The Girard Reader (37 page)

iniquity, but you will have saved your life.

And you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, Thus have you said: "Our transgressions and

our sins are upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live? Say to

them, As I

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live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked

turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O

house of Israel." ( Ezek. 33:1-11)

Jesus does all in his power to warn mankind and turn them away from paths that will be fatal

henceforth -- the most terrifying texts, like the "Curses against the Pharisees," are just the most extreme and the most dangerous for the messenger of these warnings -- but he also

serves as the victim, once his audience has determined not to listen to him and to fall back

into their old ways. He does not resist their blows, and it is at his expense that they would

become reconciled and reestablish a ritualized community if that were still a possibility. On

all conceivable fronts, he is always ready to take all risks upon himself; he is always ready to

pay with his own person in order to spare men the terrible destiny that awaits them.

Refusing the Kingdom means refusing the knowledge that Jesus bears -- refusing the

knowledge of violence and all its works. In the eyes of those who reject it, this knowledge is

ill-omened; it is the worst of all forms of violence. That is indeed how things must look from

the perspective of the sacrificial community. Jesus appears as a destructive and subversive

force, as a source of contamination that threatens the community. Indeed, to the extent that he

is misunderstood he becomes just that. The way in which he preaches can only make him

appear to be totally lacking in respect for the holiest of institutions, guilty of hubris and,

blasphemy, since he dares to rival God himself in the perfection of the Love that he never

ceases to make manifest.

Certainly the preaching of the Kingdom of God reveals that there is an element of violence even in the most apparently holy of institutions, like the church hierarchy, the rites of the

Temple, and even the family.

Faithful to the logic of sacrifice, those who have refused the invitation to the Kingdom are

obliged to turn against Jesus. They can hardly fall to see in him the sworn enemy and

corruptor of the very cultural order that they are vainly attempting to restore.

This means that violence will find in Jesus the most perfect victim that can be imagined, the

victim that, for every conceivable reason, violence has the most reasons to pick on. Yet at the

same time, this victim is also the most innocent.

J.-M.O.
: What you mean, in other words, is that Jesus, of all the victims who have ever

been, is the only one capable of revealing the true nature of violence to its utmost. Whichever

way you look at it, his death is exemplary; in it the meaning of all the persecutions and

expulsions in which mankind has ever engaged, as well as all the misconceptions that have

sprung from them, stand revealed and represented for all time.

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Jesus, in other words, provides the scapegoat par excellence -- he is the most arbitrary of

victims because he is also the least violent. At the same time he is the least arbitrary and the

most meaningful, again because of being the least violent. We might say that the same reason

always makes Jesus the victim par excellence, in whom the previous history of mankind is

summed up, concluded, and transcended.

R.G.:
Violence is unable to bear the presence of a being that owes it nothing -- that pays it no homage and threatens its kingship in the only way possible. What violence does not and

cannot comprehend is that, in getting rid of Jesus by the usual means, it falls into a trap that

could be laid only by innocence of such a kind because it is not really a trap: there is nothing

hidden. Violence reveals its own game in such a way that its workings are compromises at

their very source; the more it tries to conceal its ridiculous secret from now on, by forcing

itself into action, the more it will succeed in revealing itself.

We can see why the Passion is found between the preaching of the Kingdom and the

Apocalypse. It is an event that is ignored by historians, who have much more serious topics,

with their Tiberius and their Caligula; it is a phenomenon that has no importance in the eyes

of the world -- incapable, at least in principle, of setting up or reinstating a cultural order but

very effective, in spite of those who know better, in carrying out subversion. In the long run,

it is quite capable of undermining and overturning the whole cultural order and supplying the

secret motive force of all subsequent history.

J.-M.O.:
Let me cut in with two questions. First, are you not in fact hypostatizing violence

by treating it like a kind of subjective agency, which is personally hostile to Jesus Christ?

Second, how are you able to reconcile all you have been saying with the real history of

historical Christianity, in other words, with the failure of the Gospel revelation to affect

events? You are the first person to read the Gospels in the way that you do. However brilliant

and rigorous the textual logic that you are unfolding for our benefit, it seems to have no hold

on the real history of mankind, particularly on the history of the part of the world that claimed

to be Christian.

R.G.:
I would reply to your first question by reminding you that violence, in every cultural order, is always the true
subject
of every ritual or institutional structure. From the moment

when the sacrificial order begins to come apart, this subject can no longer be anything but the

adversary par excellence
, which combats the installation of the Kingdom of God. This is the

devil known to us from tradition -- Satan himself, of whom some theologians tell us that he is

both subject and not subject at once.

As for your second question, I cannot reply at the moment, but I shall do so presently. For the

time being, it is only necessary to point out that

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we are searching for coherence in the text, and I believe that we are finding it. We cannot

concern ourselves at this stage with its possible relationship to our history. The fact that this

logic can seem abstract and foreign to history only serves to bring out more clearly its status

as a logic, in relation to the text which we are reading -- and nothing more is required at

present.

First of all, it is important to insist that Christ's death was not a sacrificial one. To say that

Jesus dies, not as a sacrifice, but in order that there may be no more sacrifices, is to recognize

in him the Word of God: "I wish for mercy and not sacrifices." Where that word is not

obeyed, Jesus can remain. There is nothing gratuitous about the utterance of that word and

where it is not followed by any effect, where violence remains master, Jesus must die. Rather

than become the slave of violence, as our own word necessarily does, the Word of God says

no to violence.

J.-M.O.:
That does not mean, if I have understood you rightly, that Jesus' death is a more or

less disguised suicide. The maudlin and morbid element which is to be found in a certain type

of Christianity makes common cause with the sacrificial reading.

R.G.:
Yes, indeed. Since they do not see that human community is dominated by violence,

people do not understand that the very one of them who is untainted by any violence and has

no form of complicity with violence is bound to become the victim. All of them say that the

world is evil and violent. But we must see that there is no possible compromise between

killing and being killed. This is the dilemma brought out by tragic drama. But the majority of

mankind do not accept that it is truly representative of the "human condition." Those who do gain a reputation for "exaggerating," for "taking things tragically." There are a thousand different ways, so it would seem, of escaping from such a dilemma, even in the darkest times

of history. All well and good. But people fail to understand that they are indebted to violence

for the degree of peace that they enjoy.

How can nonviolence become fatal? Clearly it is not so in itself; it is wholly directed toward

life and not toward death! How can the rule of the Kingdom come to have mortal

consequences? This becomes possible and even necessary because others refuse to accept it.

For all violence to be destroyed, it would be sufficient for all of mankind to decide to abide

by this rule. If all mankind offered the other cheek, no cheek would be struck. But for that to

be possible, it would be necessary for each person separately and all people together to

commit themselves irrevocably to the common purpose.

If all men loved their enemies, there would be no more enemies. But if they drop away at the decisive moment, what is going to happen to the one person who does not drop away? For

him the word of life will be changed into the word of death. It can be shown, I believe, that

there

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is not a single action or word attributed to Jesus -- including those that seem harshest at first

sight and including the revelation of the founding murder and the last efforts to turn mankind

aside from a path that will henceforth be fatal -- that is not consistent with the rule of the

Kingdom. It is absolute fidelity to the principle defined in his own preaching that condemns

Jesus. There is no other cause for his death than the love of one's neighbor lived to the very

end, with an infinitely intelligent grasp of the constraints it imposes. "Greater love has no

man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" ( John 15:13).

If violence is genuinely the ruling factor in all cultural orders, and if circumstances at the

time of the preaching of the Gospel are as the text proclaims them to be -- involving, that is to

say, the paroxysm of paroxysms within one single vast prophetic crisis experienced by Judaic

society -- then the refusal of the Kingdom by Jesus' listeners will logically impel them to turn

against him. Moreover, this refusal will issue in the choice of him as a scapegoat, and in

apocalyptic violence, by virtue of the fact that this last of victims, despite having been killed

by unanimous consent, will not produce the beneficial effects that were produced before.

Once it has been possible to detect the operations of violence and the logic underlying them --

or, if you prefer, the logic of violent men -confronted by the logic of Jesus, you will realize

that Jesus never says a word that cannot be deduced from the events that have already taken

place within the perspective of these two types of logic. Here and elsewhere, the "gift of

prophecy" is nothing but the detection of these two logics.

So we can understand why it is that from the moment when the failure of the Kingdom

becomes a certainty, the Gospels repeatedly announce through Jesus' mouth both the

crucifixion and the Apocalypse. The old historical school interpreted these announcements as

ex post facto
prophecies destined to mask the impotence of the political leader in the face of an unexpected disaster.

The reason modern interpreters speak in this way is that they are unable to detect the two

types of logic I have distinguished. Although the logic of violence provisionally has the last

word, the logic of nonviolence is superior, since it comprehends the other logic in addition to

itself -which the logic of violence is incapable of doing. This superior logic of nonviolence

may be in the grip of illusions. But it exists and it must be detected and understood. Modern

commentators fail to do so, and attribute to the Gospels objectives as futile as those of

modern advertising or political propaganda because they do not even suspect the existence of

such a logic.

This incomprehension can be identified with the attitudes stigmatized by the text. It simply

reproduces and extends the reactions of Jesus'

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listeners, including the reactions of his disciples. There are those who believe that Jesus will kill himself, and there are those who believe in his wish for power. Not one of the positions

taken up by modern criticism has not already been sketched within the Gospel text itself, so

clearly that we might claim direct borrowing. Yet we must conclude that modern criticism is

actually unable to see these positions in their original context. Interpreters never notice that

they are themselves invariably understood and explained by the text that they pride

themselves on understanding and explaining to us.

G.L.:
So we can say that Jesus does nothing but obey, right up to the end, the promptings of

the love that he declares has come from the Father and is directed toward all mankind. There

is no reason to suppose that the Father has devised for him alone duties that he would not

require of all mankind: "I say to you: Love your enemies, pray for your persecutors; so you

will be sons of your Father which is in Heaven." All the world is called to become sons of

God. The only distinction -though of course it is a crucial one -- is that the Son hears the

Word of the Father and himself conforms to it right to the end; he makes himself perfectly