Opening Comment

"The Parable of Satan Casting Out Satan" of Mark 3:23-27 is a pivotal text for mimetic theory. It is unfortunate that it falls in the Revised Common Lectionary in the netherworld of Ordinary Time such that it only is read in years when Easter comes early. Biblical scholars such as N. T. Wright have recognized the key role of Satan in the Gospels. In Jesus and the Victory of God, Wright dedicates a significant section on "the Satan" at a crucial point in his argument (section entitled "The Real Enemy Identified: not Rome, but the Satan," pp. 451-463). Jesus cannot be seen as the victorious Messiah unless we know who is the enemy defeated. Yet Wright's analysis of "the Satan" is still rather scant in light of its centrality to his argument. Girard's anthropology of grace can greatly enhance our understanding of Satan in the Gospels -- see especially the book in which he makes it central, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning.

Genesis 3:9-15

Resources

1. Genesis 3 is one of the more commented-on passages in Girardian literature. Here are several of the references: Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 137 (excerpt on Gen. 3-4); Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 90-97 (excerpt of the beginning of ch. 4, "Sacred Violence and Original Sin"); Raymund Schwager, Must There Be Scapegoats? p. 68; Cesareo Bandera, The Sacred Game, p. 114ff. Commented on with even greater frequency is the companion story of Cain and Abel in Gen. 4.

2. James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong. I separate this reference out since Gen. 3 could not be overlooked in a book on original sin such as this one. It makes a crucial appearance, for example, in the same place as the Babel/Pentecost pairing of three weeks ago, where Alison is explaining NT interpretation of the foundational narratives in Genesis: "In order to understand the positive sense of the self-giving up to death of Jesus, the apostolic witness makes use, in different places, of four quite distinct stories from Genesis, all of which are interpreted in the light of the Cross and Resurrection." The first of those stories is the desire of Adam as interpreted in Romans 5-7:

The essence of the sin described in this passage is one of mimetic desire. An object (the fruit) became desirable when it became a way of appropriating something proper to someone else (the knowledge of good and evil proper to God). It was only when the object was seen as a way of appropriating what was proper to someone else that it became desirable. Hence the temptation was 'to become like God'. The temptation was not resisted: the object was appropriated, but more important than the object, desire thereafter functioned in the mode of appropriation, and relationality with the other became formed rivalistically. The other (whether human or divine) could only be perceived as a threat or rival. The immediate result of the appropriation was that good and evil became defined not according to God, but according to appropriation, which means that the self was not accepted as given, but had to be appropriated by forging itself over against some other considered as evil. The beginning of the forging of an identity 'over against' is the self-expulsion from the Paradise of receiving the self gratuitously.

For the story to work in Genesis there has to be an initial prohibition: the story could not have worked if God had not made available a way of entering into rivalry with himself by forbidding the eating of the fruit of the particular tree. The story could not have worked unless there were already an element of 'imitate me/ do not imitate me' built into the relationship between God and man ab initio. The possibility (though not the necessity) of double-bind is thus already present, before the originating act, as emanating from God. However, this is entirely dependent on the story being a projection of an originating act that flows from a certain understanding of salvation: the Jewish understanding flowing from the covenant and the giving of the Torah. Yet Paul showed extensively that the problem with a salvation based on the Law was that it locked one inextricably in a double bind. Salvation by Christ has come to replace salvation by the Law. So, in our christological projection we should do without the element of an explicit primal prohibition against eating from the tree. To be fully christological we need understand there to have been no primal prohibition, but instead of the law, a person....

This re-reading of the Genesis story is strictly dependent on only one piece of 'demythologization', and it is a piece of 'demythologization' which the New Testament carries out anyhow in a slightly different context: the substitution of salvation by Christ crucified for salvation by the Law. This leaves us with a person rather than a fruit, and a positive divine creative design bringing into being people who might love each other, rather than a prohibition. God is thus constantly calling us into a positive likeness of himself "be like me, imitate me" without any double bind of the sort: "but do not be like me or imitate me in this one area." (pp. 246-247, 248)

1. Gen. 3, by my reading of it, gives insight into both the Girardian roles of the devil/Satan: (1) the one who tempts us into our constant fall of mimetic desire into rivalrous desire, and (2) the one who makes the fascinating accusative gesture that lures us into scapegoating. Verses 1-7 tell the story of the fall into rivalrous desire. Man and woman are in a non-rivalrous relationship with God, modeling God's love for creation and sharing in its stewardship. But the serpent tempts them into rivalry with God; they model the desire for the forbidden fruit as expressed by the serpent.

Our passage for this day gives insight into the role of Satan that's at issue in the Gospel: pointing the finger of blame that leads to a casting out. The man blames the woman, and the woman blames the serpent. Interestingly, if the serpent is cast in the role of Satan for the first part of the story, the man and woman play the role of Satan in part two, and the lection ends with a curse on the serpent. Is this an example of Satan casting out Satan?

2. Crucial is to see that is that there is no hint in this story of a supernatural being other than God. Even if we do project a personified force of sin (i.e., Satan) into this story, it must be with creatures of this earth. I prefer not to make such a projection. For the problem in the first part of the story is that the woman and man listen to a fellow creature rather than to God. In Girardian terms, an "external" triangular relationship of desire becomes an "internal" triangular relationship of desire. The appropriate 'distance' between the model (God the Creator) and the modelers (the creatures) is leveled out into a modeling relationship between creatures that quickly turns into rivalry.

Human, creaturely responsibility in the second part is even more crucial. It is the woman and the man who point fingers of blame that lead to a casting out. Satan as the personified power of accusation which casts out is only meaningful as rooted in human action and responsibility. The value of the symbol Satan is to express the power of accusation -- the scapegoating mechanism, if you will -- as a power that does transcend the power of any single individual, but an anthropologically rooted power nonetheless. Satan becomes a dangerous symbol if he is simply another supernatural being for human beings to blame, absolving them of responsibility. The latter is clearly an instance of Satan casting out Satan.

3. There is another possible item in need of de-mythologizing (in addition to the one suggested above by James Alison): the end of the story implies God casting out the man and woman from the garden. Does this place God in the role of Satan casting out Satan? The Passion story is more careful to make it clear that it is we human beings who do the casting out.

2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1

Resources

1. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 177-179. Link to an excerpt of "The Church as a Structure of Agape Based on the Imitation of Christ Crucified."

Mark 3:20-35

Resources

1. René Girard, The Scapegoat, ch. 14, "Satan Divided against Himself" is a brilliant analysis of this passage -- an extremely important one to Girard. He continued to comment on this passage widely in his writings on Satan: "Are the Gospels Mythical?" (available online). Also, see The Girard Reader, ch. 13 entitled "Satan," p. 195 (link to excerpts). Girard's recent book (Orbis, 2001) I See Satan Fall Like Lightning furthers his elaboration on Satan as a crucial Christian symbol depicting the false transcendences of human cultures. Link to an excerpt from ch. 3, "Satan," where Girard again addresses this parable of Satan casting out Satan.

2. Paul Nuechterlein; an my explanation of this passage in "My Core Convictions."

3. Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 31, 59, 86, 113, 117. The final citation here comes in an important conclusion to the "Third Act: The Bringer of Salvation Brought to Judgment," a section excerpted here entitled "The Self-Judgment of Sin in the Judgment of Jesus":

The particular character of the third act in the Gospel drama results from the connection between the behavior of the opponents of God's kingdom, the activity and suffering of Jesus, and the actions of the heavenly Father. After Jesus in the second act proclaimed the judgment of God as the self-judgment of people hardening their hearts, we can now see this process of hardening of hearts beginning. If Jesus declared the justice of the Pharisees (and Israel) to be wholly insufficient and warned them above all against judging, on the grounds that the standards which they laid down would become the norm by which they themselves were measured, the Jewish authorities in their behavior toward him insisted stubbornly on their existing form of judgment. The cooperation with the pagans and the ridicule directed against Jesus crucified, in which his good deeds were thrown back at him in scorn, illustrate how the process of hardening of hearts progressed.

However it was decisive that the people who acted in this way were not aware of the process of self-judgment in themselves. There was a great gulf between their evaluation of themselves and their actual activity. They thought that they were only (with right on their side) judging Jesus, and not themselves, and it escaped their notice that their judging of him was in truth a ganging together against him. The third act reveals things in such a way that self-judgment is not direct self-judgment. Those judging intended to judge another and not themselves. But in the light of Jesus' love for his enemies which came from the heavenly Father, their activity is shown up as self-deception, by which they only shifted their own guilt. The self-judgment whose mechanism Jesus opened up and against which he warned people consists not in explicit self-accusation (such a thing, carried out in humility, would be healing), but in the contradiction between word and deed and thereby in the concealment of guilt and the shifting of evil onto others. The judgment on Jesus and the use of ridicule against him are consequently to be read as utterances which indirectly betray a truth about those responsible for these actions. They (and not the accused) are the ones who in fact blaspheme and who want to help others (in words), but cannot help themselves (by deeds). The self-deception is made complete above all in the cooperation, or better the ganging up, on the one, in which the false judgments of individuals mutually confirm one another and thus gain the appearance of factual objectivity. The one who is declared to be guilty, a blasphemer, serves the others as a scapegoat and gives to their kingdom of lies that appearance of peace and stability which every kingdom needs, even Satan's (see Mark 3:22-30 and parallels), in order to be able to continue.

The self-judgment of humankind, in which people shifted their guilt onto Jesus in self-deception, became a judgment on him. But from his viewpoint this was a judgment of a completely different sort. He allowed himself to be drawn into the process of self-judgment of his adversaries, in order, through participation in their lot, to open up for them from inside another way out of their diabolical circle and hence a new path to salvation. He did not pay back the lying judgment and violent attack with the same coin, but he turned around the intensified evil and gave it back as love redoubled. He made of himself a gift to those who judged him and burdened him with their guilt. His atoning deed was not a reimbursement for sins, so that the heavenly Father would forgive, but an act in the place of those who should have welcomed the kingdom of God, but who from the beginning rejected it. Jesus uses precisely this rejection in order to advance under its "cover" into that dark realm where people judge themselves. By allowing sinners to shift their actions onto him, he managed to be drawn into their dark world (fear of death, abandonment by God) in order from within to open up this world once more to the Father.

It is decisive in this interpretation that the handing over by the Father, which Feldmeier stresses in his interpretation of the Gethsemane narration, is seen entirely in connection with the message of the kingdom of God and with the actions of Jesus. From this perspective it cannot be said that the Father handed over the Son because he wanted to judge him and punish him in place of sinners. The judgment did not start from God but from humankind, and the will of the Father was only that the Son should follow sinners to the very end and share their abandonment, in order thus to make possible for them again a conversion from the world of hardened hearts and distance from God. (pp. 116-118)

Jesus spins a parable so shocking that it not only polarizes the political climate, but provokes a rift with family and friends. He compares himself to a thief struggling to break into the house of a 'strong man,' whom he intends to bind and whose captives he intends to liberate. And he claims that in this criminal venture, his accomplice is none other than the Holy Spirit!

5. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred, pp. 81-84.

Reflections and Questions

1. My first reaction to Girard's appropriation of this passage was skepticism. I was too used to reading it in its more ordinary sense, i.e., that Jesus' question about Satan casting out Satan was a rhetorical one with the sense that it could never happen. To interpret his question as implying the scapegoating mechanism seemed far-fetched to me. Yet I've since noticed that Mark gives us a clue: he uses the word "parable" for the first time in his gospel immediately before Jesus' question regarding Satan. In Mark's gospel, "parable" has the sense of "riddle." He seems to be signaling us that what Jesus is about to say may not have the most ordinary sense. And so these verses (3:23-26) become more compelling to me in the Girardian reading of them: all of human culture is based on Satan casting out Satan, and it is a kingdom, a household, a way of forming human community, that cannot stand. Jesus comes to offer us a new way of forming a Holy Communion that isn't based on some version of divisiveness. Link here for a sermon on this theme entitled "The Parable of Satan Casting Out Satan."

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