Contrastación de la Hipótesis General

R.G.: There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that the death of Jesus is a sacrifice, whatever definition (expiation, substitution, etc.) we may give for that sacrifice. At no point in the Gospels is the death of Jesus defined as a sacrifice. The passages that are invoked to justify a sacrificial conception of the Passion both can and should be interpreted with no reference to sacrifice in any of the accepted meanings.

Certainly the Passion is presented to us in the Gospels as an act that brings salvation to humanity. But it is in no way presented as a sacrifice.

If you have really followed my argument up to this point, you will already realize that from our particular perspective the sacrificial interpretation of the Passion must be criticized and exposed as a most enormous and paradoxical misunderstanding -- and at the same time as something necessary -- and as the most revealing indication of mankind's radical incapacity to understand its own violence, even when that violence is conveyed in the most explicit fashion.

Of all the reappraisals we must make in the course of these interviews, none is more important. It is no mere consequence of the anthropological perspective we have adopted.

Our perspective is rooted in the Gospels themselves, in their own subversion of sacrifice, which restores the original text, disengaging the hypothesis of the scapegoat and enabling it to be transmitted to the human sciences.

I am not speaking of my own personal experience here. I am referring to something very much larger, to the framework of all the intellectual

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experiences that we are capable of having. Thanks to the sacrificial reading it has been possible for what we call Christendom to exist for fifteen or twenty centuries; that is to say, a culture has existed that is based, like all cultures (at least up to a certain point) on the

mythological forms engendered by the founding mechanism. Paradoxically, in the sacrificial reading the Christian text itself provides the basis. Mankind relies upon a misunderstanding of the text that explicitly reveals the founding mechanism to reestablish cultural forms which remain sacrificial and to engender a society that, by virtue of this misunderstanding, takes its place in the sequence of all other cultures, still clinging to the sacrificial vision that the Gospel rejects.

J.-M.O.: Any form of sacrificial vision would contradict, I suppose, the revelation of the founding murder that you have shown to be present in the Gospels. It is obvious that bringing to light the founding murder completely rules out any compromise with the principle of sacrifice, or indeed with any conception of the death of Jesus as a sacrifice. A conception of this kind can' only succeed in concealing yet again the real meaning and function of the Passion: one of subverting sacrifice and barring it from working ever again by forcing the founding mechanism out into the open, writing it down in the text of all the Gospels.

G.L.: I can see very well that a nonsacrificial reading is necessary. But at first sight it looks as though the enterprise will come up against some formidable obstacles, ranging from the redemptive character of Jesus' death to the conception of a violent God, which seems to become indispensable when you take into account themes like the Apocalypse. Everything that you say here is bound to provoke in response the famous words that the Gospels have no qualms about putting in Jesus' own mouth: "I have come not to bring peace but a sword."

People are going to tell you that the Christian Scriptures explicitly provide a reason for discord and dissension.

R.G.: None of what you say is incompatible with the nonsacrificial reading I am putting forward. It is only in the light of this reading that we can finally explain the Gospels' intrinsic conception of their action in history, in particular the elements that appear to be contrary to the "Gospel spirit." Once again, we must judge the interpretation that is being developed by the results it will offer. By rejecting the sacrificial definition of the Passion, we arrive at a simpler, more direct, and more coherent reading, enabling us to integrate all the Gospel themes into a seamless totality. . . .

R.G.: If we can rid ourselves of the vestiges of the sacrificial mentality that soil and darken the recesses of our minds, we shall see that we now have all the elements to hand for understanding that the death of Jesus takes place for reasons that have nothing to do with sacrifice. All that

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remained unclear in the nonsacrificial reading should have been clarified in the most comprehensive way.

As we have seen, Jesus is the direct, though involuntary, cause of the division and dissension that is stirred up by his message, by virtue of the fact that it meets with almost universal incomprehension. But all of his actions are directed toward nonviolence, and no more effective form of action could be imagined.

As I have already pointed out, Jesus cannot be held responsible for the apocalyptic dimension that underlies Jewish history and ultimately all of human history. In the Jewish universe, the superiority of the Old Testament over all forms of mythology meant that the point of no return had already been reached. The Law and the Prophets, as we saw, constitute a genuine announcement of the Gospel, a praefiguratio Cbristi as the Middle Ages testified, but could not show, unable as they were to recognize in the Old Testament a first step outside the sacrificial system, and the first gradual withering of sacrificial resources. At the very moment when this adventure approaches its resolution Jesus arrives on the scene -- Jesus as he

appears in the Gospels.

From now on, it becomes impossible to put the clock back. There is an end to cyclical history, for the very reason that its mechanisms are beginning to be uncovered.

G.L. : I think that the same thing [begins to happen in the preSocratics]. . . . Empedocles gives us the splendid anti-sacrificial text that you quoted in Violence and the Sacred, ^1. but the pre-Socratics are unable to see the ethical consequences of what they are saying in the domain of human relationships. No doubt that is why the pre-Socratics are still fashionable in the world of Western philosophy, while the Prophets never are.

R.G. : Let us come back to the attitude of Jesus himself. The decision to adopt nonviolence is not a commitment that he could revoke, a contract whose clauses need only be observed to the extent that the other contracting parties observe them. If that were so, the commitment to the Kingdom of God would be merely another farcical procedure, comparable to

institutionalized revenge or the United Nations. Despite the fact that all the others fall away, Jesus continues to see himself as being bound by the promise of the Kingdom. For him, the word that comes from God, the word that enjoins us to imitate no one but God, the God who refrains from all forms of reprisal and makes his sun to shine upon the "just" and the "unjust"

without distinction -- this word remains, for him, absolutely valid. It is valid even to death, and quite clearly that is what makes him the Incarnation of that Word. To sum

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1. Violence and the Sacred, trans. P. Gregory ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 69.

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up: the Christ can no longer continue to sojourn in a world in which the Word is either never mentioned or, even worse, derided and devalued by those who take it in vain -- those who claim to be faithful to it but in reality are far from being so. Jesus' destiny in the world is inseparable from that of the Word of God. That is why Christ and the Word of God are, I reaffirm, simply one and the same thing.

Not only does Jesus remain faithful to this Word of Love, but he also does everything to enlighten men about what awaits them if they continue in the pathways they have always taken before. So urgent is the problem and so massive the stake that it justifies the remarkable vehemence, even brutality, that Jesus manifests in his dealings with "those who have ears and hear not, eyes and see not." That is indeed why -- through a further paradox, which is

outrageously unjust but could have been expected since we know that no mercy can be shown to the person who understands what all the world around him refuses to understand -- Jesus

himself stands accused of unnecessary violence, offensive language, immoderate use of polemics, and failure to respect the "freedom" of his interlocutors.

Within a process that has lasted for centuries -- indeed, since the beginnings of human history -- the preaching of the Kingdom, first in the Judaic world and later throughout the world, must intervene at the very point when the chances of success are maximized: that is to say, at the very point when everything is ready to slide into a limitless violence. Jesus lucidly perceives both the threat and the possibility of salvation. He therefore has the duty to warn mankind; by announcing to all the Kingdom of God, he is doing no more that observing in his own behavior the principles he proclaims. He would fail in his love for his brothers if he were to keep silent and abandon the human race to the destiny that it is unconsciously creating for itself. If Jesus has been called the Son of Man, this is principally, in my view, a response to a text in Ezekiel that accords to a "son of man" a mission to warn the people that is very similar to the one conferred on Jesus by the Gospels:

So you, son of man, I have made a watchman for the house of Israel; whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, O wicked man, you shall surely die, and you do not speak to warn the wicked to turn from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way; he shall die in his

iniquity, but you will have saved your life.

And you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, Thus have you said: "Our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we waste away because of them; how then can we live? Say to them, As I

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live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways; for why will you die, O house of Israel." ( Ezek. 33:1-11)

Jesus does all in his power to warn mankind and turn them away from paths that will be fatal henceforth -- the most terrifying texts, like the "Curses against the Pharisees," are just the most extreme and the most dangerous for the messenger of these warnings -- but he also serves as the victim, once his audience has determined not to listen to him and to fall back into their old ways. He does not resist their blows, and it is at his expense that they would become reconciled and reestablish a ritualized community if that were still a possibility. On all conceivable fronts, he is always ready to take all risks upon himself; he is always ready to pay with his own person in order to spare men the terrible destiny that awaits them.

Refusing the Kingdom means refusing the knowledge that Jesus bears -- refusing the

knowledge of violence and all its works. In the eyes of those who reject it, this knowledge is ill-omened; it is the worst of all forms of violence. That is indeed how things must look from the perspective of the sacrificial community. Jesus appears as a destructive and subversive force, as a source of contamination that threatens the community. Indeed, to the extent that he is misunderstood he becomes just that. The way in which he preaches can only make him appear to be totally lacking in respect for the holiest of institutions, guilty of hubris and, blasphemy, since he dares to rival God himself in the perfection of the Love that he never ceases to make manifest.

Certainly the preaching of the Kingdom of God reveals that there is an element of violence even in the most apparently holy of institutions, like the church hierarchy, the rites of the Temple, and even the family.

Faithful to the logic of sacrifice, those who have refused the invitation to the Kingdom are obliged to turn against Jesus. They can hardly fall to see in him the sworn enemy and corruptor of the very cultural order that they are vainly attempting to restore.

This means that violence will find in Jesus the most perfect victim that can be imagined, the victim that, for every conceivable reason, violence has the most reasons to pick on. Yet at the same time, this victim is also the most innocent.

J.-M.O. : What you mean, in other words, is that Jesus, of all the victims who have ever been, is the only one capable of revealing the true nature of violence to its utmost. Whichever way you look at it, his death is exemplary; in it the meaning of all the persecutions and expulsions in which mankind has ever engaged, as well as all the misconceptions that have sprung from them, stand revealed and represented for all time.

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Jesus, in other words, provides the scapegoat par excellence -- he is the most arbitrary of victims because he is also the least violent. At the same time he is the least arbitrary and the most meaningful, again because of being the least violent. We might say that the same reason always makes Jesus the victim par excellence, in whom the previous history of mankind is summed up, concluded, and transcended.

R.G.: Violence is unable to bear the presence of a being that owes it nothing -- that pays it no homage and threatens its kingship in the only way possible. What violence does not and cannot comprehend is that, in getting rid of Jesus by the usual means, it falls into a trap that could be laid only by innocence of such a kind because it is not really a trap: there is nothing hidden. Violence reveals its own game in such a way that its workings are compromises at their very source; the more it tries to conceal its ridiculous secret from now on, by forcing itself into action, the more it will succeed in revealing itself.

We can see why the Passion is found between the preaching of the Kingdom and the

Apocalypse. It is an event that is ignored by historians, who have much more serious topics, with their Tiberius and their Caligula; it is a phenomenon that has no importance in the eyes of the world -- incapable, at least in principle, of setting up or reinstating a cultural order but very effective, in spite of those who know better, in carrying out subversion. In the long run, it is quite capable of undermining and overturning the whole cultural order and supplying the secret motive force of all subsequent history.

J.-M.O.: Let me cut in with two questions. First, are you not in fact hypostatizing violence by treating it like a kind of subjective agency, which is personally hostile to Jesus Christ?

Second, how are you able to reconcile all you have been saying with the real history of historical Christianity, in other words, with the failure of the Gospel revelation to affect events? You are the first person to read the Gospels in the way that you do. However brilliant and rigorous the textual logic that you are unfolding for our benefit, it seems to have no hold on the real history of mankind, particularly on the history of the part of the world that claimed to be Christian.

R.G.: I would reply to your first question by reminding you that violence, in every cultural order, is always the true subject of every ritual or institutional structure. From the moment when the sacrificial order begins to come apart, this subject can no longer be anything but the adversary par excellence, which combats the installation of the Kingdom of God. This is the devil known to us from tradition -- Satan himself, of whom some theologians tell us that he is both subject and not subject at once.

As for your second question, I cannot reply at the moment, but I shall do so presently. For the time being, it is only necessary to point out that

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we are searching for coherence in the text, and I believe that we are finding it. We cannot concern ourselves at this stage with its possible relationship to our history. The fact that this logic can seem abstract and foreign to history only serves to bring out more clearly its status as a logic, in relation to the text which we are reading -- and nothing more is required at present.

First of all, it is important to insist that Christ's death was not a sacrificial one. To say that Jesus dies, not as a sacrifice, but in order that there may be no more sacrifices, is to recognize in him the Word of God: "I wish for mercy and not sacrifices." Where that word is not

obeyed, Jesus can remain. There is nothing gratuitous about the utterance of that word and where it is not followed by any effect, where violence remains master, Jesus must die. Rather than become the slave of violence, as our own word necessarily does, the Word of God says no to violence.

J.-M.O.: That does not mean, if I have understood you rightly, that Jesus' death is a more or less disguised suicide. The maudlin and morbid element which is to be found in a certain type of Christianity makes common cause with the sacrificial reading.

R.G.: Yes, indeed. Since they do not see that human community is dominated by violence, people do not understand that the very one of them who is untainted by any violence and has no form of complicity with violence is bound to become the victim. All of them say that the world is evil and violent. But we must see that there is no possible compromise between killing and being killed. This is the dilemma brought out by tragic drama. But the majority of

R.G.: Yes, indeed. Since they do not see that human community is dominated by violence, people do not understand that the very one of them who is untainted by any violence and has no form of complicity with violence is bound to become the victim. All of them say that the world is evil and violent. But we must see that there is no possible compromise between killing and being killed. This is the dilemma brought out by tragic drama. But the majority of