ANÁLISIS DIMENSIONAL Y SEMEJANZA FÍSICA EN

Gil Bailie makes a wonderful connection between the ‘scapegoat’ in the Old Testament and the ‘Lamb of God’ in the New Testament since both of them are meant to take away the sins of the world. Unlike the scapegoat who takes away the sins of the people, the Lamb of God takes away the power which gives birth to individual sins. It is for this that the mention of the Lamb of God emphasizes both the innocence of the victim and the sacrificial reversal that takes place because of the revelation made by the Lamb. The Lamb of God reveals to humanity that sins are taken away by the self-emptying stance of God manifested in the unconditional forgiveness of sinners and not by the unanimous murders of scapegoats. The reversal happens when the Lamb of God in his human form, who like all human beings should demand victims to take away sins, himself dies at the hands of the victimizers in an act of forgiveness. By this stance the Lamb of God reverses the age-old scapegoat mechanism and reveals that forgiveness is the new way of attaining reconciliation with God and neighbor.

Bailie, like ‘Piet Schoonenberg,’¹ finds in John’s gospel a summary of striking similarities between the scapegoat mechanisms or sacrifices employed throughout the history of the ancient society in order to take away sins and the way the gospels talk about the same reality.

They both find in what John the Baptist said to his disciples a revelation of the mystery of sin.

John writes: “The next day he (John the Baptist) saw Jesus coming toward him and said,

‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (Jn. 1:29). The Church has given this proclamation a prominent place in its liturgy as it is found in the Gloria, in the litany during fraction (Agnus Dei.. addressed to the sacrificed savior), and at the elevation of the body and blood of Christ.

The significance of these proclamations is that in the Gloria and in John the Baptist’s call to behold the Lamb of God, sin is referred to in singular form: SIN. On the contrary, at the elevation of the body and blood of Christ, sin is referred to in plural: sins. The Latin text of the Gloria translates the Greek (Κύριε ὁ Θεός, ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ, ὁ Υἱός τοῦ Πατρός, ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου) into (Dómine Deus, Agnus Dei, Fílius Patris, qui tollis peccáta mundi).

The point of contention here is how the Greek text maintains John the Baptist’s singular form for SIN (ἁμαρτίαν) while the Latin uses the plural form, sins (peccáta). Unfortunately, the 2011 English translation of the Roman Missal changes the 1970 and 2002 translations which did not keep exactly the Latin text which had a plural form for sins (peccáta). The 1970 and 2002 missal translated it as if it was (peccatum) SIN as it read: “Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father

1 Piet Schoonenberg in his work Sin and Man: A Theological View, tr. Joseph Donceel, (Notre Dame, Indiana, Notre Dame University Press, 1965), makes ̮ ̻Ή̻ΛΉ̼̮Λ ͊ϲ͊ͼ͊μΉμ Ω͔ φΆ͊ εΆθ̮μ͊ ͡φΆ͊ μΉ΢ Ω͔ φΆ͊ ϭΩθΛ͆͢ Ή΢ Ωθ͆͊θ φΩ ̻θΉ΢ͼ forward the idea that since the Fall of Adam and Eve the world has been subjected to sin. He began to view sin not only as a pervading alienation from God and creatures represented by merely the performance of single or Ή΢͆ΉϬΉ͆ϡ̮Λ μΉ΢͔ϡΛ ̮̼φμ΁ ̻ϡφ φΆ̮φ ΆϡΡ̮΢ ̻͊Ή΢ͼμ ̮θ͊ ͡μΉφϡ̮φ͊͆͢ Ή΢ φΆ͊ ̼Ω΢φ͊ϲφ Ω͔ ̮ μinful world. Therefore sin is

who takes away the SIN of the world.”² This being the case, then, it makes more sense to argue that the Greek text was maintaining the biblical proclamation of John the Baptist which announces that the Lamb of God comes to take away the “power of sin” which makes all individual sins possible.

However this apparent inconsistency in the use SIN and sins is an important one because the Sin of the world is the condition of possibility of all individual sins. It is not without importance that this inconsistency is present in the entire work of René Girard. Girard considers Satan (scandal) to be a power that causes all other individual scandals because like SIN he is the father of all lies. From SIN we have individual sins which include “envy, lust, pride, greed, jealousy, avarice, and covetousness, each one famishing further a craving it cannot satisfy and swirling the sinner ever deeper into a vortex of luring, lying, swindling, pandering, betrayal, and violence.”³ In this regard, “to sin is to succumb to the entangled nexus of rivalistic desires and thereby to fall ever more inextricably under the power of SIN.”⁴ Bailie argues that “the power of sin” is synonymous with “the power of Satan” in his accusatory, lying and murderous scheming.

As a power, SIN destroys the consciousness of sins. Sin like Satan obliterates the consciousness of sins “by infecting the whole community and swirling it into the most profound kind of madness, sin magically transforms itself into righteousness, rectitude, peace and social

2 2002 Roman Missal

3 GΉΛ ̮ΉΛΉ͊΁ ͡René GΉθ̮θ͆͞μ Ω΢φθΉ̻ϡφΉΩ΢ φΩ φΆ͊ Άϡθ̼Ά Ω͔ φΆ͊ 21^st Century,͢ In Communio: international Catholic Review, 26 No. 1 (Spring 1999), 134-153

4 Ibid., 139

camaraderie.”⁵ The Lamb of God comes to reveal and to take away SIN, the mechanism which destroys the consciousness of sins.

In order to understand the centrality of the Cross for our salvation it is important to understand sin not only as a moral problem but as a power which makes us turn our desires in a wrong direction. “Sin of course, is (ἁμαρτίαν) hamartia, missing the mark. Girard brings Augustine’s understanding of sin (homo incurvatus in se) into a sharper focus. It is turning one’s desires in a wrong direction; it is imitating the wrong model, or imitating only enviously and rivalrously.”⁶ This is a failure to desire what God desires because desiring what another person desires is longing for something that both the model and the imitator cannot possess. “The failure to desire what God desires, the theme of the first commandment, is therefore the theological summation of the human predicament. The irresistible impulse to desire what our fellow fallen creatures desire, the theme of the last commandment, is the anthropological summation of that same predicament.”⁷ In short, when human beings turn their desires away from God’s desire to material things or social honor made desirable by the other with whom they must compete, SIN infects them with more sins. Bailie quotes Virgil instructing Dante: “For when your longings center on things such that sharing them apportions less to each, the envy stirs the bellows of your sighs. But if the love within the Highest Sphere should turn your longings heavenward, the fear inhabiting your breast would disappear; for there, the more there are who would say ‘ours’ so much the greater is the good possessed by each.”⁸ The love within the Highest Sphere would

5 Ibid., 139

6 Ibid., 136

7 Ibid., 136

certainly destroy the tendency to grasp at things which bind human relationships in relentless competition. The reality is that people have desired being (including material property) by grasping after it than receiving it as a gratuitous gift of love.

What the Cross reveals is the connection between the power of Satan (SIN) and the forgiveness of sins. “We begin to understand the meaning of the Cross when we realize that it is the ‘power of Satan’ that keeps fallen humanity from receiving forgiveness… of course fallen and sinful humanity stands constantly in need of forgiveness, but the urgency with which Jesus takes up the task of forgiveness needs to be understood in historical relationship to the Cross and its far flung anthropological effects.”⁹ The bottom line is that both in the Christian Bible and in ancient-history-of- religions (mythic or what Girard calls archaic religions) humanity has gone to the “CROSS” (execution or expulsion of the supposed cause of the problem) to take away their sins. Bailie writes:

Speaking anthropologically, the ‘Cross’ is where sin ridden humanity has always gone to take away its "sins," and the Cross is where Jesus went to take away humanity's sinful mechanism for converting its own sins into righteousness. That mechanism is the SIN of the world, for it is what made the world the cultural world of fallen humanity possible. This SIN is a deeper and graver moral calamity than ordinary "sins," both because it is fueled by collective self-delusion and accompanied by a sense of righteous rectitude and because it makes forgiveness impossible by annihilating our consciousness of sin. It is the sin against the Holy Spirit, its unforgivability as much a product of its intrinsic epistemological defects as its moral iniquities. It is unforgivable because its ruse for taking away the sins of the world prevents the recognition of the need for forgiveness.¹⁰

The SIN of the world theologically termed as original sin prevents the need for forgiveness because no one is held responsible for any sins, except the community “we,” which in short is to say that no one feels responsible for its guilt. The mechanism that has been used in cultures and religions is revealed at the Cross since the Cross of Jesus exposes each one’s

9 Ibid., 139

10 Ibid., 151

complicity in the SIN of the world and invites the onlookers to the act of love and forgiveness as the only way through which Sin can be purged. The Cross of Jesus Christ really deprives humanity of its age-old way of reconciliation. “A world gradually being deprived of its age-old method of ridding itself of “sins” is a world desperately in need of another way of dealing with the problem of sin. It is against this anthropological backdrop that we can best understand the fact that forgiveness was such a conspicuous feature of Jesus’ ministry. So much so, in fact, that at the Last Supper he told his disciples that the reason his blood would be shed was “so that sins may be forgiven.”¹¹ Therefore relating the Cross and forgiveness in this way invites us to look for a different model of reconciliation than the one employed by ancient religions of the world.