This audio recording begins in the middle of a question and answer section of a lecture. Marcus is speaking about the language of sacrifice.
We find the language of sacrifice in both the old and new testament. It is important to realize that the language of sacrifice by itself does not mean substitution. In the old testament and the Jewish practice, the sacrifice of animals was never about god wanting the life of the human being but that he will accept the life of the goat instead. One of the problems many people in the modern church face is a disenchantment with the notion of substitution in sacrifice. Many people still think substitution when they hear the word sacrifice or atonement. Marcus doesn’t have an answer to the question “why did the notion of substitution get so strongly and popularly associated with sacrifice and atonement?”
Dom Crossan talks about metaphors and that it is important to examine the time period people live in to understand the metrics of their specific metaphors. The metaphors they use are often not as much representative of the characteristics of god but more a reflection of the highest powers in their contemporary land. There is a metaphor about god being a feudal lord that comes from Normandy where feudal lords were the highest power in the land.
What is the significance of Jesus referencing the old testament when he proclaims he is “the son of man?”
Dom answers by explaining empire and eschaton. The empires are portrayed as being beasts from the sea, not being of human creation. Jesus wants to be of human creation by comparison. Jesus wants his kingdom of god to be the anti-kingdom to imperial rule. Son of man is in some ways a more transcendental title than son of god because it means that Jesus is the one who has been given the kingdom so that he may bring it down to us. If the son of man is here then the kingdom is here.
Jesus acted his life out of love, he forgave adultery without punishment. What would a church look like that taught how to love with equal fervor as we currently teach the rituals of the church?
Dom answers by saying that the trouble with the word love is that it’s the most precious word in the English language and also the most vacuous. You have to use it for your favorite candy bar and the soulmate of your life. Dom wants to bring together the two meanings of distributive justice and love. Distributive justice is the flesh and body of love and love is the spirit and soul of justice. When you separate body and soul you get a corpse. What we have done in Christianity has separated the body and soul of justice and love and therefore we have a corpse as a result we don’t get either.
Marcus addresses the story of adultery in the gospel of John. This story is a good one in that forgiveness is offered without any penance or compensation or payment being made. If we take Jesus as the decisive revelation of god then that also suggests that the character of god is compassion or love and not that god is a punitive god. Any time that the Christian gospel portrays god as a punitive god you’ve kind of left Christianity. To touch on Dom’s point, love can be a very vapid and vacuous term. The content of what it means to love for Christians is what we see in Jesus, in other words, Jesus defines love, it’s not that love as we understand it is what Jesus was about. If we see Jesus as the decisive revelation of god’s character then we realize that god doesn’t just love the world. As Robert Frost puts it, god “has a lover’s quarrel with the world” that is what drives the passion of Jesus. Jesus’s passion was for a transformed world and a transformed world is more than being about a world where people are nice to each other of forgive each other or love each other. It is about the transformation of the world in the direction of justice and peace. We always need to remember that justice is the social form of love and love without justice is kind of about happy families.
Dom begins again by saying that it would be much better if in the bible we could get rid of the war metaphors instead of victory, struggle would be a more accurate term.
Could you expand on the idea of distributive justice especially when dealing with the different cultures in our society?
Where the bible gets it’s ideas of distributive justice is not where we get our ideas of human rights or anything like that instead it begins at the household, Dom answers. ‘The father’ is really a gendered term for the householder. They are asking ‘what does a well run household look like?’ Dom thinks you could ask that of a lot of cultures and come up with a similar answer. In a well run household the kids would be well fed, protected and sheltered. The animals, lands and fields are well taken care of then you would praise the name of the house holder and say nice job. God is the house holder of the world house, what does a well run household look like when it is the world? Would you look around the world and say nice job god? You can put in intermediate steps and look at a king, the king should be the ideal house holder of the land that he rules. That is where the writers of the bible get their image from. Most people have an understanding of what a decent home is like even if that home is not theirs. Is everyone in the home treated fairly, it is not a question of, does everyone get the same amount of food, a sick child might get and warrant more attention than a healthy child. By that reckoning the world house looks pretty dismal.
Marcus chimes in by saying that a way to move toward a more just society in this country might be through education in local congregations about how central the concern for distributive justice is in the bible, in the old and new testament. In some sense distributive justice is a very simple notion. The structures of society including the economic and educational systems should be fair. This is utterly central to the passion of god and to Jesus’s own passion for the kingdom of god. It’s about fairness and fairness has to do with the idea that everybody should have enough, not as the result of charity but as the product of the way the system is put together. That does not mean everybody gets exactly the same. These conversations need to happen at the congregational level about the bible’s dream of justice and peace. We need to do education and consciousness raising about this and be aware that we are going to encounter resistance. That’s why it’s so important to let the bible speak about this. People can easily dismiss an adult education teacher or clergy person, but it they actually see this in the bible, not just once but all over the place then they can see it’s really there.