Micah 5:2-5a

Reflections and Questions

1. Bethlehem of Ephrathah: “who are one of the little clans of Judah.” There is such an emphasis on being little here. David himself, who made Bethlehem famous, was the littlest of Jesse’s eight sons. When Samuel goes to Jesse’ house, he is still grieving over the downfall of Saul as king -- who, by the way, was very tall. We read in 1 Samuel 16:7:

But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.”

2. How does the emphasis on God not seeing “as mortals see” relate to the basic insight of mimetic theory that the true God sees from the perspective of the victim, while human perspectives are always shaped in the cauldron of collective violence, that is, from the perspective of the persecutors?

3. Bethlehem of Ephrathah is the littlest of the clans of Judah. Judah/Israel is the littlest of the nations among the Middle East / Mediterranean. They reached their zenith under David and Solomon and then slipped into being trampled under foot by everyone else’s empire: Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Egyptian, Roman.

How does this relate to the survival of the perspective of the victim? There’s a severe practical issue of the latter’s survival. Victims are shunned or murdered, making it very difficult for their perspective to survive. Wouldn’t it take the sense and identity of being chosen by a God who doesn’t see as we see, who stands by even the littlest?

It is into this history of chosenness, despite being trampled upon by others for centuries, that the Messiah is born in the town of the littlest among the littlest. Is his destiny then to overturn things? Yes, but again, not as mortals see! He isn’t going to overturn things with military might, with a collective violence against God’s enemies. No, he is going to take the perspective of the victim to its destiny of becoming the victim as one shamed and executed on a cross for all to see. But it will be God’s raising him up on the third day that will change history. It will be God’s raising him as the power of forgiveness, instead of vengeance, through which the perspective of the victim will now survive forever, becoming a powerful force, the Holy Spirit, throughout the rest of history and peaceably bringing history to the fulfillment of God’s loving desire.

Hebrews 10:5-10

Resources

1. The Letter to the Hebrews has been one of the most controversial books of the Bible in Girardian circles. Its heavy orientation around sacrifice appears suspicious in the face of the Girardian analysis of sacrifice. René Girard's own first assessment of it was negative in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (written in 1978), pp. 227-231. He retracted these criticisms in an interview with Rebecca Adams in November 1992 ("Violence, Difference, and Sacrifice: A Conversation with René Girard," in Religion and Literature 25, no. 2, 1993, pp. 9-33). Here's a portion of that interview:

RG: I say at the end of Things Hidden -- and I think this is the right attitude to develop -- that the changes in the meaning of the word "sacrifice" contain a whole history, religious history, of mankind. So when we say "sacrifice" today inside a church or religious context, we mean something which has nothing to do with primitive religion. Of course I was full of primitive religion at the time of the writing of the book, and my theme was the difference between primitive religion and Christianity, so I reserved the word "sacrifice" completely for the primitive.

RA: So you scapegoated Hebrews within the canon of Scripture.

RG: So I scapegoated Hebrews and I scapegoated the word "sacrifice" -- I assumed it should have some kind of constant meaning, which is contrary to the mainstream of my own thinking, as exemplified by my reading of the Judgement of Solomon in the book [pp. 237-245]. This text is fundamental for my view of sacrifice.

3. Raymund Schwager offers an extensive exposition of Hebrews in Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, pp. 182ff. In a major "Systematic Consideration" entitled "Redemption as Judgment and Sacrifice," Schwager basically uses Hebrews to anchor his argument. The concluding section of this part is "The Sacrifice of Christ and the 'Conversion' of Evil," and Schwager uses Hebrews to show how the Cross works that transformation. Link to an excerpt of Schwager on Hebrews, the final sub-section of this part, entitled "The Cross and the Transformation of Evil."

4. In Violence Renounced, there are two articles with a Girardian perspective on Hebrews: "Sacrificial Language in Hebrews: Reappraising René Girard," by Michael Hardin (one of the authors of another Girardian website on the lectionary, "Preaching Peace"), pp. 103-119; and "'A Better Sacrifice' or 'Better than Sacrifice'? Response to Michael Hardin's 'Sacrificial Language in Hebrews,'" by Loren L. Johns, pp. 120-131.

5. I recommend Thomas Long's commentary on Hebrews in the Interpretation series (John Knox Press) as a standard, i.e., non-Girardian, commentary to consult for preaching. Long considers Hebrews to be a sermon, not really a letter, and so his rich homiletic exposition of Hebrews also includes wonderful commentary on the art of preaching itself. Moreover, Long himself is an artful preacher and brings a beautiful flare for language and metaphor to his commentary.

Reflections and Questions

1. This passages grapples with the fact that the Hebrew tradition itself is steeped in sacrifice and is attempting to proclaim Christ as the end or fulfillment of all this. The quote from the Hebrew scriptures is from Psalm 40:6-8, but there are a number of related passages in which the Jewish tradition is trying to throw off the sacrificial: 1 Sam 15:22, Ps 50:8-15, Is 1:10-17, Jer 7:21-26, Hosea 6:6. See a webpage of biblical passages on the theme of "Mercy not Sacrifice." Can one preach a sermon on the fact that the whole movement of the Old Testament seems to be away from sacrifice? Gil Bailie speaks of the near-sacrifice of Isaac as a defining point: Abraham, the father of the people of Israel, is one who begins the move away from sacrifice by hearing the voice of the true God to halt his sacrifice of the firstborn son. To be a descendent of Abraham means to move along this same path until Christ finally fulfills it by transforming sacrifice into self-sacrifice. See Violence Unveiled, pages 140-143, on "Abraham and Issac" (excerpt).

2. In what sense is it "God's will that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all"? We need to walk the fine line that refrains from saying that Christ's sacrifice was God's will. It was not God's will in the sense that God requires such sacrifice. Mimetic theory makes it clear that sacrifice is by our will. (See the webpage "The Anthropology of René Girard and Traditional Doctrines of Atonement.") But God transforms Christ's self-sacrifice to the human powers of sacrifice into our sanctification. Now, that's grace!

3. Raymund Schwager's treatment of such passages in Hebrews is nuanced and difficult but well worth the effort. (You may link to the section, "The Cross and the Transformation of Evil," in its entirety; the following comments mix some explanation with crucial citations.) He is attempting to show how God's actions in Jesus Christ expressed a divine will in opposition to human wills but one with the power to transform what is evil in us. He notes that in Christ there is a conjunction of paradoxical forces that God is able to convert:

What at first seemed to be something purely negative, as the rejection of love and closing in on oneself, was transformed by Christ into a surrender which bursts all dimensions of earthly existence. He is therefore both scapegoat and lamb of God; he is the one who is the one slain and the bread of life; he is the one made into sin and the source of holiness. (Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, p. 189)

There are two crucial moves in Schwager's argument. One is to show that Jesus' act of surrender was for the benefit of all, even his enemies. Jesus came to incarnate a love that even reaches out to enemies. So if he allows himself to be killed by them, this is at the same time an act of identification with them because they did not know that they are victims of the same forces of sin and death. Schwager writes:

Jesus' judges and his executioners wanted to punish a criminal; he himself on the other hand wanted to give himself, as the Last Supper sayings show, for the many. These two intentions stand in contradiction to each other. It follows that if Jesus was able to identify himself with the actions of his opponents, then this was possible only because he thereby managed at the same time to transform their actions.

The crucified one saw in his opponents people who ultimately did not know what they were doing, who, because of blindness, even in their actions were more victims than responsible agents. He himself was a victim insofar as he was killed and they were victims in killing, insofar as they were under the spell of an external power. For him, then, killing was an act done both to him and to them, even if in very differing ways. Both together were victims of that power which in fact kills: sin. At this deeper level, Jesus no longer stood over against his opponents, but he underwent together with them the blows of a destructive power, but in such a way that he alone experienced this suffering for what it was. Through his identification with his executioners, he suffered together with them the being killed by sin. Because of this common destiny, Paul can rightly say: "One has died for all; therefore all have died" (2 Cor 5:14).

The "conversion" and transformation of evil began with Jesus including his opponents in his being killed, and thus consciously living through on their behalf that dimension in their action which enables us to say that the act of crucifying him was in fact something suffered. But he had not yet achieved the decisive act, for suffering would only have had a positive sense if we had to assume that God directly willed such suffering as a punishment, which, however, we have already excluded. The crucial point was the transformation of passivity through his surrender. Because of his unreserved acceptance of the suffering which came to him, it was already more than something merely undergone. Suffering which is affirmed becomes a new form of activity. (pp. 187-188)

All the synoptic Gospels on the one hand emphasize the suffering of the crucified one and on the other they clearly describe his dying as an activity. We find in Mark: "Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed out the Spirit [exepneusen, usually translated "expired"]" (Mark 15:37; Matt. 27:50). The loud cry was an expression of the most extreme desolation, and with the breathing out of his Spirit he indicated at the same time a revelatory event (Mark 1:11; 9:7) which went out from Jesus as bearer of the Spirit. The breathing out of the Spirit is made even clearer in Luke: "And Jesus cried loudly, 'Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit'" (Luke 23:46). Suffering is here understood unambiguously as surrendering and handing over the Spirit to the Father. Since Luke describes Jesus at the beginning of his ministry as the long awaited bearer of the Spirit (Luke 4:16-22; Acts 4:27; 10:38), the return of the Spirit to the Father means at the same time the fulfillment of the mission. The act of dying, the fulfillment of the mission, and the handing over of the Spirit to the Father consequently come together in the one event described by the letter to the Hebrews as the sacrifice of Christ.

Whoever in dying places himself in the hands of another person renounces entirely any further self-determination and hands himself over to the treatment of this other, to whom he thereby entrusts himself without reserve in love. Every act of surrender made during a person's life has its limits, arising at the least from the demands of one's own life and one's own identity. At the moment of dying, these limits can be broken down. But since in death all a person's strengths fail, death in itself is extremely ambiguous. Is it merely the passive undergoing of an inexorable limit, or can there be a surrender which goes beyond all previous limits? From the viewpoint of ordinary human experience, no clear answer is possible. However Jesus surrendered himself "by the power of the eternal Spirit" (Heb. 9:14) and, dying, entrusted his Spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46). Since the Spirit which he laid in the hands of the Father was at once his human spirit and the divine spirit bestowed on him, he was able completely to transform the ambiguous human act of dying, which is above all something suffered, into an act of surrender.

Whoever no longer determines himself by his own spirit, but entrusts this to the heavenly Father in order to allow himself to be totally determined by him, achieves a sort of openness and availability which go beyond our earthly experience and can only he hinted at by parables. The image of the clay with which the potter works can give a clue to this readiness to be shaped, and yet the one dying on the cross was much more than clay, for it was with his whole being and above all with his free will that he became a totally available "material." What at first appeared only negative in the "victim situation" was transformed with his death into a limitless opening of himself and making himself available, an abandonment of himself and total trust. His dying as total act of handing over already contains agreement in advance to that imminent sovereign action of the Father, which was realized in the resurrection of the crucified one. His will allowed itself to open up through obedience in suffering to a complete uniting in love with the will of the Father. (pp. 188-189)

Hebrews poses all this as something Christ came into this world to tell us. Where did he tell us? Matthew 9:13 and 12:7, for one: "Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy not sacrifice'" -- a quote of Hosea 6:6. Jesus continues the prophetic message that sacrificial religion gets us sidetracked from our actual covenant to do God's will as the people of God. Christ also surpasses the prophetic (as Hebrews tells us from the start, 1:1-2) by being the high priest who sacrifices himself as the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

We no longer practice religions of ritual sacrifice, but are our practices of religion still in any way sacrificial?  Do our practices of religion follow God's will of doing mercy? Link to reflections on such questions through a church newsletter column on Hebrews 10:5-10.

Luke 1:39-45 (46-55)

Resources

1. James Alison, "Living the Magnificat" (online), a talk for the conference held by Affirming Catholicism in Durham, England, 7-10 September 2006.

2. Gil Bailie's tape series on "The Gospel of Luke," tape #2. Link to my notes / transcription of his lecture on Luke 1-2. Here are excerpts most pertinent to this gsopel lesson:

Luke 1:5-45 is structured in a diptych between the conceptions and births of John the Baptist and Jesus. There's tremendous asymmetry between the two, which is the point.

Elizabeth and Zechariah. An angel appears to Zechariah in the temple. "Do not be afraid": a refrain of the angels in these opening stories. We need to remember the backdrop: religious terror. The message of the angels from God is to not be afraid; real news for archaic religion, suffused with holy terror. The message is an old story: that of Abraham and Sarah. Zechariah doesn't believe and made mute.

The Visitation: Angel appears to Mary. Same message and same refrain. But, while Elizabeth is too old to have a child, Mary is too young to have a child; she is still a virgin, a young maiden.

Is Mary a virgin? Dante's Paradiso: at the beginning he says something like, 'If you have eaten of the bread of angels (panis angelicus, the Eucharist), then go ahead and read; if you haven't, then don't bother reading because you aren't going to get it.' In other words, if the idea of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is something you can't get your mind around, then there's not a chance in the world you're going to be able to get your mind around the Paradiso. If the mystery of that is a stumbling block, then there is a place beyond which you cannot go. Similarly, with the virginity of Mary. A minimalist view: No attempt to account for the meaning of Jesus' life can succeed in doing so without taking into account divine intervention. If God's intervention is inconceivable to you, then there are aspects of the Christian mystery that are out of your range.

The meeting of Mary and Elizabeth is a surrogate meeting for the first meeting of John and Jesus. Elizabeth speaks for John and Mary speaks for Jesus. Elizabeth bows and defers to Mary, the first point where the diptych becomes asymmetrical. John is the forerunner. Mary responds with the Magnificat, which we need to focus on.

The Magnificat (1:46-55). This song sung by Mary is based on Hannah's song. And the story of Mary and Jesus is a filling in and fleshing out of the Hannah/Samuel story as the Elizabeth and Zechariah story is a filling in and fleshing out of the Abraham and Sarah story.

This song of praise summarizes the themes of the whole Old Testament. In our world, we tend to think that if something new is going to come into the world, then you have to get rid of the old ideas. We've got to think for ourselves, to do something original. But Mary is the vessel for the newest thing ever, and she's nothing but the incarnation of the tradition.

Quote from Thomas Dehaney Benard (sp?), around the turn of the century: "Do we not all know how sentences from the Bible or the liturgy glide into our prayers and offer their unsought aid to express kindred feelings of our own? So here [namely, the Magnificat] the words, as well as the thoughts, are those of a high-souled Hebrew maiden of devout and meditative habit, whose mind has taken the tone of the Scriptures in which she has been nurtured. We feel the breath of the prophets; we catch the echoes of the psalms; we recognize most distinctly the vivid reminiscences of the song of Hannah."

He's explaining how the Lukan Mary spontaneously irrupts with this glorious avalanche of themes that summarize the whole Hebrew experience. Do we really know? Do sentences from the Bible and the liturgy glide into our prayers? He's talking about something that's not so true anymore.

"The mind has taken the tone of the Scriptures in which she has been nurtured." What is the corollary for that in our world? Today, what would we irrupt with? Would we irrupt with the Magnificat? Or with some TV commercial? What is forming us? And whatever it is, it's anything but this because we believe, as Luke did not, that creativity is other than being steeped in the tradition.

Reflections and Questions

1. This passage very much continues the theme from the Micah passage about a God who favors the least among God's children. (See the reflections above.) Mary's song highlights the overturning that will take place. Mimetic theory helps, I think, to keep this overturning in perspective. As we said above, the overturning will not happen through the usual human means of military victory. For those who have been victims to rise up and murder their persecutors is a reversal only according to the same age-old human perspective of the persecutors. The victims have reversed things by becoming the persecutors of their persecutors.

The perspective of the victim, on the other hand, takes the faith of letting oneself fulfill the destiny of a victim, trusting that the God of Life and Creation will overturn that power of death through a power of new life. The perspective of the victim can only take an permanent place in history when the Messiah submits to human persecution in the faith of being raised from the dead by the God who sides with victims. This God understands that the ultimate end of the human perspective shaped by sacred violence is for all of humanity to become victim to its own violence. Thus, this God is ultimately on humanity's side, intervening in history through the Messiah who forever reveals the life-giving power of victim as forgiveness.

2. Gil Bailie emphasizes how easily the perspective of Scripture glides from Mary's tongue. This was re-emphasized for me in scrolling through 1 Samuel to rehearse the part about Samuel choosing David to replace Saul. Here is a taste once again of how close Mary's song is to Hannah's:

Hannah prayed and said, "My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in my God. My mouth derides my enemies, because I rejoice in my victory. There is no Holy One like the LORD, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God. Talk no more so very proudly, let not arrogance come from your mouth; for the LORD is a God of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed. The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength. Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil. The barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn. The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up. The LORD makes poor and makes rich; he brings low, he also exalts. He raises up the poor from the dust; he lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes and inherit a seat of honor. For the pillars of the earth are the LORD's, and on them he has set the world. He will guard the feet of his faithful ones, but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness; for not by might does one prevail. The LORD! His adversaries shall be shattered; the Most High will thunder in heaven. The LORD will judge the ends of the earth; he will give strength to his king, and exalt the power of his anointed." (1 Samuel 2:1-10)

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