The Passion of Christ and the End of Blood Sacrifice

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a Summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire

TS Eliot, Four Quartets “East Coker”

I would like to read Gil Bailie with fresh eyes. I’ll be investigating two similar works: one chapter from God’s Gamble and the other from his Emmaus Road Initiative. Both have the same title: “Why Did It Take the Crucifixion to Save Us?” He begins his ERI talk with the same quote from TS Eliot. Running with the phrase “if you do not come too close,” he shows in many ways how those who come too close risk the retaliation of the whole sacrificial system, which depends on scapegoats to maintain mimetic stasis.

The Crucifixion unmasks the victimage mechanism and offers a new form of self-sacrifice. The Passion is not simply the world’s most successful unveiling of violence and scapegoating, it is the world’s most complete act of love. The scapegoating mechanism is revealed as evil, yes, but more importantly, it is overcome by an act that offers no resistance. In a world steeped in mimetic rivalry, there are only two ways to resolve escalating tensions: blood-sacrifice, the violent expulsion of a scapegoat, or self-sacrifice, the voluntary surrender of rivalry for the sake of love. The Cross marks the decisive shift.

Gil Bailie argues that only a victim of ontological innocence, one whose very being is without sin, could bring the sacrificial system to a halt. Merely exposing its injustice is not enough. The Passion needed to out-love the violence it revealed.

Jesus’s innocence consisted neither of his merely moral impeccability nor his merely juridical innocence of the charges leveled against him. He was ontologically innocent. He was like us in all things but sin. This essentially is why it took the crucifixion of Christ to save us. Only the kind of innocence of which we fallen creatures are incapable could have broken the spellbinding power of the system of ritual accusation and immolation by camaraderie and a communal sense of moral rectitude “since the foundation of the world.”

Gil Bailie, God’s Gamble 168

Bailie is clear in his hearing in Eliot that there is something hazardous in “coming too close,” that on our own, we lack the resources to overcome that mimetic gravity.

This will possibly be controversial in some circles, but I recently read Cesareo Bandera’s The Truth of Mankind, which warns against the misuse of mimetic theory to understand the Crucifixion. Essentially, if you want to render mimetic theory completely palatable to everyone, one could understand the Crucifixion as a new epistemology, as just the knowledge that the victim is innocent and so the scapegoaters are wrong for everything they have done. If grace and divine love are secondary, then all we are left with is an epistemological unveiling — one that might be found in the death of Socrates, Virgil, and particularly the Old Testament. If that were true, do we really need the New Testament? And was the Crucifixion really necessary, or was it just a powerful means of exposing a truth that we could have come to ourselves given enough time? I am completely convinced that this reading of mimetic theory is not what Rene Girard believed, but Bandera’s warning is still well said and meaningful. Socrates exposes the injustice of Athens; Christ bears and transforms the injustice of the world. The former reveals the flaw; the latter heals it.

Gil Bailie has emphasized, and I have picked up, the distinction between blood-sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Essentially, given the mimetic friction of our fallen world, there are two ways to deal with the tensions that build up: either the sacrifice of a scapegoat (blood-sacrifice), something that redirects the potential violence; or one’s self-sacrificial act where one lays down one’s life for another, renouncing the mimetic rivalry in favor of the other out of love.

I’ve brought up Peck and his description of evil as the act of scapegoating, the refusal to self-sacrifice and instead cast the blame on someone (or something) else. I’ve criticized his conclusion as being not yet clear of the scapegoating he points out, because he immediately turns around and scapegoats those whom he identifies as scapegoaters.

Peck’s analysis of evil as scapegoating is incisive—but his remedy is not yet free of it.
We see this same mimetic pattern today.
Modern moralism often replaces bulls and lambs with Twitter mobs and hashtags.

We call out scapegoaters and, in so doing, risk becoming them. It is the same dance around the bonfire, only the drums are digital. And this is another way of pointing out what Bandera warned us against. If we aren’t transformed by the renewing of our minds, in imitation of the one model that will not become our rival (at least not from His end, idolatry is arguably a form of our rivalry towards Christ), then the scapegoating impulse remains. However, that impulse finds its resolution not in divine grace but in finding more acceptable scapegoats, such as those who are blatantly or arguably scapegoating.¹

The Passion of Christ is hardly the final blood-sacrifice. But it is the first perfect self-sacrifice, the template of love freely given, without rivalry, without retaliation. The call now is to live this pattern, not to decode it. As Eliot reminds us, the danger is not in seeing the dance, it is in getting too close. But unless we come too close, confess our complicity and are transformed, we risk dancing around the fire ourselves.

1. This struggle to identify ever more “acceptable” scapegoats is ongoing. I’ve written elsewhere about Acceptable Categories of Scapegoats, the categories we find safest to condemn (criminals, the foreign, the fallen-from-grace), and I will return to them again. What matters most is recognizing that the temptation to expel rather than forgive remains daily, mimetically present.