Jesus makes a seemingly bizarre and squeamish sacrificial saying in the Gospel of John, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
The New Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris claim that these kinds of ancient religious fables are the problem with the modern world and religious people should just grow up and leave the religious worldview behind.
As you can imagine, I beg to differ. In fact, when Jesus says these words, he is actually subverting religion and sacrificial violence. But in order to make sense of this religious and sacrificial language, we need to do a bit of history and a bit of anthropology.
Ancient Religion and the Social Function of Sacrifice
One of my favorite anthropologists is a man named René Girard. Girard looks at the historical and archeological evidence of the ancient past and claims that religion and sacrificial violence emerged virtually at the same time, so that violence and the sacred are intermixed.
He postulated that our ancient ancestors had a major problem – violent conflict. Individuals fought with one another over resources that were either limited or, possibly more likely, that they refused to share. This fight turned into a war of all against all that consumed the group. Many of these ancient groups were destroyed by the chaotic violence that ensued.
But Girard says that over time, something happened that allowed some ancient groups to survive. They still suffered from violent conflict that threatened their survival, but soon one person in the group pointed the finger of accusation against another. And then other people began pointing their fingers against that same person. Soon, everyone was united in blaming an individual for the problems that threatened the community. The war of all against all turned into a war of all against one.
That person who was blamed became their scapegoat. All of the violence and hostility within the group was channeled against this one individual. Girard states that this individual was sacrificed or banished from the group.
This created the distinction between “us and them,” or “we good guys” and “those bad guys.” The act of violence against the scapegoat brought a sense of peace to the group. Where there was once conflict, there was now cooperation. Where there was once the threat of all-consuming violence, this act of sacrifice brought a sense of miraculous peace.
One thing that might help in understanding this theory is how prevalent the basic act of ancient sacrifice remains today. It’s still true that the easiest way to manage conflict is not to actually deal with the conflict, but to unite against a common enemy. Instead of dealing with conflict, it seems that it’s much easier to find a sense of unity by blaming another for our problems.
That’s what the ancient human groups did, too. And when they experienced this miraculous sense of peace, they thought it was a gift from the gods. But the gods can give peace and they can take it away.
Whenever the community experienced conflict again, they thought the gods were mad at them. How do you make peace with the gods? The same way you make peace with one another – by uniting against and sacrificing a common enemy.
The angry gods demanded more and more from the people – which often came in the form of child sacrifice. In fact, many cultures, including those in the surrounding Jewish world, practiced child sacrifice.
What’s important to know is that in the ancient world, religion wasn’t simply about myth and superstitions. The sacrificial rite had a real social function. It brought a good thing – a sense of peace and cooperation, but sacrifice brought that through acts of violence against a scapegoat.
The New Atheists are right to criticize that religious violence. The problem is that the Jewish and Christian traditions had already been criticizing religious violence for nearly three thousand years.
Jesus Critique of Sacrifice
This history of religion and sacrifice is important to understand as we read the Bible. For example, the prophets condemned religious sacrificial violence. The prophet Hosea, for example, said that God desires merciful love, not sacrifice. The true God doesn’t want us to divide the world into us, the good guys, and them, the bad guys that we can sacrifice. God wants us to treat all people with merciful love.
Jesus’ comment about eating his body and blood begins to make sense in this light. You see, from the beginning of human history, we have thought the gods were angry at us. So we thought we had to perform some kind of human sacrifice in order to appease the gods. We had to blame some person or group for our problems and sacrifice them in order to appease the gods and give us peace. The sacrifice was a violent offering that people gave to the gods, and it seemed as if the gods loved to taste the blood of the victims because it brought a sense of peace.
Jesus reversed this whole dynamic. Jesus provides us with an anti-religious and anti-sacrificial religion. In Jesus we find that we don’t have to make peace with God, because God has already made peace with us. The true God doesn’t desire sacrificial violence or the death or exclusion of a scapegoat. We do not have to give an offering of sacrificial violence to God. In fact, Jesus reveals that God already gives everything of God’s self to us. We don’t need to sacrifice to God because God sacrifices God’s self to us. Not in the sense that the Father sacrifices the Son on the cross. Rather, God’s sense of sacrifice is an act of giving. As Romans 12:1 suggests, it’s a living sacrifice. God gives God’s self to us in a nonviolent sacrificial offering. But what are we going to do with God’s body when it is among us? That’s what Jesus means when he says, “This is my body and my blood, given for you.” Unfortunately, humans decided to sacrifice God in our midst in the person of Jesus.
But the human sacrifice of Jesus didn’t have the last word. Resurrection has the last word. Jesus was not resurrected to come back for divine revenge. Instead, Jesus came back to offer what the true God has always offered us: peace.
The new community of the resurrected Jesus was no longer to create a sense of unity based on scapegoating another. Instead, the new community was to create unity through love and forgiveness. That’s the mission of the church. And it’s the subversion of all religion based on sacrifice.
