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Sacrifice: To Make Sacred
Change the Paradigm III
Second Sunday in Lent
Gen. 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Phil 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35 (Luke 9:28-36)
Luke’s vignette describing Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem, claiming to follow the pre-ordained path to Calvary, is so familiar it no longer has any meaning. Even knowing that Luke was writing for one faction of Jewish Christians in Jerusalem well after Jesus’ death fails to inspire fresh interpretation. In a world where “faith-based” organizations get the lion’s share of government funding, and where there is doubt that the current U.S. Supreme Court, stacked with Christian fundamentalists, will continue to follow its own precedent and allow private citizens to sue the government over constitutional violations of the separation of church and state, it is difficult to imagine how to get outside the retributive, imperial paradigm. Jesus certainly seems to intend to speak to power in Luke’s story: “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.’” So screw you, Herod Antipas. Like, I’m leaving anyway because no prophet can be killed outside of Jerusalem. Petulant, at best, antisemitic at worst, Luke’s Jesus slouches on his way to Golgotha to die.
The Genesis passages tell the story of God’s covenant with Abram. A covenant is an agreement or contract drawn up under seal. In Judeo-Christian myth, the original covenant between God and humanity was sealed when God set his rainbow in the sky after the great flood. Now, God makes a second covenant with Abram. The Elves who concocted the Lectionary cut the story off before this second Covenant is sealed, and it is too bad, because the imagery of how the Covenant is sealed between God and Abram lends itself to the interpreters of the story of Jesus both in the early centuries and in the 21st Century. Abram wants to know how he will know that he will indeed possess the land that God has promised. God tells him to prepare “a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon” for sacrifice. Abram does all this, and then spends time chasing away the birds of prey who of course see an opportunity for a feast. Eventually, “As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him,” and God speaks to him out of the darkness. This part is left out of the reading for today. God spells out specifically what will happen within 400 years (4 generations). The people will be aliens in a land not theirs, but God will deliver them. Abram himself will die in peace, and then the people will return to the land in the 4th generation. The covenant is sealed when “a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces” of the sacrifice, assuring Abram that he can trust God’s promises.
The metaphor of sacrifice to seal a covenant is basic to Luke’s story about the life and teaching of Jesus (see Luke 2: 21-24). In Luke 13:31-35, Jesus declares that contrary to the covenant with Abram, which would take 4 generations to implement, the covenant with Jesus will take 3 days. Because we know the stories, we know that Jesus’ life will be the sacrifice that seals the new covenant. Paul also uses the metaphor of sacrifice, but unlike Luke, it is in direct contradiction to the Roman civic religion, wherein citizens made sacrifices to the living deified Cesar and feasted with their clients, and it is that metaphor that is behind his words to the group in Philippi: “For many live as the enemies of the cross of Christ. . . . Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.” But then Paul gets political. “But our citizenship” he says “is in heaven, and it is from there that . . . Christ will transform the body of our humiliation....” – just as God acted in Abram’s dream to pass the torch across the prepared sacrifice – “that it may be conformed to the body of his glory by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself” – another political, anti-imperial statement. Paul continues to insist on “citizenship” for Christians “in heaven,” NOT citizenship in Rome. “Citizenship” is a political term, used deliberately to remind the hearers of Paul’s letter that their loyalty is to the risen Christ, not to the pantheon of Cesars. Luke, by contrast, lays the responsibility for the death of Jesus at God’s door, not Cesar’s – where it truly belongs. In fact, the victim – Jesus – actively chooses to play the role God has ordained for him. The Romans are off the hook in Luke’s gospel. Luke’s religion is no threat to Roman imperial injustice. Paul’s theology, however, written 50 to 75 years earlier, undermines the whole system.
So what is the imperial paradigm in the 21st Century that we are called to transform, and conform to the body of Christ’s glory? Or, in other words, how do we participate in the Kingdom of God’s justice-compassion – which is what is meant by “the body of Christ’s glory”? We who are followers of Jesus’ way are the body of Christ, and living in God’s Kingdom means being conformed to that, in Paul’s mystical, problematic, 1st Century language.
In contrast to the imperial theology of piety, war, victory, and peace, John D. Crossan suggests covenant, non-violence, justice-compassion. But with whom is the Covenant, and how is it sealed? How do we sanctify opposition to imperial piety (e.g., service to Bush’s war as “sacrifice”) in a context of justice-compassion where there is no “God”? Perhaps part of the answer is found in what we know about the nature of the Universe. In The Universe Story, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry find the metaphor of Willing Sacrifice in the ongoing evolution of life-forms that come into being, and if they find a niche, live and thrive, and if they do not, give way to life forms that can. “. . . [T]he universe has what can be called a sacrificial dimension. When we reflect upon the omnipresence of destruction and violence throughout the layered universe, and on the mysterious relationship of this destruction to the evocation of a great beauty, we can begin to approach such an understanding. . . . [T]he human community is attempting to give recognition to a central dimension of existence and to enter this reality in a creative rather than an unconscious and destructive manner” (pp. 59-60).
With that in mind, perhaps we can read Psalm 27 as confirmation of Covenant with distributive justice-compassion: “Teach me your way O Lord, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies. Do not give me up to the will of my adversaries, for false witnesses have risen against me, and they are breathing out violence. I believe that I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”