimesis of accusation. The diabolic descension into increasing scandal is averted into the satanic creation of culture around the accusation, the scapegoat. Conventional human culture is formed on the basis of someone being left out, of being expelled, of being murdered. Torah, too, comes under the clutches of this victimage mechanism such that Paul found himself living a life of persecuting others. It is that life in which he is confronted by Christ on the road to Damascus.

3. I think this text, then, can be combined with the Gospel text to elucidate two kinds of burden. More on that below.

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

Exegetical Notes

1. 11:30 -- "For my yoke is easy." The Greek word for "easy" is chrestos (one letter different than Christ!). It appears six additional places in the New Testament and, in the NRSV, is variously translated as: "The old [wine] is good" (Luke 5:39); "for [God] is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked" (Luke 6:35); "Do you not realize that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?" (Rom. 2:4); "Bad company ruins good morals" (1 Cor. 15:33); "be kind to one another" (Eph. 4:32); "tasted that the Lord is good" (1 Pet. 2:3). In short, everywhere else it is translated as either good or kind.

From the Friberg Lexicon:

with a basic meaning being well adapted to fulfill a purpose, i.e. useful, suitable, excellent; (1) of things good, easy, pleasant; of requirements easy (MT .30); comparative, better, more pleasant (LU 5.39); morally upright, suitable, good (1C 15.33); of value superior, better (LU 5.39); (2) of persons kind, obliging, benevolent (EP 4.32); of God gracious, good (1P 2.3); (3) neuter as a substantive to chreston, kindness (RO 2.4).

2. Matthew 11:16-17 -- "But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.'" Exegetes often comment that there was a gender difference referred to here in Jewish culture: The round dance that occurred at weddings, accompanied by flutes, was performed by men, while mourning, often done by professionals, was women's work. Is the picture here children playing to be grownups, with the boys chiding the girls about dancing, and the girls chiding the boys about mourning?

A Girardian also takes note of the phrase "this generation" (Gr: ten genean tauten), since we have in mind a "generative" anthropology, i.e., a theory which hypothesizes as to what actually generates human culture. "This generation" thus has the double sense of what generates the culture of a particular generation, the culture of a given time and place.

3. From last week to this week we skip over what I contend is one of the most important verses in understanding Matthew, 11:12: "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force." The Advent 3A gospel is Matthew 11:2-11 -- stopping one verse short. So this key verse never appears in the lectionary. See Advent 3A for more.

Resources

1. Gil Bailie, "At Cross Purposes" audio tape lecture series, tape #6 (beginning of side 2). Bailie sees the children already playing out their parents' polarizations. Here are my notes / transcription for the portion of the lecture on Matt. 11:16-17:

• The other side of the matter of blaming others is blaming our political opponents, and there's a marvelous little metaphor in the New Testament. One of the ways in which these things perpetuate themselves is to divide up into camps: Croats and Serbs, Catholics and Protestants, liberals and conservatives, Capulets and the Montegues (Shakespeare), the Guelphs vs. Ghibellines in Florence (Dante).
• Example: Original film footage of the first French anthropologist in Papua-New Guinea ca. 1960. There were cultures that existed literally side-by-side, just down the river from each other, for whom their purpose for existence -- that is to say, their entire cultural apparatus, the production of their arts, their crafts, their food gathering -- everything was built around venting their violence on one another. They would meet periodically in the middle and have a ritual warfare, which was not about anything (i.e., land, or the usual objects of war). They would simply come together, vent their violence on each other, and go home. It's a symbiotic tribal situation, where the relationship between the tribes is to use each other to vent what we called last night, resentment. It's a very effective system, that goes way back into human history, and comes right into today, with the bifurcated political system. There's a marvelous, gentle image in the New Testament.
• Jesus says, (Matt. 11:16-17; par. in Luke 7:31-32): "But to what will I compare this generation?" Again, to me, "this generation" means all of us who continue to generate our social identity, our social consensus, using someone else on whom to blame, or vent, our resentment.
• Continuing with Jesus' words: "It is like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.'" This is another way of covering our ears [as those whom stoned Stephen did when he spoke to them].
• The background (one of those statements you might think ridiculous, but which could be better substantiated given more time): all cultural institutions are products of the sacrificial system. Quick example: soccer. An attendee to a seminar at Stanford was dubious about this point. 'All of culture can't be generated out of this,' he said, 'What about games, for instance?' It just so happened that the Stanford Museum had, at that moment, an exhibit on Aztec culture, and part of the exhibit was on the Aztec version of soccer -- which was played with what? The heads of human sacrificial victims! I could tell him to walk down that way, turn to left, and see for himself.
• Two institutions are referred to in these words by Jesus: the round dance done at weddings and ritual wailing at funerals. The round dance was done by the men, and the ritual wailing by the women. These are children practicing their roles in the adult world, and they're mocking each other for not joining in on each others' roles. It's a wonderful little parable of how the two, symbiotic bifurcated cultural arrangement works. We have our group, and we say, 'They're not us. They should catch on. Aren't they dumb.' Meanwhile, we're all taking part in it. And Jesus is exasperated, wondering how he can possibly get through to us, under these circumstances.
• Trapped on the tarmac at Denver in a snowstorm [during the time of the NATO intervention at Kosova], he was reading everything he could get his hands on, and stumbled onto a cartoon in the New Yorker. It's a man sitting in his easy chair, reading a newspaper, and commenting to his wife: "Now that everyone's joining NATO, we don't have to take any more crap from the Martians."

2. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 30, 36, 39, 215. On p. 36, for example:

A particularly characteristic feature of God's new action, as Jesus preached it, was seen in his own behavior. He turned toward sinners, tax-collectors, and prostitutes, and his conduct was so conspicuous that he drew the reproach: "Behold, a glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!" (Matt. 11:19).

3. René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, p. 147:

It is mimetic contagion that completely determines the contents of mythology. The myths are so much in its thrall that they cannot suspect their own subjection. No text can make allusion to the principle of illusion that governs it.

To be a victim of illusion is to take it for true, so it means one is unable to express it as such, as illusion. By being the first to point out persecutory illusion, the Bible initiates a revolution that, through Christianity, spreads little by little to all humanity without being really understood by those whose profession and pride are to understand everything. This is one of the reasons, I believe, Jesus speaks the literal truth when he exclaims: "I thank you, Father . . . that you have hidden these things from the wise and clever and revealed them to babes" (Matt. 11:25).

Reflections and Questions

1. There are at least two kinds of burdens, apparently, according to Jesus in Matt. 11:28-30. Notice Jesus doesn't offer to take away all burdens; he offers to replace the heavy burden of this world with the lighter burden of living his life of loving service. The world's burdens are those created by the rivalry of mimetic desire. It is the kind of life-toward-death that living lives entrapped in scandal entails. The excerpt above of chapter 1 in I See Satan gives a good intro to the Girardian analysis of living this kind of burden. In modern terms, one might say it the burden of "keeping up with the Joneses." Mimetic rivalry keeps one's life a perpetual famished craving. No matter what one achieves or accumulates there will never be enough. There will always be someone who does it better or who has more. With so much wealth this famished craving only intensifies in our modern society. The perpetual feeling of never quite making the grade, or of there never being enough, creates a great sense of burden.

The world's way of lightening that load has always relied on some version of the victimage mechanism: transferring as much of the burden onto a scapegoat. In a society focused on material wealth, the ultimate burden is born by the poor, those who are deemed to really miss out because there isn't enough to go around for everyone. 'I may not have quite as much as the guy next door right now, but at least I'm not poor.' Thus, mimetic theory doesn't trivialize the suffering of real victims as it helps us to see the burden of the perpetrators, too. The burdens created by mimetic rivalry never go away completely, even when much of it is shifted to the victims.

Jesus' lighter burden is paradoxically being willing to take on the load of victims. Again, the Cross shows us that this is not a trivializing of suffering. But the Resurrections shows us that this is the only ultimate way to true life, Eternal Life, i.e., by a life of sharing the suffering of others. Eschatologically, everything does get turned upside-down. The poor in spirit, the meek, the mourning, the peacemakers, the persecuted are actually the blessed ones. They are the ones to inherit eternal life because their burden ultimately is shared by the one who brings God's power of eternal life. The burdens created by mimetic rivalry, on the other hand, are burdens ultimately carried alone, and so they can never participate in this power of life.

2. Link to a sermon outline, entitled "Relieving the Yoke of Modern Consumerism," combining Bailie's insight into this passage, a Girardian take on the covetousness of Rom. 7, and some July 4 holiday reflections on our nation.

3. I've also appreciated Paul Tillich's approach to this passage as represented in his sermon on it, "The Yoke of Religion" (link to an online version). Link to a sermon that gives a Girardian version of how religion can be a yoke, entitled "All Sinners yet All Saints."

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