by Richard Rohr
In the same way, mutual desiring is the intended impact of the Eucharist.
We know that Jesus loved to refer to himself as the “bridegroom” (John 3:29, Matthew 9:15), and one of his first recorded acts of ministry was whooping it up at a wedding feast (John 2:1), creating 150 gallons of wine out of water toward the end of the party! (What do Baptists do with that?) We also know that the very erotic Song of Songs somehow made its way into the Bible, and its images of union have been precious to mystics from the earliest centuries. Yet much of later Christianity has been rather prudish and ashamed of the human body, which God took on so happily through Jesus, and then gave away to us so freely in the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is an encounter of the heart, knowing Presence through our own offered presence. In the Eucharist, we move beyond mere words or rational thought and go to that place where we don’t talk about the Mystery anymore; we begin to chew on it. Jesus did not say, “Think about this” or “Stare at this” or even “Worship this.” Instead he said, “Eat this!”
We must move our knowing to the bodily, cellular, participative, and thus unitive level. We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, in an undefended moment, “My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.” Then we can henceforth trust and allow what has been true since the first moment of our existence. As I mentioned before, the Eucharist should operate like a stun gun, not just a pretty ceremony. We have dignity and power flowing through us in our bare and naked existence—and everybody else does too, even though most do not know it. A body awareness of this sort is enough to steer and empower our entire faith life, while merely assenting to or saying the words will never give us the jolt we need to absorb the divine desire for us—and for Itself. Frankly, we’re talking about the difference between receiving a sincere Valentine’s Day card that says, “I love you,” and making physical, naked, and tender love to someone you deeply care about and who cares for you. Why are we so afraid of that?
This is why I must hold to the orthodox belief that there is Real Presence in the bread and wine. For me, if we sacrifice Reality in the elements, we end up sacrificing the same Reality in ourselves. As Flannery O’Connor once declared: “Well, if it is just a symbol, to hell with it!”*
The Eucharist then becomes our ongoing touchstone for the Christian journey, a place to which we must repeatedly return in order to find our face, our name, our absolute identity, who we are in Christ, and thus who we are forever. We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!
This continues in Romans 8:18–25 (as creation), 1 Corinthians 10:16ff. and 11:23ff. (as bread and wine), and in 12:12ff. (as people). In each of these Scriptures, and in an ever-expanding sense, Paul expresses his full belief that there is a real transfer of human and spiritual identity from Christ to Creation, to the elements of bread and wine, and through them to human beings. The Great Circle of Inclusion (the Trinity) is a centrifugal force that will finally pull everything back into itself—exactly as many physicists predict will happen to the universe the moment it finally stops expanding. They call it the “Big Crunch,” and some even say it will take a nanosecond to happen. (Could this be a real description of the “Second Coming of Christ”? Or the “Final Judgment”? I think so.)
Thus Eucharist, like Resurrection, is not a unique event or strange anomaly.
Eucharist is the Incarnation of Christ taken to its final shape and end—the very elements of the earth itself.
It is all one continuum of Incarnation.
Who we are in God is who we all are.
Everything else is changing and passing away.
Written with great joy on Easter Sunday, 2017
* Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 125.
12
Why Did Jesus Die?
Our predestination to glory is prior by nature to any notion of sin.
—John Duns Scotus, OFM
Thirty-five years of men’s work around the world have shown me how deeply the human psyche in almost every culture has been wounded and scarred by violent, unavailable, and abusive fathers and other men. The impact of this wounding on our spiritual sensitivities is profound. Of course, there is no shortage of reasons why someone wouldn’t trust or believe in God, but surely one of the most counterproductive things Christians have done is add to those reasons by presenting “God the Father” as a tyrant, a sadist, a rage-aholic dad, or just an unreliable lover.
A clear case in point is the now-dominant explanation of why Jesus had to die and how that transaction is related to our salvation. It made God “the Father” distant and cold.
For most of Christian history, no single consensus prevailed on what it means when Christians say, “Jesus died for our sins,” but in recent centuries one theory did take over. It was often referred to as the “penal substitutionary atonement theory,” especially once it was developed after the Reformation. Substitutionary atonement is the theory that Christ, by his own sacrificial choice, was punished in the place of us sinners, thus satisfying the “demands of justice” so that God could forgive our sins. This theory of atonement ultimately relies on another commonly accepted notion—the “original sin” of Adam and Eve, which we were told taints all human beings. But much like original sin, which we considered earlier, most Christians have never been told how recent and regional this explanation is, and that it fully relies upon a retributive notion of justice. Nor are they told that it is just a theory, even though some groups take it as long-standing dogma. The early church never heard of this; at best they had some idea of “ransom” from the many biblical metaphors.
Until we see this explanation of why Jesus had to die for what it is and what it isn’t, we’ll struggle to liberate our notions of both Christ and Jesus and to see them as a revelation of the infinite love of the Trinity, not some bloody transaction “required” by God’s offended justice in order to rectify the problem of human sin.
In this chapter, I hope to address how our commonly accepted atonement theory—especially as accomplished through the life, suffering, and death of Jesus—led to some serious misunderstandings of Jesus’s role and Christ’s eternal purpose, reaffirmed our narrow notion of retributive justice, and legitimated a notion of “good and necessary violence” all the way down. I take up this subject with both excitement and trepidation because I know the theory of substitutionary atonement is central to the faith of many. But the questions of why Jesus died and what is the meaning and message of his death have dominated the recent Christian narrative, often much more than his life and teaching. As some have said, if this theory is true, all we needed was the last three days or even three hours of Jesus’s life. In my opinion, this interpretation has kept us from a deep and truly transformative understanding of both Jesus and Christ. Salvation became a one-time transactional affair between Jesus and his Father, instead of an ongoing transformational lesson for the human soul and for all of history.
At best, the theory of substitutionary atonement has inoculated us against the true effects of the Gospel, causing us to largely “thank” Jesus instead of honestly imitating him. At worst, it led us to see God as a cold, brutal figure, who demands acts of violence before God can love his own creation. Now, there is no doubt that both Testaments are filled with metaphors of atonement, sacrifice, expiation, ransom, paying the price, opening the gates, et cetera. But these are common temple metaphors that would’ve made sense to a Jewish audience. Anthropologically speaking, these words and assumptions reflect a magical or what I call “transactional” way of thinking. By that I mean that if you just believe the right thing, say the right prayer, or practice the right ritual, things will go right for you in the divine courtroom. In my experience, this way of thinking loses its power as people and cult
ures grow up and seek actual changes in their minds and hearts. Then, transformational thinking tends to supplant transactional thinking.
As I wrote earlier, Christianity’s vision of God was a radical departure from most ancient religions. Instead of having God “eat” humans, animals, or crops, which are sacrificed on an altar, Christianity made the bold claim that God’s very body was given for us to eat! This turned everything around and undid the seeming logic of quid pro quo thinking. As long as we employ any retributive notion of God’s offended justice (required punishment for wrongdoing), we trade our distinctive Christian message for the cold, hard justice that has prevailed in most cultures throughout history. We offer no redemptive alternative to history but actually sanctify the very “powers and principalities” that Paul says unduly control the world (Ephesians 3:9–10, 6:12). We stay inside of what some call the “myth of redemptive violence,” which might just be the dominant story line of history.
It’s time for Christianity to rediscover the deeper biblical theme of restorative justice, which focuses on rehabilitation and reconciliation and not punishment. (Read Ezekiel 16 for a supreme example of this.) We could call Jesus’s story line the “myth of redemptive suffering”—not as in “paying a price” but as in offering the self for the other. Or “at-one-ment” instead of atonement!
Restorative justice, of course, comes to its full demonstration in the constant healing ministry of Jesus. Jesus represents the real and deeper level of teaching of the Jewish Prophets. Jesus never punished anybody! Yes, he challenged people, but always for the sake of insight, healing, and restoration of people and situations to their divine origin and source. Once a person recognizes that Jesus’s mission (obvious in all four Gospels) was to heal people, not punish them, the dominant theories of retributive justice begin to lose their appeal and their authority.
The History of a Theory
It only makes sense that early Christians would look for a logical and deeply meaningful explanation for the “why” of the tragic death of their religion’s founder. But for centuries, appeasing an angry, fanatical Father was not their answer. The consensus for the first eleven hundred years was that the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross—the “price” or the ransom—was being paid not to God, but to the devil! Yes, I know this now seems silly, but it’s what many Christians believed for almost a millennium. This made the devil pretty powerful and God pretty weak, but it gave the people someone to blame for Jesus’s death. And at least it was not God at that point.
Then, in the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury wrote a paper called Cur Deus Homo? or “Why Did God Become a Human?” which, unfortunately, might just be the most successful piece of theology ever written. Thinking he could solve the problem of sin inside of the medieval code of feudal honor and shame, Anselm said, in effect, “Yes, a price did need to be paid to restore God’s honor, and it needed to be paid to God the Father—by one who was equally divine.” Apparently, Anselm never thought out the disastrous implications of his theory, especially for people who were already afraid or resentful of God. In authoritarian and patriarchal cultures, most people were fully programmed to think this way—working to appease an authority figure who was angry, punitive, and even violent in his reactions. Many still operate this way, especially if they had an angry or abusive parent. People respond to this kind of God because it fits their own story line.
Unfortunately, for a simple but devastating reason, this understanding also nullifies any in-depth spiritual journey: Why would you love or trust or desire to be with such a God?
Over the next few centuries, Anselm’s honor- and shame-based way of thinking came to be accepted among Christians, though it met resistance from some, particularly my own Franciscan school. Protestants accepted the mainline Catholic position, and embraced it with even more fervor. Evangelicals later enshrined it as one of the “four pillars” of foundational Christian belief, which the earlier period would have thought strange. They were never told of the varied history of this belief, even among a few Protestants, and if you came from a full “law and order” culture, which most have till very recently, it made perfect sense.
The Franciscans, however, led by John Duns Scotus (1266–1308), refused to see the Incarnation, and its final denouement on the cross, as a mere reaction to sin. Instead, they claimed that the cross was a freely chosen revelation of Total Love on God’s part. In so doing, they reversed the engines of almost all world religion up to that point, which assumed we had to spill blood to get to a distant and demanding God. On the cross, the Franciscan school believed, God was “spilling blood” to reach out to us!*1 This is a sea change in consciousness. The cross, instead of being a transaction, was seen as a dramatic demonstration of God’s outpouring love, meant to utterly shock the heart and turn it back toward trust and love of the Creator.
In the Franciscan school, God did not need to be paid in order to love and forgive God’s own creation for its failures. Love cannot be bought by some “necessary sacrifice”; if it could, it would not and could not work its transformative effects. Try loving your spouse or children that way, and see where it gets you. Scotus and his followers were committed to protecting the absolute freedom and love of God. If forgiveness needs to be bought or paid for, then it is not authentic forgiveness at all, which must be a free letting-go.
I’m not sure Christians even yet recognize the dangers of penal substitutionary atonement theory. Perhaps the underlying assumptions were never made clear, even though thinking people throughout the ages were often repelled by such a crass notion of God. Even more so in our time, these theories have become a nail in the coffin of belief for many. Some Christians just repress their misgiving because they think it implies a complete loss of faith. But I would wager that for every person who voices doubt, many more quietly walk away from a religion that has come to seem irrational, mythological, and deeply unsatisfying to the heart and soul. These are not bad people!
We can do so much better, and doing so will not diminish Jesus in the least. In fact, it will allow Jesus to take on a universal and humanly appealing dimension, striking at the heart of our inability to believe in unconditional love. The cross cannot be an arbitrary and bloody sacrifice entirely dependent on a sin that was once committed by one man and one woman under a tree between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. That idea, frankly, reduces any notion of a universal or truly “catholic” revelation to one planet, at the edge of one solar system, in a universe of what now seem to be billions of galaxies, with trillions of solar systems. A religion based on necessary and required sacrifices, and those ending up required primarily of Jesus and later the underclass, is just not glorious enough for, hopeful enough for, or even befitting the marvelous creation that we are all a part of. To those who cling to Anselm’s understanding, I would say, as J. B. Phillips wrote many years ago, “Your God is too small.”
Far too many evils have been committed in history under the manipulative cry of “sacrifice,” usually violent and necessary sacrifice for an always “noble” cause. (Just go to any Veterans Day parade and you’ll see that sacrifice unites both liberals and conservatives rather quickly.) But I believe Jesus utterly undoes the very notion of sacrificial requirements for God to love us—first in himself, and then in all of us. “Go, learn the meaning of the words, what I want is mercy, not sacrifice!” Jesus said throughout the Gospels (Matthew 9:13, 12:7). He was quoting the prophet Hosea, who further added, “I want knowledge of God, not your holocausts” (6:6). Notions of sacrifice keep us in the retributive justice framework and outside of the essential Gospel of grace and undeserved love. This is major for understanding the Gospel. French philosopher and literary critic René Girard (1923–2015) goes to great length to demonstrate that Jesus puts to an end all notions of sacrificial religion, which only maintain our quid pro quo worldviews.*2 I highly recommend him.
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.
