A Girardian Perspective on Kingship

Brief Explanation

According to Mimetic Theory, the sacrificial victim gets both a negative and positive valence. He or she is blamed for the turmoil and unrest but then also gets credit for the peace that ensues, often even before the sacrifice is made since the sacrificial institution anticipates the outcome. It seems strange to us, but it truly helps to interpret the anthropological data.

One can see this same bi-valence, for instance, in the polytheistic pantheons of gods. Some are trouble-makers who sow chaos; some are bringers and keepers of societal order; and some are both.

Girard theorizes that the role of priest/king arose in ancient cultures out of the positive valence attached to the sacrificial victims. A prospective sacrificial victim could use the prestige to garnish an office of continuing to supply the sacrificial institution with victims. The priest/king role slowly evolves, then, as the presiders over the institutions of sacrifice themselves. One has to remember that these things developed over millennia, beginning in very primitive ritual settings. But, again, the thesis truly helps to synthesize the wide ranging data, from the practice of indigenous African tribes to the fall of the monarchy to democracy; see the Gil Bailie examples below.

Resources

1. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, pp. 104ff., and Things Hidden, pp. 51ff.  On page 107 of Violence and the Sacred, for example, Girard writes, “The king reigns only by virtue of his future death; he is no more and no less than a victim awaiting sacrifice, a condemned man about to be executed.”

2. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, pp. 123ff. Link here to his section "The Victim with an Extended Sentence," including some wonderful examples from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power. An incredible piece from the latter on African Sacral Kingship is:

Sometimes the length of [the new king's] reign is fixed from the start: the kings of Jukun . . . originally ruled for seven years. Among the Bambara the newly elected king traditionally determined the length of his own reign. “A strip of cotton was put round his neck and two men pulled the ends in opposite directions whilst he himself took out of a calabash as many pebbles as he could grasp in his hand. These indicated the number of years he would reign, on the expiration of which he would be strangled.”

The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering began .... The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood. The queen was guillotined, and most of Robespierre’s antagonists were guillotined; atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined; Danton was guillotined because he thought there was too much guillotine; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood, and needed more and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more opium.

The sacrificed subject is the object of both condemnation and honor.

This contradictory situation makes sense in Girard’s view. The sacrificial mechanism produces this polarity, since the victim is viewed as powerful and holy, because capable of producing such benevolent results, but also eminently deserving of death for having transgressed the most profound commandments. One will search in vain for a consistent list of features inherent to the entities classified in the category of “the sacred,” even though the category itself exists in all cultures. Girard claims to see the explanation for both the differences and the commonality. Persons are not chosen to be killed because they are sacred, because they belong to some special if elusive class. They are “sacred” because they are chosen to be killed. It is designation for sacrifice, by whatever formula, that constitutes something as sacred. Designated victims are holy because their death has a supernatural, reconciling power.

The great anthropologists catalogued innumerable variations on this process. In some cases it is a king or a priest who ritually transgresses the most awful taboos as a preliminary to being sacrificed (literally or figuratively) to renew the people. In other cases it is a prisoner of war, an outcast, or a common criminal who is elevated to a place of honor and rendered all manner of service prior to sacrifice. This model is well known from the Aztec example. What prisoners of war from outside a society and kings who rule in it have in common is that they can easily be isolated, the one by their strangeness and the other by their eminence (kings belong to a class that by definition has only one member). Ideal sacrificial victims must be without ties or supporters that would stand in the way of their execution, but their identification with the community must be sufficient so as to embody the evil, the polluting crime to be purged with their destruction. The cause of the sacrificial crisis is to be found somewhere within the community itself, but in someone whose supposed offense removes any possible ties or sympathy. The contrary treatments of the criminal and the king thus point in the same ultimate direction, meeting the requirements of the sacred. The king, who is a consummate insider, must be dramatically separated and condemned, while the prisoner of war, who already bears the onus of a criminal or enemy, must be adopted in such a manner as to have a veneer of identity with his captors.

The disorienting inconsistency in the condemnation and honor extended to the victim is understandable in light of those two essential if paradoxical qualities of the sacred: the transgressions that rightly merit sacrifice and the honor due one whose death saves society. Girard suggests that only such an insight can make sense of data like an African investiture hymn for a king that contains the following formula.

You are a turd,
You are a heap of refuse,
You have come to kill us,
You have come to save us. (pp. 48-49)

5. James G. Williams, "King as Servant, Sacrifice as Service: Gospel Transformations," in Violence Renounced, pp. 178-199; see also his chapter on kingship and prophecy in The Bible, Violence & the Sacred.

6. Sermon on Jesus' transformation of kingship entitled "A King Who Makes His Home with the Homeless."

Daniel 7:13-14

Resources

1. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, p. 322. In general, Wright's work on the Book of Daniel is the key to this first volume in his monumental project of "Christian Origins and the Question of God." "First-Century Jewish Monotheism," pp. 248-259 in this first volume, and all of chapter ten, "The Hope of Israel," are the most essential reading from this book for setting up what is to come in the subsequent volumes.

In "First-Century Jewish Monotheism," for example, Wright addresses the charge that Jewish apocalyptic falls into dualisms that betray monotheism. His sorting through the various senses of “duality” (excerpt) goes a long way to set the record straight. Does it help, for example, when confronted in this text with the "duality" between those who are raised to everlasting life, as opposed to those raised to shame and everlasting contempt?

Chapter Ten, "The Hope of Israel," focuses on a wholistic reading of Daniel, in order to set the record straight on Jewish apocalyptic. As mentioned in the introduction above, one of his central points addresses what has traditionally been interpreted (by Schweitzer, for example) as "end of the world" thinking. In my opinion, Wright couldn't be more clear and convincing in leading to the conclusion:

There is, I suggest, no good evidence to suggest anything so extraordinary as the view which Schweitzer and his followers espoused. As good creational monotheists, mainline Jews were not hoping to escape from the present universe into some Platonic realm of eternal bliss enjoyed by disembodied souls after the end of the space-time universe. If they died in the fight for the restoration of Israel, they hoped not to ‘go to heaven’, or at least not permanently, but to be raised to new bodies when the kingdom came, since they would of course need new bodies to enjoy the very much this-worldly shalom, peace and prosperity that was in store. (p. 286)

Reflections and Questions

1. How does this passage square with the king who came not lord it over others like the Gentile kings, and to be served, but to serve?

John 18:33-37

Exegetical Notes

1. There is a word group for truth in Greek that consists of the noun itself, aletheia; two different adjectives ("true"), alethes and alethinos; and an adverb ("truly"), alethes. There are 55 occurrences of this word group in the Gospel of John!

2. The heaviest concentration in John of the word group for truth occurs in chapter 8, where we encounter this very important Girardian passage (John 8:44-45):

You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I tell the truth, you do not believe me.

3. The closest parallels in the synoptics to John 8:44 is a Q passage in which Jesus basically accuses the Jewish leaders of continuing in along line of murders from the beginning, going all the way to Abel. Those passages are Matthew 23:34-35 and Luke 11:49-51. The Lukan version is:

Therefore also the Wisdom of God said, 'I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute,' so that this generation may be charged with the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation.

4. The Greek word lethe means forgetful. With the "a" as a prefix, the etymology of aletheia, or truth, would seem to be literally to not be forgetful, or to stop forgetting. Gil Bailie often points this out in his studies of John. This has a loaded meaning for John 8. To come out from under the influence of the father of lies would be to stop forgetting the truth. It also has a powerful meaning to many psychologies of trauma in which a person's psyche buries the memories for a time; for an abused person, for example, whose memories often stay buried for years until later years when they stop forgetting, when the truth comes out.

5. John 18:37: "For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth." This is reminiscent of John 9:39: "I came into this world for judgment so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind." Jesus "came into the world" for judgment and for testifying to the truth. These two are related through the Girardian interpretation that poses the truth of who we are as human beings as fundamentally rooted in the mimetic power of the accusatory gesture which underlies all our institutions of judgment. Through the judgment of Jesus Christ and his execution on the cross, God judges our judging. God exposes our systems of judgment as fundamentally sinful -- as the core of original sin. Helpful to this point is Gil Bailie's exegesis of John 19:13 (see lecture notes below). John's text is ambiguous such that it could be read as Pilate sitting Jesus down on the judge's bench -- which thus switches their roles. It is Pilate being judged as he judges Jesus.

Resources

1. Gil Bailie, his audio taped lectures on " The Gospel of John," tape 11. Link here to my notes / transcription.

2. In my sermon 1997 Proper 28B sermon "The End of the World?"), I spoke of the end of the law. I found it interesting that the place in which James Alison cites John 18:31 (just before this Sunday's gospel text), in The Joy of Being Wrong, is in connection with his discussion of the end of the law. I thought I'd share about a page with you. To set it up, Alison is continuing his extrapolation of the insights that were coming upon the apostles prompted by the resurrection and has arrived at the ways in which the apostolic experience of sin has been reshaped around the reality of forgiveness. He begins with a discussion of John 9, the story of the man born blind (similar to his discussion in the Contagion article this past spring), and concludes: "The passages I have indicated bear clear witness to John having understood as one of the first fruits of the resurrection the making available of the understanding that we are all wrong (blind), and that this does not matter. Being wrong can be forgiven: it is insisting on being right that confirms our being bound in original murderous sin. "From there, he moves to St. Paul's demythification of the divine wrath in Romans, making a similar point as the one just quoted: those who insist on their own righteousness are the ones who suffer wrath, but it is not a divine wrath; it is the wrath of their own sacrificial machinery, bolstered by their own insistence on being righteous. It is into that discussion that the following fits:

The next factor in the Pauline testimony is not only the revelation of human idolatry, but its universal quality. This is abundantly illustrated in the first three chapters of Romans where Paul is keen to illustrate precisely that: "all men, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin." (Rom. 3:9)

It is not only sin that is universal, but for anyone who believes in the goodness of God that has been made manifest in the handing over of Jesus and then his raising up, then righteousness is universally available. It is of course the same insight that has brought the understanding of wrath to its sharpest definition -- the killing of the son of God -- that has made it possible to be set free from wrath. This is the import of 5:9: "Since therefore we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath." The true understanding of wrath came about exactly at the same moment as there emerged the possibility of being freed from it: it is the forgiveness of the resurrection which defines the nature of sin.

This of course leads Paul into a highly complex series of arguments about the Law which it is not the place to follow here. However, it seems important to indicate that it is precisely from his understanding of the universal nature of the sinfulness of humanity that he understands that Law, which is in itself holy (7:12), has become a function of that sinfulness. In the first place, the law brings about knowledge of sin (3:20) just as it also bears witness to the righteousness of God, along with the prophets (3:21). However, it does not only serve as an epistemological instrument, in the good sense of letting people know what sin is. It is an instrument of wrath (4:15). That is to say, that the knowledge of sin that it brings about, rather than being salvific, becomes part of the sinful human world of mutual judgment and recrimination. At least where there is no law, there is no transgression.

Paul indicates however that the law actually increases sin (5:20). It is hard not to read 5:21 as indicating that the increase of sin produced by the law was made manifest in the death of Jesus ("sin reigned in death"), while the resurrection brought about that "grace might reign through righteousness". Paul goes even further with this line of thought in 7:5, where the law again has an active role in arousing sin. I would suggest that this verse is wrongly interpreted if "flesh" is taken in the modern debased sense (i.e. basically sexual). It seems far more probable (and in line with Pauline usage; cf., Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence, pp. 120-9, 146-50) that "flesh" means "within the Jewish religious framework", and that the sinful passions in question, rather than lust etc. mean the persecutory zeal which led Paul to persecute Christians -- that is, the zeal which was at work in his members to bear fruit for death.

We can therefore see something very similar to the (much clearer) Johannine analysis above: sin is universal, and easily forgiven through faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. So the blind man (and thus blindness from the beginning) was easily cured. However, there is the complicating factor of the law, which appears to enable people to be just by knowing good and evil (the pharisees in Jn 9 who 'could see'). In fact, not only does the law not permit people to become just, but it locks them further into wrath, which is the judgmental attitude of those who think they have a superior knowledge, leading them to involvement in persecution and death, just as it had lead Paul himself. That is to say, rather than sin being overcome by the law, it is compounded by it, making sin even more lethal. So the Johannine pharisees are driven deeper into blindness by their pretensions of sight. And of course, as in John (cf., the ironic juxtaposition of Jn18:31 and 19:7), the paradigm for the law being wrong is the death of Christ. Where for John the death of Christ revealed the structuring mechanism of sin at work in the authorities, in Paul it reveals the complicity of the law with sin, and thus, finally the caducity of the law. Paul explicitly says that: "Christ is the end of the law that every one who has faith maybe justified." (Rm 10:4) He is the "end" of course in multiple senses,one of which for Paul is that the law achieved its purpose in leading to Christ's death, thus revealing definitively the true nature of sin whose accomplice it had been -- that is exactly what is said by 7:13. Having fulfilled its ambiguous purpose, the law is now at an end, now that righteousness is made available by faith in Christ. (The Joy of Being Wrong, pp.128-130)

Pilate said to them, "Take him yourselves and judge him according to your law." The Jews replied, "We are not permitted to put anyone to death."

The Jews answered him, "We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has claimed to be the Son of God."

1. Another passage that has been prominent for me in reflecting on these texts this week is 1 Cor. 1:18-31. We preach this scandalous gospel of a king who was summarily executed on the cross. And then God has chosen the weak and foolish to be followers of this king. None of us, including Christ, appears very noble or royal by the standards of this world. But by God's standards we manifest the wisdom of God and the power of God.

2. We finished this past week [in 1997] our fall session of confirmation classes on the Old Testament. As I sought to conclude with the big picture of what the OT might be trying to show us, I focused on the theme of chosenness. What does it mean to be chosen by God? Who are the chosen people of God in the OT? The big picture seems to reveal precisely what St. Paul concludes in 1 Cor. 1:18-31. God's chosen people are a people whose high point was first a liberation from slavery and then a brief reign of two strong kings (around 1000-820 B.C.) Both of these high points are somewhat ambiguous, as the liberation was followed by a period of grumbling and wandering in the wilderness, and the reigns of both David and Solomon saw their share of turmoil. Overall, the history of Israel's children is one of being in bondage to the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. It was into this history that God chose a new Christ who was a poor carpenter's son, born in a barn and executed on a cross. And who are we who follow as his disciples? (Tragically, part of our identity 2000 years later is as descendants of those who have continued the subjugation and persecution of God's chosen Israel.)

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