![]() Welcome to Conspire, the crossword scanning and crossword sharing app. Image credit: The Sacificial Lamb (detail), by Josefa de Óbidos (1630-1684), Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland.Conspire is an app for sharing crossword puzzles with friends over the internet. Gateway to Silence: Father, forgive them.Īdapted from Richard Rohr, CONSPIRE 2016: Everything Belongs, sessions 2 and 3 (CAC: 2016), MP4 video download. He showed us on the cross how to hold the pain and let it transform us, rather than pass it on to the others around us. Jesus replaced the myth of redemptive violence with the truth of redemptive suffering. Violence doesn’t save it only destroys in both short and long term. With such a mistaken view of God, our violence becomes necessary and even “redemptive violence.” But there is no such thing as redemptive violence. The Ku Klux Klan uses the cross as their symbol! Members of ISIS probably believe they are doing God’s will. The vast majority of violence in history has been sacralized violence. Millions of soldiers have given their only lives by believing the lies of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler, to name a few. Power itself is not a good guide, yet for many, if not most people, authority soothes their anxiety and relieves their own responsibility to form a mature conscience. ![]() We too could be utterly wrong about choosing victims, just as high priest and king, Jerusalem and Rome-the highest levels of authority-were utterly wrong about Jesus. In worshiping Jesus as the scapegoat, Christians should have learned to stop scapegoating. You see why inner work, shadow work, and honest self-knowledge are all essential to any healthy religion. Scapegoaters do not know they are scapegoating, but they think they are doing a “holy duty for God” (John 16:2). The scapegoat mechanism largely operates in the unconscious people do not know what they are doing. Jesus became the sinned-against one to reveal the hidden nature of scapegoating and so that we would see how wrong people in authority can be-even religious important people (see John 16:8-11 and Romans 8:3). Throughout most of history, church and state have both sought plausible scapegoats to carry their own shame and guilt. It painstakingly illustrates how the systems of both church and state (Caiaphas and Pilate) conspired to condemn Jesus. The Gospel is a highly subversive document. It seems “the sin of the world” is ignorant hatred, fear, and legitimated violence. Jesus became the scapegoat to reveal the universal lie of scapegoating. Note that John the Baptist said, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). ![]() Usually the illusion only deepens and becomes catatonic, blind, and repetitive-because of course, scapegoating did not really work to eliminate the evil in the first place. Whenever the “sinner” is excluded, our ego is delighted and feels relieved and safe. And the people went home rejoicing, just as European Christians did after burning a supposed heretic at the stake, or white Americans did after the lynching of black men. Then the goat was beaten with reeds and thorns and driven out into the desert. On the Day of Atonement, a priest laid hands on an “escaping” goat, placing all the sins of the Jewish people from the previous year onto the animal. Leviticus 16 describes the ingenious ritual from which our word “scapegoating” originated. The Myth of Redemptive Violence Monday, May 1, 2017
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