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| Jesus, Our Self—Gifter That I am writing about Jesus and his “sacrifice” on the cross for an issue you’ll get right in the middle of Lent is the product of three events converging at about the same time. First, I’m reading up on the history of Jesus at the movies and run across some interesting commentary, especially from director Paul Verhoeven who gave us Hollow Man and that fleshpot of a movie, the universally panned Showgirls. According to an article by Richard von Busack, Verhoeven — also a fellow of the Jesus Seminar — would love to film a new life of Jesus. But this has got to be a problem for someone who’s troubled by the crucifixion. “The Jesus Seminar describes it as a ‘car accident,’” he says. This is in line with the view that the crucifixion was not much more than a “ghastly mistake on behalf of three parties: the Romans, the Jews and Jesus himself.” Verhoeven goes on to say that “the message of Jesus is the way he lived. That he ultimately was killed was something that just happened. By seeing it as a sacrifice we diminish the importance of what he’s thinking. Putting the cross and the resurrection at the heart of the story has diminished the importance of Jesus’ message.” See, that just shows you how much smarter these guys are than me. I’ve never thought the cross and the resurrection diminished the importance of Jesus’ message. Second, I picked up the latest issue of Homiletic (without the s, Homiletic is the journal of the Academy of Homiletics), and the lead article there, “Negotiating the shifting semantics of sacrifice in preaching,” is by Sally Brown of Princeton Theological Seminary — an article which is part of a book project that now has the working title of Cross Talk: Preaching and the Poetics of Redemption. Ms. Brown is concerned about sacrifice language in our preaching. She worries about the influence of Gustav Aulen’s Christus Victor and atonement theories based on satisfactio. She thinks that the blood and guts, swords and sandals of the gospel accounts have possibly perpetuated — if you read these accounts from a feminist and womanist perspective — an unfortunate misreading by women who are in a situation of abuse. She cites Brown and Parker who, in a work in the late 1980s, said that “Christianity has been a primary — in many women’s lives the primary — force in shaping our acceptance of abuse.” Along these lines, von Busack notes that writer Graham Greene, a good Catholic himself, observed when he was traveling that the poorer the country, the bloodier the crucifix. After all, if Jesus is going to inspire faith and sympathy from a people who already look oppressed, malnourished and suffering, then Jesus has got to look like he got the bloody living daylights beat out of him. Brown, regrettably I think, turns to Delores Williams, who has done considerable work linking the sacrifice and substitution imagery of traditional soteriology to the slavocracy of the South, sacralizing the role black women had as substitutes, surrogates and self-sacrificing servants in white households. No question of the horrors of slavery and the plight of black women in that era, but can we link it to substitutionary atonement theory? I don’t know. I just know that Williams never suffers from want of an opinion, being, as she is, in lockstep with those feminist theologians who see the cross as “divine child abuse” and whose vision of the incarnation, publicly announced to considerable laughter during the Re-Imagining Conference in Minneapolis in 1993, makes Whoopi Goldberg’s riff at Radio City Music Hall in New York during the Bush-Kerry campaign seem like a Mother Goose rhyme. But I have no reason not to respect Ms. Brown’s work on this, although there’s a part of me that thinks that women caught in a cycle of domestic violence often stay there because if they don’t their husbands have threatened to beat the living hell out of them. Thus the existence of safe houses. Back to Brown in a moment. Third, about the same time this is happening, I have a staff meeting in which Associate Pastor, Derek Krehbiel, tells me that in a recent women’s Bible study, the text about turning the other cheek had been referenced in the context of domestic violence and abuse. Some women, he thought, understood that the Scriptures called on them — on the basis of this text — to submit to violence. Oh, man! So I went back to Brown essay. Here’s the thing. I don’t want to give up “sacrifice” language as a preacher. I think that to do so, we’d be losing a powerful chunk of the good news. “Sacrifice” is one of those words that Kathleen Norris calls in her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith, a “scary” word, but a word which should be retained in our theological lexicon. It’s simply too rich a word to give up. Unfortunately, too often meaningful words or ideas get co-opted. The word “patriot” and its meaning is one example. If atonement language has contributed to an unfortunate application of meaning for the victims of domestic violence, then the answer is not to get rid of the word, but to reinstruct as to its meaning. When Jesus spoke of turning the other cheek, he was speaking about a possible response to political oppression, not about husbands beating their wives. Brown helped me on this. I’m not going to give up the word “sacrifice.” Still, there’s another way to look at this. Brown isn’t sure the language of sacrifice — embedded as it is in liturgical experience and homiletical practice — will ever disappear, but suggests that preachers work toward a new semantic emphasis. She argues that perhaps it is time “to restore emphasis in Christian imagination on the creative, self-gifting trajectory of sacrifice, rather than the bloody destruction of life, signifying appeasement, propitiation or expiation.” Hoc est corpus meum, quod pro vobis datur: This is my body which is given for you. Such a position reduces the confusion of God the Father saying “This is my Son in whom I am well pleased and whom I am going to kill on the cross in 36 months.” Brown’s right. This is an emphasis we’ve lost. Jesus gave himself for us. Jesus said of his own life, “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). Jesus, our Self-Gifter. That will preach.
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