1. “it is expedient that one man die for the sake of the nation”
Rene Girard – Redemptive Violence
Scarcity
Mimetic (Imitative) Desire – rivalry & competition
Violence
Need to restore order
Seeking a scapegoat/sacrificial victim
Declaring the victim guilty
Kill victim
Hush of ‘peace’ – reinforcing the guilt of victim
Development of ‘rituals’ of sacrificial violence
* human sacrifice....evolving to
* rituals of confession (Leviticus 16:6-10)
Development of theologies of sacrificial violence
* God must ‘kill’ someone (Jesus) in order to forgive (expiate) sins
“it is expedient that one man die for the sake of the nation”

2. Where do we think we may have witnessed scape-goating violence this week?

3. Jesus and the end of sacrificial violence
Jesus is declared ‘innocent’ victim
* if we can kill the Christ, how wrong can we get it?
* the virus of the Gospel is planted within culture – a new and world changing sensitivity to victims everywhere (with associated trap – ‘let’s fight about who’s the biggest victim’)
Jesus declares forgiveness of enemies
*God’s rain and sunshine falls equally on the good and evil. Our desire to follow the law and to be ‘good’ can be an excellent way of being clear about who is ‘bad’ (and therefore worthy of exclusion or death. ) See Psalm 1
* The judgement of God is this – ‘God loves sinners’ (Romans 5:8)
*to ‘imitate Christ’ is to love one’s enemies,
*which breaks the power of tribal scape-goating violence
*and de-stabilising culture by undercutting the myth of redemptive violence
The Eschatological Imagination
*Resurrection + forgiveness of enemies subverts the Apocalpytic imagination

4. But if there is any justice in the world, surely some body’s gotta pay.....!!!!

5. “Jesus took away the sin of the world by exposing it first of all as different that we imagined and letting us know that our pattern if ignorant killing, attacking and blaming is in fact history’s primary illusion, it’s primary lie. Then he shared with us a great participatory love, which would make it possible for us not to hate at all. The game was over after Jesus, at least for those who gazed long enough”.
(Richard Rohr, Things Hidden-Scripture as Spirituality. P.195)

6. “Christian hope consists precisely in our daring to ask with insistence that the forgiving victim become present to us, inviting us to his banquet, as one who burrows a hole in our hut, arriving like a thief in the night, so that we don’t miss through sleep the wrenching invitation to build the celestial counter-story in the teeth of death”
And the great counter story is
(James Allison, Raising Abel, p. 177)

7. You have not come to something
You have not come to something* that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that not another word be spoken to them (for they could not endure the order that was given, ‘If even an animal touches the mountain, it shall be stoned to death.’ Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, ‘I tremble with fear.’) But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly* of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
(Hebrews 12:18-24)