The Poison is the Cure
The Necessity of Feasting on the Victim
Photo by Josh Applegate via Unsplash
“There’s something about the Catholic doctrine of the transubstantiation that is always super humbling. Where it’s literally the Body and Blood of Christ, and you’re still no better than a cannibal, and it’s a cannibalistic meal, and the problems of human nature and the problems of violence are continuous with the past. And the only hope we have of doing better are to realize that we’re still [not discontinuous] with the entire human past.” - Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel: Zero to One (Conversation with Eric Metaxas at ‘Socrates in the City’), January 2020 (Source)
I’ve struggled to write this well, but I haven’t been able to get there quite yet. My hope is that the reader will be gracious and patient with me as I build and formulate this line of argument, even while recognizing that it remains unfinished.
Here it goes.
Since I became Catholic, I’ve found myself, of course, wondering why everyone isn’t Catholic. Of course, there are myriad reasons as there are for each and every person, but I recognize that there is a portion of Protestantism that Protests (inter alia) to what Catholics call, in a typical hyper-Latinized word, “transubstantiation.” The doctrine of transubstantiation is covered in great length elsewhere by persons much more learn’d than I, but to put it extremely simply, transubstantiation is the belief that the bread and wine that is offered in the Catholic Mass becomes, at the “Words of Institution” said by the priest (“This is My Body…” and “This is My Blood…” from the Passover meal shared by Jesus with the disciples shortly before his arrest and crucifixion) the actual human, fleshly, guts-and-all Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, while still of course maintaining, in most occasions, the appearance of bread and wine.
A not uncommon Protestant response to this construction of the Last Supper is that Catholics are “killing Jesus all over again,” which would bemuse any Girardian. Catholics may be too scandalized in their response to this, which is often to assert that Catholics enter into the moment of Calvary, at the one and only sacrifice of Jesus in an eternal moment that is entered into again and again at every Mass, but “occurs” in history only once.
Though I’d have to do some formal polling to better understand this, my terrible assumption is that the circles of the Venn diagram of “people who believe in the Last Supper as a symbol” and “people who believe in penal substitutionary atonement” (not to say that a not insignificant number of Catholics don’t believe in some version of this; a matter for another time) has some considerable weight. To give myself extra scientific credibility that I certainly don’t deserve, behold, I have made a new thing and drawn such a diagram for you.
I can’t here go into all the problems with penal substitutionary atonement and I fully recognize it originates from Anselm, a Catholic, and at the risk of making too shocking a statement, I do believe we have to explore whether this a fundamentally pagan perception of Christianity that is extremely problematic and may bear some substantial responsibility for the abandonment of traditional Christian belief in the West.
I am drawn to an arresting story in the Book of Numbers. The Israelites, still wandering in the exodus to the desert, suffer a plague of snakebites which kills some of them (Numbers 21:6: “Then the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.”). As a typical response to a plague, the Israelites assume that the plague of serpents is because they have “sinned” because they have “spoken against the Lord” (complaining about the desert conditions).
The Israelites ask Moses to “intercede with the Lord” so that the Lord will “remove the serpents.”
Moses does as he is asked, intercedes for the people. In response, God instructs that Moses should make a fiery serpent (a graven image, particularly notable for this culture which typically eschewed such as part of pagan practices) and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten will live when they look at the bronze serpent.
The thread of the bronze serpent is only picked up two more times in the entire Bible, once in 2 Kings and once in the Gospel of John. In 2 Kings, some hundreds or thousands of years after Numbers, King Hezekiah breaks up this bronze serpent (in addition to some other smashing of “sacred” things). The justification given is that the Israelites had been in the practice of burning incense before this bronze serpent.
In the third and final time that the bronze serpent is referenced in the Bible, Jesus says:
“As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up; that whosever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”
Where did the Israelites of King Hezekiah’s time go wrong? After all, the same practice of interacting with the bronze serpent had saved their own ancestors in the desert, without which it they would not be there. It seems logical that the Israelites of Hezekiah’s period would want to engage with such a thing, particularly since it came directly from the Lord’s instruction.
Interestingly, in such a climate, they, not in any immediate need of relief from the venom of the asps coursing up to their hearts, seem to find themselves circling back to offering sacrifice to the bronze serpent. Meanwhile, their ancestors did nothing but look on the serpent and so find their salvation — the action that Jesus again emphasizes to Nicodemus in John 3, the Spirit of Life discourse.
Notably, John does not have Jesus here referring to the later incident of Hezekiah (with which he would have been well familiar). He does not pick up the thread of what is really happening in 2 Kings, which is that the Israelites have refashioned one type of relationship to the bronze serpent to another type one that is wholly integrated within the system that requires a sacrifice, even of incense. Jesus in John 3 calls back to the Israelites’ original relationship with the bronze serpent, and likens himself and his own mission to it: something instinctive, something primal, something relational.
Unlike Jesus, the bronze serpent isn’t a living, breathing thing. It’s bronze, a representation, not even some dead asp strung up on the pole that we could call a once living thing. The Israelites of the desert related to the bronze serpent, though: they looked at it as if their lives depended on it, because they knew full well that it did.
But again, anything static like this — a golden calf, a bronze serpent — begs for a sacrificial system to be constructed around it. And that’s exactly what happened, several thousand years later, away from the extreme reality of encounter in the desert, up high in the nice constructed walls of civilization.
What are the snakes of Numbers? Sent by God? No. The plague of snakebites are like any other plague, any other external event that threatens the community into finding a scapegoat. The snakes of Numbers are simply creatures irritated at the passing through of the Israelites and disturbance of their habitat. The snakebites are functionally meaningless in the larger narrative. It isn’t the snakebites that matter. It’s the response to the snakebites that we must look to.
What is the typical response to plague? To believe that it is caused by some external force that is angry with the community (whether this belief is consciously or unconsciously held, the community acts as if this is true), and then to very quickly start looking for a scapegoat to hunt and kill in order to end the plague.
In Numbers, the Israelites are presented as a group. It is the group of nameless, faceless Israelites who go to Moses to ask him for relief from the snakebites. Already, we have the perfect image of the all-against-one: an identity-less group against the one named man. This named man, Moses, is a stranger in a strange land, a lowly Hebrew would-be murder victim raised in the highest palace of the land by pagan foreigners, one who speaks with some sort of stutter or notable speech impediment, one marked by God in a unique insider-outsider status. Moses is a would-be scapegoat of this little story, a Chekov’s shotgun hanging over the mantle, just begging to be fired.
But here, Moses is not pushed off any cliffs, nor thrown to snakes himself. Instead, he is an intercessor for the community, and the community recognizes him as such.
What does the Lord do, in response to Moses’ request? The Lord listens to the would-be scapegoat. The voice of the would-be innocent victim is heard — not, quite literally as would sometimes happen — drowned out. The voice of the would-be innocent victim is prioritized above other voices, above the community as a whole.
Not only does the Lord listen to the would-be innocent victim, the Lord provides a non-violent means of salvation to the community through that one person.
This is the mic drop. I have to emphasize it more loudly here because you, dear reader, have a disease that doesn’t let you see the fullness of the meaning here: you are infected with the Christian virus; the lens through which you see the world is already compromised. This is the shift — right here, paganism to Christianity, the rift, the apocalypse.
The community is saved not because the community has triumphed in expelling the innocent victim, but because the would-be innocent victim is the means of grace for the community, in a manner that the would-be innocent victim completely controls. This is no foaming at the mouth, no mad Bacchanal romp from which we awake from the frenzy of the night to pools of blood at dawn. No, this sequence of events in Numbers is sober, calculated, thought-out.
Moses’ bronze serpent in the desert is not just healing of the Israelites. It is the beginning of a healing of the entire world from the wound of the sacrificial system — even as the bronze serpent later slips its way back into it, a world obsessed with mimetic rivalry and sacrifice.
Jesus will be no inert bronze serpent. In John 3, he claims healing simply by belief in the Son of Man, healing into eternal life. This is a promise beyond what was offered to the desert Israelites, and he is something more than the bronze serpent, too. Belief in the Son of Man is to believe in the dead-and-risen God, the one stone rejected by the builders to become the cornerstone. Belief in the Son of Man is to acknowledge the innocent victim, to see through the filter of mimesis and to work to reject it.
Here is where I see penal substitutionary atonement together with any belief that the Last Supper, communion, whatever you want to call it — can only be celebrated or recognized as a symbol, something that Christians might do from time to time to remember the Last Supper but not to actually engage with it as real.
It seems to me that such an approach runs the risk of being quite pagan. It seems to make some sort of altar to Nehushtan, to put Jesus right back into the sacrificial system again. He died for our sins, once, long ago in the past, because God’s justice demanded it, and then now we have some sort of vague relationship to this event in which we accept Jesus as Lord and Savior into our hearts, say that he “paid the price for our sins” (which is true, but not in the way that a subscriber to penal substitutionary atonement might think) and we believe that we are somehow covered in the blood of Jesus to the extent that it shelters us from the anger of God the Father at our own sins. It’s not clear to me how Jesus’ sacrifice is any different than any other pagan sacrifice, with the only exception being that God offers himself to himself, the Son to the Father. Perhaps that suffices for some, but it doesn’t seem to me to go quite far enough in making Jesus so strikingly different from the pagan world in the way that Jesus himself would seem to demand. I don’t see in this construction of Christianity the very thing that is shaking culture at its roots, revealing the “things hidden since the foundation of the world.”
Those who would assert that the “Last Supper” of Jesus should be a commemorative meal that is purely symbolic (whatever that means) of the sacrifice miss the opportunity given in the theology of the transubstantiation of the bread and wine into the real Body and Blood of the Innocent Victim. If we come to the Last Supper as symbol, we risk building our faith on something that is as inert as the bronze serpent, something that does not engage with us and challenge us, because it isn’t anything but ordinary food and drink that we can find at the supermarket. It seems to permit us too much the luxury of trusting in the pagan conception of sacrifice, that a certain person’s blood has been shed to appease the angry God, and we can take shelter in that blood and avoid that anger. We are not challenged by the Last Supper as a symbol (again, whatever that means); it is simply some sort of re-presentation of a re-presentation, sufficiently distant from us and somehow appended to our belief in the sacrifice of Jesus.
But what if the Last Supper weren’t some sort of re-presentation and indeed, never was? What if it was something so much more challenging and demanding to us, something that made us as desperate as the snakebitten Israelites in the desert, needing the cure?
What if it was calling us back to realize that we are the ones consuming the Innocent Victim in our frenzy for blood and flesh? What if we are the ones who have demanded such sacrifice out of our envy that spirals into mimetic rivalry? What if we do not compartmentalize our own sins to God? What if it is the Innocent Victim who has wholeheartedly and willingly given of the infinity of himself as God-Man to humankind, to slake this thirst so that we can finally begin to move beyond it?
What if we are the ones who should crawl over broken glass not in sacrifice, but in full and honest relationship to the Innocent Victim, to gnaw on his flesh?
Perhaps, in so doing, we would open up to knowing ourselves more fully as the animals we are, as desperate as the snakebitten Israelites in the desert, feeling the mortal poison infecting our own hearts, and looking up to the victim to beg from him the mercy that is so freely given.