By arresting, torturing, and killing Jesus, the authorities thought that they were securing well being and peace again in their society by means of the tried and true method of a single-victim scapegoat. Everyone’s thirst for violence will be satisfied and we can get on with the business of everyday life.
Once they decided on this violence, they were all unified. Everyone’s anger and frustration and hatred converged on a single victim. If we don’t understand this process we will just be baffled by the bizarre unity achieved in John 18–19. The escalation of the rivalries and the advent of violence always witness the strangest about-faces and the most unexpected regroupings: Pharisees and Herodians; Zealots and Sadducees. The bodyguards of the High Priests and the Roman Cohort garrisoned in Jerusalem. Judas and Peter. Caiaphas, Annas, and Pilate. Religious leaders cooperated with political. Barrabas was accepted by the Jews. Jews and Romans learned to work together! “Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other” (Luke 23:12).
We have a united kingdom—one society, one kingdom, a kingdom of this world unified in their hatred and violence. They all conspire together against the Lord and his anointed (Psalm 2).
And here is Jesus, the innocent victim, the scapegoat. “My kingdom is not of this world, Governor Pilate.”
And Pilate says, “Ah, so you are a king!”
And Jesus replies, “Yes, it is as you say: I am a king. I know you don’t understand a word of what I am saying, but for the benefit of those that will read and reflect on this story after my death, I tell you this: I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting.”
Pilate: “What is truth?” And we remember what Jesus had said earlier: “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.”
It is just here that Jesus unveils the truth about us by His own humble submission to death, his giving in to the snowballing of rivalries and hatred. He gives in to death. He willingly becomes the scapegoat, the innocent victim whose death everyone thinks will achieve a new unity for them, will indeed achieve a unity and peace like no other victim before him.
Jesus could have died of cancer. He could have taken his own life. He might have died of poison administered by Judas or Herod. Instead he dies at the hands of a religious, self-righteous mob. And by so doing he exposes the pagan religious mechanism for what it is—self-seeking violence looking for a victim to blame.
The crucifixion exposes the violence of these escalating rivalries. The cross exposes and expunges it once for all.
What happens in the passion narratives is that the single-victim, scapegoat mechanism that fallen human cultures have always turned to in order to unite and regenerate the community is exposed for what it is. The passion of Christ makes clear what is going on—an innocent victim is being sacrificed for the good of human society. Of course, this is true, but not exactly in the same way that his murderers intend.
Behind this collective violence is Satan, the accuser of the brethren, the prince of this world. He is the power behind paganism and the power behind Judas, remember. He is the one whom the Jews in the first century emulate (“Your father is the devil. . . . From the beginning he was a murderer”). Satan is the one that rules the pagan Roman world, and Satan is the one who desires to sift Peter and the disciples like wheat.
At the arrest, trial, and condemnation of Jesus, everyone is unified by a camaraderie of collective violence. Furthermore, it is collective violence that characterizes all pagan religions. All pagan rituals and myths are designed to sanction violence against innocent victims in order to guarantee social harmony and peace. Israel and Rome are united in their pagan bloodlust to kill the one they believe is disrupting their social peace and harmony.
What Christ conquers on the cross —and this is one very important but all too neglected perspective on the crucifixion—is the Satanic pagan way of organizing communities, a Satanic unity. Jesus will indeed gather the scattered children of God into one. But he will do so not by fighting, but by self-sacrifice. He will take to himself all the violence of humanity and by doing so he will conquer it.
It is the most remarkable turn of events in human history.
Rene Girard has said: “As Satan was making humans obligated to him, putting them in his debt, he was making them accomplices in his crimes. The cross, by revealing the lie at the bottom of Satan’s game, exposes human beings to a temporary increase of violence, but at a deeper level, it liberates them from a servitude that has lasted since the beginning of human history.”
The death of Jesus releases human communities to find unity in love rather than in violence and hatred and murder.
But, of course, we cannot stop there. If the season of Lent is good for anything it is not about giving up chocolate ice cream or red meat on Fridays for forty days. It is about honest reflection on how the depths of our own depraved hearts are revealed in the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and condemnation.
When we take on our lips Johann Heerman’s haunting hymn “Ah, Holy Jesus” we dare not trivialize it or tame it. Meditate on the first two stanzas:
Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
That man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected, O most afflicted.
Who was the guilty?
Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus hath undone thee.
‘Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee: I crucified thee.”
The mechanism exposed here in the Gospel stories—rivalries that are overcome through the release of hatred and violence against a single innocent victim—is at the heart of the way we fallen men and women continue to form friendships and enjoy the illusion of unity and community. It is the way we crucified Jesus.
It is those almost invisible rivalries between us, that barely concealed hatred of one another, that we need to renounce at Lent. Our envy and jealousy secretly longs for nothing better than the demise of our rival. Innocent of any real offense against us, these men and women have simply achieved or possess something we want, something we think we have a right to. This is just how the Jews, the old people of God, longed for the power of Rome.
Be honest with yourself for once before God this during this Lenten season. How easy is it for you to wish for the downfall of someone you consider to be a rival? How easy is it for you to envy someone in your heart of hearts simply because he or she has something that you want? Consider how easy it is for you and me to get sucked into a conversation that quickly snowballs into verbal violence against another (and the hatred is oh-so-delicately concealed behind “righteous,” “pious”-sounding words). It happens in conversations on phones and in seminary lunchrooms quite regularly.
How often do we fantasize about another’s downfall or rejoice in it when it actually happens? And the fact that hatred is simmering in your heart, cunningly dressed up in self-righteous justifications, is proven once anyone gives you an opportunity to vent it. For if you find someone who shares your hatred, you will both find endless hours of satisfaction and unity in verbal criticism that only barely conceals your violent hatred of that other person, or that other church. This is what often unites factions in our churches, in our denomination, in the Christian world at large. We find unity in our hatred of a common enemy, and often that enemy is quite innocent, guilty of nothing more than having something we want or being different from us.
Now, of which kingdom are you a subject? Satan’s kingdom, the kingdom of “the accuser of the brethren,” the Lord of hatred and violence and murder, justified by self-righteousness? Or the kingdom of Jesus, the king of love and sacrifice, the innocent victim who willingly allowed himself to be hated and killed by you and me for you and me to establish once and for all a new foundation for friendship, society, and unity?
As the Apostle Paul writes to a church riddled with rivalry and dangerously divided: “For it stands written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart. . . . For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. . . . For I decided to know nothing among you”—nothing over against each of you and in your community—“except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 1:19, 25; 2:2).