John 12:20-33

THE TRUTH ABOUT VIOLENCE

I recently went to the Merrigong Theatre (Wollongong, New South Wales) to see the play ‘The Boys’. The relationships in the story, whether between men and women, between men and other men, or between parent and child are dominated by violence which continually plays itself out as a never ending cycle of violence. Can the cycle of violence be broken?

If we violently oppose violence we inevitably play its game and violence will always win. On the other hand if we do not oppose violence, if we keep quiet, if we do not speak up, if we do not protest, if we do not act, then we will be colluding with violence. We become accustomed to it. It becomes part of our lives, part of the community, part of how society and the systems within society operate. Violence has a way of suppressing the truth about itself, of hiding it away.  It dominates relationships, economics, politics, religion and even the church.

Jean-Michel Oughourlian says, ‘… the task of revealing the truth about violence requires a… person… who is not obliged to violence for anything and does not think in terms of violence – someone who is capable of talking back to violence while remaining entirely untouched by it (p.218)’. Rather than using violence or confronting violence Jesus exposes the truth about violence by taking the place of the victim and in doing so rises above the violence that had dominated the world.

Jesus says, ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth (on the cross) will draw all people to myself.’ John 12:33

The period of Lent offers us a time to reflect upon the truth about violence and how Jesus offers a way to expose it.

My reflections on violence used in this article were mainly drawn from the book ‘Things hidden since the foundation of the world’ by Rene Girard, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort.                     

John 3:14-21

And just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so must the son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life (v14,15).

Why would Jesus compare himself to a snake or to the act of Moses lifting up a snake in the wilderness? What is the story behind the lifting up of the snake?

The story comes from Numbers 21:4-9 - The people of Israel were grumbling about God and Moses for leading them out into the wilderness because there was no food or water and they were sick of the manna from heaven (so, the story goes).  Then God sent poisonous snakes to punish the people and many people died. When the fear hit them they came back to Moses and admitted that they had sinned by speaking against God and against Moses and begged Moses to pray to God for the snakes to be taken away. So Moses prayed and God told Moses to make a poisonous snake and put it on a pole and whenever someone would be bitten by a snake if they looked up at the snake on the pole they would live. So Moses made a snake out of bronze and put it on a pole and whenever someone who had been bitten by a snake looked up at the snake they did not die, they lived.

When I came across this story years ago, I thought it was amazing. It was another wondrous story of what God can do and how silly were those people not to trust God. Now when I read it I am appalled. It speaks of a God who treats people as totally dispensable in order to get God’s way. What a cruel way to control people, punishing them indiscriminately with a plague of poisonous snakes. God had rescued the people from Egypt by bringing terrible plagues on the Egyptians now this rescuer is controlling the people with the same bullying and fear invoking methods. I don’t believe in this kind of God anymore. If there is something of a God in this world then I see this God as totally different. For me God is love.

Why would Jesus compare himself being lifted up (on the cross) to the snake being lifted up on a pole? Does Jesus become a snake or is he merely referring to the act of being lifted up? Is Jesus a snake or made a snake? The whole picture is bizarre to me.

I can’t get the image of the snakes crawling about biting people out of my mind. As this is St. Patrick’s weekend I’m reminded that St. Patrick is said to have driven all the snakes out of Ireland. There are a number of very strange stories about snakes in the bible and which have led people to believe all sorts of things, like the snake handling Christians in the USA who base their rituals of handling poisonous snakes on Mark 16:18 which says ‘they shall pick up snakes with their hands’ and on the story of Saint Paul who was bitten by a snake but survived. Pete Rollins in his book ‘The Fidelity of Betrayal’ writes how in the third century there was a Gnostic group called the Ophites (Ophis meaning snake) who understood the snake in the garden of Eden to be a great hero who stood up to the tyrant God in an attempt to free humans.

Can the snake episode be viewed as prophetic of the future when anti-venom came to be made from the very venom that could kill a person. A drug is a poison that, taken in the right dosage, is also a remedy. One takes the anti-venom and lives. For us Christians Jesus is seen as innocent, sinless. From the view point of the religious leaders of his day Jesus would have been a snake, evil, tempting people away, leading them astray, his words were seen as poison yet for Jesus his very words were what would bring life, …whoever believes in him may have eternal life (V15).

Is the snake symbolic of grumbling against God? In the garden of Eden the snake quarrels with God or rather with Eve and questions God. In the wilderness the snake may represent those who question God and those who represent God. While they are complaining about God there is also truth in their claims, the antidote, the answer, the cure is also found in the cause, in the source. In Jesus’ time the leaders take one who is causing trouble and have him crucified, in the one who is causing trouble is also our salvation.

On the night of my initial conversion the minister ‘leading me to the Lord’ used John 3:16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.’ At that point in my life I took that to mean that by believing in Jesus I would go to heaven when I died. Now I think eternal life is something to be discovered and lived in this world. A few weeks ago I discovered that the original meaning of believe was belove. Whoever loves me may have eternal life. This implies more than head knowledge but relationship. Jesus is asking us to do more than believe that he died on a cross but to take up our cross and follow him in relationship, in solidarity, with him.

In John 3:19-21 Jesus speaks about the light that has come into the world and people preferring to love the darkness rather than the light. I’m reminded of the gruesomeness of how the Emperor Nero is said to have dipped Christians in oil and put them on a pole a set them alight to illuminate Rome at night. Jesus is lifted up like a light so that all who come under the light or into the light are not afraid to come openly and honestly and truthfully, they have nothing to hide in the light of Christ.

In John 2:18 the religious leaders ask Jesus, “What sign can you give us?” John is fascinated by signs. Jesus is raised up as a sign. The same word for raised as a standard also means sign or miracle. Jesus being raised up is the ultimate sign to which all other signs point. The light comes from the cross, the ultimate sign, the darkest moment, not from the resurrection.

Was this a sacrifice by human beings to God? Did God really require a human sacrifice? Would God really take a Human being and require him to be stuck on a pole, a cross, like the snake in the wilderness? Surely such ideas can only come from human beings who use violence to control and intimidate. I think it was a sacrifice but not in the way animals were sacrificed to God. Sacrifice literally means ‘to make sacred’. The violence of killing makes the victim holy. The irrational requirement of sacrifice is seen as absolving people from all responsibility. But I think that responsibility for our actions is the very sacrifice God wants us to make. The sacrifice Jesus made was made in his refusal to have anything to do with violence. Jesus is lifted up on the cross and placed for all to see. In being lifted up Jesus rises above the violence. Rene Girard (Things hidden since the foundation of the world) says that violence is the controlling agent in every form of mythic or cultural structure, and Christ is the only agent who is capable of escaping from these structures and freeing us from their dominance. Jesus is the only person who achieves the goal that God has set for all humanity, the only human who has nothing to do with violence and its works. Jesus alone, the son of man, the true human being, has fulfilled a calling that belongs to all human beings: to live in love, to love one another. Jesus comes to Jerusalem not as a sacrifice for sin but to break the cycle of violence. Jesus, by this action, breaks out from the cycle of murder and death. He gives his life in order not to kill. Jesus doesn’t mimic our actions like we mimic each other's actions and desires. Love God and your neighbour as yourself…you shall not covet, you shall not kill…

Again I finish with some quotes courtesy of Brian McLaren from the Book ‘Things hidden since the foundation of the world’ by Rene Girard

Rene Girard - ‘A non-violent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence – by demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the Kingdom of Violence. (p219)

But this very demonstration is bound to remain ambiguous for a very long time, and it is not capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live under the regime of violence. That is why at first it can only have some effect under a guise, deceptive through the admixture of some sacrificial elements, through the surreptitious re-insertion of some violence into the conception of the divine. (p220)

Behaving in a truly divine manner, on an earth still in the clutches of violence, means not dominating humans, not overwhelming them with supernatural power, it means not terrifying and astonishing them in turn, through the sufferings and blessings one can confer; it means not creating difference between doubles and not taking part in their disputes.(p234)

John 2:13-22

(The best bits of this are the Rene Girard quotes at the end)

Jesus arrived in Jerusalem and headed to the Temple (as one would on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the Passover). What does the story of Jesus making a whip and driving out all the cattle and sheep and people involved in selling them out of the Temple mean? In John’s Gospel Jesus goes to Jerusalem three times in his ministry whereas the other three Gospels only mention one visit and that visit was just before he was crucified. Why did Jesus go to Jerusalem? He got stuck into those who were in the Temple and into the religious leaders but there was no political attack on the injustice of the Romans, nothing directed at Pontius Pilate or towards Herod and yet he was put to death for being a possible threat. Jesus only attacks the religious practices and the injustice at the heart of it. Has he come to clean up religion? Are we in the church to be more concerned with cleaning up our own act and our unjust practices rather than telling politicians to clean up their act? Are we acting justly within the church? Is there discrimination? Is there exploitation? How are we treating people who are poorer? Do we show favouritism to the wealthier people? How is our religion relating to people in society who are poorer in society, in the world?

Some see his visit to the Temple and especially the words where he said, ‘Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up’ as Jesus replacing the sacrificial system and worship centred in the temple to a religious system focused on Christ as the supreme sacrifice and worship centred in Christ.  Was it coincidental to Jesus’ death that he was killed during the Passover? Our theology suggests that it wasn’t but that it was all God’s sacrificial plan or are we just reading that into it with hindsight?  The first Corinthians reading (1 Corinthians 1:18-25) seems to confirm that. Some see this as Jesus replacing Judaism with Christianity. There is a reference here to the destruction of the temple but then it is translated to mean the resurrection of Christ’s body. The Temple of his body is more important. Perhaps he was saying when you are exploiting people you are destroying the real temple, where God really resides, in the lives of people. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19).

Was what was going on in the temple but outer evidence of the real religion and motives of people?  In order to clean up our religion do we need to clean up our own motives, our own souls, our own beings?

I was glad to see that even though Jesus himself physically drove the sheep and cattle out he told those who were selling the doves to take them out. They weren’t hurt.  Jesus liberates animals and birds from certain death. The accusation is that they have made his Father’s house into a marketplace. What I see here is passion - passion for something different. Exploitation was taking place in the very space that was deemed to be the holiest place in Judaism, the place where God resided. Here the good is being tainted. Those selling cattle, sheep and doves are profiting from the people who have come a long way, days and weeks away, to the Temple to offer sacrifice.

I am fascinated by the mention of the doves. A dove is an internationally known symbol for peace. Noah sent out a dove and it came back to him with an olive leaf -another symbol of peace (Genesis 8:11). As Jesus was being baptised, ‘just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descended like a dove on him’ (Mark 1:10). I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained in him (John 1:32). The metaphorical imagery surrounding Jesus is of a person of peace. It seems ironic to me that here Jesus throws out the symbols of peace from the Temple.

All of this seems like scratching the surface of what Jesus was doing on the way to the cross. A deeper insight for me is hinted in the words ‘But Jesus on his part would not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people… for he knew himself what was in everyone’(v24, 25). For me this is our thirst for power and our justification of violence in order to get what we want –even peace. Some see Jesus’ anger and actions in the Temple as justification for the use of force and violence in order to bring about change.

I want to finish with some thoughts from Rene Girard for further reflection which call us to look forward towards the cross. For me the cross is not about a blood sacrifice as articulated by the doctrines of ‘Sacrificial atonement and substitution’. Nor is it simply believing in these things. The cross invites participation in a non-violent path. The cross is about revealing a path for all humans to follow if we hope to see real peace and real transformative change. In the cross Jesus reveals a mystery that I cannot but partially grasp but which excites me greatly. Jesus may have driven out the cattle, sheep and doves out of the Temple but I think he was only demonstrating that the religious leaders had already driven God out of the Temple and that they would drive Jesus out from the world too.

Rene Girard - ‘A non-violent deity can only signal his existence to mankind by having himself driven out by violence – by demonstrating that he is not able to establish himself in the Kingdom of Violence. (p219)

But this very demonstration is bound to remain ambiguous for a very long time, and it is not capable of achieving a decisive result, since it looks like total impotence to those who live under the regime of violence. That is why at first it can only have some effect under a guise, deceptive through the admixture of some sacrificial elements, through the surreptitious re-insertion of some violence into the conception of the divine. (p220)

Behaving in a truly divine manner, on an earth still in the clutches of violence, means not dominating humans, not overwhelming them with supernatural power, it means not terrifying and astonishing them in turn, through the sufferings and blessings one can confer; it means not creating difference between doubles and not taking part in their disputes.(p234)

(Quotes courtesy of Brian McLaren from the Book ‘Things hidden since the foundation of the world’ by Rene Girard)

Mark 8:31-38

“If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Mark 1:34

What did Jesus mean?

What do we think he meant?

What is the common or dominant view?

Could it mean something else?

Before we take up our cross we have to deny ourselves. What could this mean? Some have interpreted this to mean that they have to give up their right to everything in life, to even hate themselves, to put up with everything.

We have to lay something aside. What could we be asked to lay aside? Perhaps a certain way of thinking or certain ways of thinking, perhaps lay them down in order to take up another.

  

Peter confesses to Jesus that he believes that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus again warns his disciples not to tell anyone about him. When Jesus starts to speak about the future and the suffering he will endure, Peter takes him aside to stop Jesus talking such nonsense. This cannot happen to the Messiah. It’s going to be all up, up, up to glory from here on. But Jesus rebukes Peter, saying, “Get behind me Satan.”

Rather than up, up, up is it more about down, down, down?  Rather than inviting us on an upwardly journey Jesus seems to be inviting us to grow down to a way of being, a way of being that he models. Not a godlike way of being but a human way of being – to real humanness. To be the best human being. We are to follow his example, that is to lay down our life, set it aside, and take up our cross and follow Jesus.

As I reflect on the words “Get behind me Satan” I wonder whether Satan could be a name for all that is bad about humanity?  Could Satan stand for the down ward pull of humanity? All that robs us of living together in harmony, peace, equitably?

Do we then need to lay aside the ways of Satan and then follow Jesus by taking up the cross?

What the cross meant for Jesus illuminates what the cross means for us. Jesus dramatically changes the story. Deepak Chopra says that, ‘With the death of Jesus comes the death of the old way of thinking. With the resurrection comes the birth of the new way of thinking.’ The old way of thinking and acting killed Jesus but was unable to stop him from rising to life again. Being born again does entail a death.

First of all we determine to lay aside the old way of thinking and then taking up the cross each of us is involved in putting to death that old thinking. So that human beings can discover a much richer level of humanity to live by. Deepak Chopra suggests that in these days it may mean a shift from consumption to relationship, from valuing my life over yours to valuing that which gives life to you and not just thinking of myself.

Sarah Dylan Breuer http://www.sarahlaughed.net/lectionary/2006/03/second_sunday_i.html - In being called to follow Jesus, as his disciples, we are called to let go our power, recognise our power, our privilege and let it go- the way to abundant life leads to the cross.

We are taught to be strong, to be tough, to protect ourselves, to defend ourselves, to arm ourselves but the way of the cross is about becoming defenceless

Jesus doesn’t say take up your weapons as in arm yourself, but take up your cross, disarm yourself. Usually we have to put others down in order to elevate ourselves but with Jesus it is not that way.

Christianity is a religion for the poor but it has become a religion of the rich and controlled by the rich and powerful and what is left of value is trickled down to the poor but that is not the way it should be.

I wonder if the Christian churches have got their theology wrong regarding their theology of the cross? So often ‘the cross’ refers to the suffering and death of Jesus and is interpreted in purely sacrificial language. An execution is turned metaphorically into a sacrifice. Is there more to the meaning of the cross than this? Is there a meaning or meanings that are not so otherworldly, something done on a spiritual unseen level but rather something that we can actually participate in rather than something done on our behalf. If Jesus is the only worthy sacrifice why do we need to take up our cross?

In inviting all who want to be Jesus' followers to take up their cross he is inviting us to identify with a God who longs for a transformed world, a world of justice and non-violence.

In lent we contemplate a pre-Easter human Jesus (Borg)

Jesus doesn’t say if you want to be my disciples you need to believe certain things, but take up something, join me in something, be willing to sacrifice your life for a better world, be willing to sacrifice your life so that this becomes a better world for those marginalised and impoverished in society.