A Collision of Cross-Purposes
With that for context, let me now offer you what I think is the first and most
helpful meaning of Jesus’s death—how the most famous act in Christian history
both reveals the problem we are up against and gives us a way through it. My
premise, as you’ll see, is that:
It is not God who is violent. We are.
It is not that God demands suffering of humans. We do.
God does not need or want suffering—neither in Jesus nor in us.
Girard understands Hebrews’s frequent “once and for all” language (7:27,
9:12, 26, 10:10) in a quite definitive way as the end of any need for any sacrifices
by which to please God. The problem of divine love is settled forever from
God’s side. In our insecurity, we keep re-creating “necessary sacrifices.”
Hear Jesus’s words in John’s Gospel: “I did not come to condemn the world,
but to save it” (12:47). Or in Matthew, “Come to me all you who labor and are
overburdened, and I will give you rest....for I am gentle and humble of heart.
Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (11:28). If you grew up a Christian,
you’ve probably read verses like these dozens of times. But once you can make
the switch from a juridical and punitive worldview to a grace-filled and
transformative one, you will see such passages throughout the New Testament
in a new and central light.
Most of us are still programmed to read the Scriptures according to the
common laws of jurisprudence, which are hardly ever based on restorative
justice. (Even the term was not common till recently.) Restorative justice was
the amazing discovery of the Jewish prophets, in which Yahweh punished Israel
by loving them even more! (Ezekiel 16:53ff.). Jurisprudence has its important
place in human society, but it cannot be transferred to the divine mind. It
cannot guide us inside the realm of infinite love or infinite anything. A
worldview of weighing and counting is utterly insufficient once you fall into
the ocean of mercy. If I can ever so slightly paraphrase my dear Thérèse of
Lisieux, there is a science about which God knows nothing—addition and
subtraction. Thérèse understood the full and final meaning of being saved by
grace alone as few have in all of Christian history.