“Christ, through his blood that he shed, we have liberation and forgiveness of sins” (Eph 1, 7); “God made Christ, by shedding his blood, an instrument of forgiveness” (Rom 3, 25). How illogical to say that Jesus died for our sins, as Paul of Tarsus has narrated it, and even more so if we say that Jesus, being God, settled an account that no human being could pay; therefore, it falls to God to pay himself that debt and the currency of it was his blood, his life, his dying for that account. To say this is to affirm that Jesus committed suicide [if one wishes to frequent the passage: “no one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (Jn 10, 18)]. The Church has determined in studies of morality that suicide is a sin… Unless there are exceptions in Jesus.
Christianity is the religion that glorifies a historical and concrete execution: the execution of Jesus; because the Church sees redemption through the blood and only the blood of Jesus, the blood of an animal is no longer worth it as it was for the Jews, who had the unblemished animal to offer in sacrifice to God, by means of the holocaust. Capital punishment is for Christians the requirement for their redemption, that is, the death penalty of Jesus liberates, forgives and sanctifies. Man was in favor of death and blood whenever it suited him, so much so that, for the Church, blood has a redemptive effect not only at retail but also at wholesale: according to Christian conception, all of humanity is redeemed through blood, for God himself is also a partisan of blood; it is his Son who must die by shedding blood.
Jesus of Nazareth was a bloody victim of God and had to die nailed to a cross despite the fact that he dreamed of being allowed to continue living; it would seem that God remained insensitive and inflexible with his Son, Jesus. With his death we can breathe; trying to clarify this panorama, it is fitting to continue asserting that the accusation of the victim abandoned by the inhuman God and of those men who were undoubtedly made in his image and likeness, equally, inhuman men. We associate sacrifices with redemption.
If sacrifices are for salvation, then Adolf Hitler is sitting and not precisely at the right hand, but on the very lap of God himself, because he sacrificed poorly counted six million people to purify the race. So much so that John Paul II, who was Pope of the Church for 27 years, writes in the encyclical Salvifici doloris, inviting the sick to “unite their sufferings to the suffering of Christ”; this phrase has been inspired by Paul of Tarsus when he says “in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Col 1,24); this phrase has been used as a poetic antidote. This assertion gives it to be understood that the passion of Jesus, his cruel death, was not enough for redemption; apparently God wanted more pain and much more blood.
The Christian who wishes to be exemplary will always have to negotiate compromises with suffering; Christian doctrine and asceticism thus ask the faithful to suffer in order to share and unite themselves with the sufferings of Christ. To suffer to contribute to the redemption and salvation of the world. To suffer to be forgiven. To suffer to expiate sins. To suffer to please God. To suffer to be sanctified. To suffer on earth to be happy in heaven. To suffer to gain paradise. Because human suffering is the pleasure of God, while human pleasure is the suffering of God.
It remains covered and incorporated in the doctrine that, without the cross, there is no redemption; without blood, there is no salvation of humankind, as Cardinal Joseph Hóffner would say: “The holiness of the divine order proves itself as powerful also in this aeon through capital punishment”. I continue with the displeasure and unease that lead me to ask: Is salvation given by the mere fact that Jesus, the Son of God, is incarnate? Were his parables and teachings worth nothing, his Life in the lives of others? For if so, then why speak of incarnation, why speak of his public life (which is summed up in parables and miracles)? It would only be necessary to speak of his death on the cross, and perhaps in order to have the weight of his divinity, we would also have to speak of the resurrection. I ask myself and I question:
If Jesus had died as a consequence of the ailments of old age, or because of the ingestion of decomposed, spoiled fish, or of a fishbone that choked him […] Would he have then failed in the project of redemption for humanity? Or would redemption have been achieved only halfway if the Romans, in their methods of execution, had already had the technical level that can be used today, for example, the electric chair, euthanasia or one of the many lethal injections, or as was the case in Auschwitz the gas chamber, or if he had suffered from an epidemic or pandemic that would take his life, in these methods there would be no shedding of blood, so to speak, we would be missing an indispensable element to celebrate the Eucharist, the wine that is transformed into blood, this would lead priests and other ministers to pronounce only the consecration of the host – bread that is transformed into body; in which it is recognized that the Eucharist would only have to do with the death of Jesus.
If the Eucharist is, more strictly, sacrifice, why must it be eaten? The Hebrew people practice sacrificial practices for different purposes; one of them is introduced by someone who presents an offering to the Lord, a sacrifice of aroma that serves to appease – calm the wrath of an irascible God; that is why the offering must be pleasing or have an agreeable aroma. There is another series of sacrifices that are of absolution, to mend an act committed against the law given by the Lord. Roger Lenaers intuits in his work that, even if there is no God above, making an invitation to the focus of the faithful to say goodbye to the premodern figure of God, the ‘god of the heights’ brings about with this an important change in the representation and significance of the Eucharist. Lenaers argues that “to distance oneself from theos also means to move away from worship understood as sacrifice and from petitionary prayer”.
The sacrifice contains the sin of the people, so it must be done away with, that is, by killing it or letting it drift away for the purpose of depositing the sins of the people on the animal, and liberating it so that it will bear the abominations of each one of those who had been in contact. From the Christological premise it has been affirmed that Jesus is the Lamb of God; said lamb takes away the sin not of a single culture, but of ‘the whole world’ which becomes sacrament in the Eucharist. In excess, the animal had to be without defect, as has been mentioned; that is why the animal is wrapped to be transported for the sacrifice or the liberation so that it carries, as is narrated in Lc 2, 7: “Mary gave birth to her firstborn son, and she wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger”. They have made parallels to say that Jesus is the sacrifice without defect, a carefully tended sacrifice. And don’t even mention the prize that God gives to Mary, the spirit of the reception of her son through a prophecy spoken by an old man who was in his last days; it seems that what he said, he pronounced with difficulty: “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign of contradiction; and you yourself a sword will pierce so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Lc 2, 22-35) … Is this doing the will of God? Must the will of God be suffering – pain? (Cfr. Lc 1, 26 – 38).
Why consume the sacrifice in the Eucharist? To become contaminated again with sins, apart from adding another sin, of being complicit in someone’s death (whether animal or person), when the fifth commandment of the law given by God through Moses proposes not to kill.
We know the phenomena of the people of Israel intuiting in the opinions of the moderns; although they are divergent, they open us to a perspective and vision. Some commentaries interpret the pericope of Is 53, 7 which is cited in a text of the New Testament of the Acts of the Apostles when the Ethiopian asks Philip for an explanation of said passage. Some exegetes differ with the text for having difficulties; there is no explicit mention of an immolated lamb, but of a sheep, which is immolated; of the lamb it is only said that it remains silent while it is shorn. On many occasions one usually speaks merely of the lamb and disregards the sheep, which leads to it being said that the lamb is immolated.
“The suffering servant of whom Isaiah speaks does nothing but bear the sins of the people; he does not take them away, as the text of John 1, 29. 36 affirms. Others interpret this text in light of the paschal lamb. It has been objected that the immolation of this lamb was merely a commemorative rite and not an expiatory one; such reason led P. Lagrange to renounce the expiatory sense. Jesus had been an expiatory lamb because of his innocence, while C.H. Dodd resorting to Jewish apocalyptic, compares the King – Messiah with a lamb” (Cfr. La verdad de Jesús).
Following the other evangelists, the Synoptics also speak of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world; this confession of faith is attributed to John the Baptist, called the precursor of the Messiah, although we may doubt these words spoken by John; rather they seem to be a later Christological confession. Most likely, according to exegetes, Jesus was called by John as the chosen one or servant of God and not as a lamb or as the Son of God. The Synoptics provide the framework of the account of Jesus’ baptism, in parallel with the first song that presents the servant at the beginning of his mission as the prophet and physician (Cfr. Is 42, 1 – 7) which fits very well with what is narrated in Lc 4, 16ss: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because he has Anointed (Sent) me to bring good news to the poor, to make the blind see again, to free prisoners…” Subsequently, through reflections, it is conceived that Jesus is the immolated victim who propitiates the sins of all humanity, but it is not Jesus himself who states that his death and resurrection are acts of redemption.
Therefore, it would not be amiss to affirm that, in practice, the Romans redeemed us, and did us much good by sentencing Jesus of Nazareth and not that fellow Barabbas; following a literalist way we would have to canonize Judas Iscariot because he was the one who betrayed him and why not do a historical search to know who properly hung Jesus on the tree and place them in the calendar of saints, because as a consequence of their actions, Jesus was able to die and shed blood to save us. And if Jesus died then the religions and/or sects that claim to be Trinitarian lose their meaning because if Jesus who is God truly died, then they would have to speak of ‘binarity’ and not of trinity. I like better the way Leonardo Boff presents it in his book of the Gospel of the Cosmic Christ: “Jesus Christ has to do with the mystery of creation and not only with the mystery of redemption”. The sacrifice of Jesus is of communion as presented in chapter three of the book of Leviticus.
It is said that John brings in his sixth chapter a key text for understanding the Eucharist. But, as we are about to demonstrate briefly, that chapter does not deal with the Eucharist, despite the vocabulary it uses; it focuses us on a text of Christological interpretation, faith in Jesus.
There are three formulations in this text: going to Jesus, believing in him and eating him as if he were bread, which mean the same thing in verse 35. It continues further in the same sense, without any allusion to the Eucharist. Only suddenly in verses 51b-56 is it read that one must eat his flesh and drink his blood—and this would seem to point to the Eucharist—. Is it really so? In reality, these six verses interrupt the course of thought and give the impression of having been inserted or interpolated, for until now it was only about faith in Jesus, with the symbol of food, Jesus as bread.
Material food and drink accomplish nothing that has not already been accomplished by faith. In such a way that this eating and drinking is but symbolic language. One might ask whether the author achieved something with such brutal symbolic language. It is almost unthinkable that Jesus himself would have used it. One need only recall that the Torah strictly prohibits drinking blood (Leviticus 17,10-14) and that cannibalism is universally condemned. It is strange that these verses should have entered the text and that this should not have caused problems for the Church until now. A critique that one must eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood; cannot help but be horrified and resist. It leads us to think that Jesus would never make such a long discourse, let alone knowing that it is country folk who would not understand it… nor compare this with his parables, little stories that are immersed in the reality of people.
Throughout the centuries, Christianity and all its derivatives have perfected their strategies to manipulate, have influence and power to induce believers to make their lives dependent on the will of God, convincing his followers that their happiness is not in the present, but in the future; and making misfortunes, trials, sacrifices and sufferings of life, endured in an attitude of faith and submission to divine will. Those who have this present and live these parameters are those who are considered perfect beings, saints, blessed or people worthy of being raised to the altars by canonizing them.
This framework is what Paul of Tarsus structured with the mythical account of redemption, describing that the violent death of Jesus on the cross is a gesture of expiation planned and desired by God in Jesus, who realized it in the name and in place of all men—as has been said by tradition– “he came to pay a bill that we ourselves were not capable of paying”… as they say, it does not compare with external debt. Pope John Paul II, cited earlier, says in the catechism of the Church: “The violent death of Jesus was not the result by chance in an unfortunate combination of circumstances. It belongs to the mystery of God’s Plan” (n.599). God’s Plan? A God who prohibits killing (Cfr. Ex 20, 13), but who rejoices at the death of his Son.
According to the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth had no idea of such a threatening, angry, aggressive God, offended by the sins of men and who would have chosen him for the realization of a project of reconciliation; nor does Jesus have knowledge of a humanity fallen by original sin and that would need to be saved by divine intervention. In spite of this, the concepts of universal guilt, curse, condemnation, redemption, expiation, redemption, justification… already appear in the writings of the New Testament only a few years after Jesus’ death and particularly in the letters of Paul. The Pauline texts and the letters attributed to Peter speak of a humanity enslaved by sin, of the forgiveness of sins, of God and of men who need peace, reconciliation and an end to hostilities.
This myth, through blood, suffering and sacrifice, not only transformed Christianity into a gloomy, sinful religion full of guilt, but contaminated all its dogmas, beliefs, spiritualities, prayers, rites and cults. The myth of redemption has proven to be the most damaging and failed of all Christian myths, since it contradicts the God that Jesus revealed to us, a God who is Love, Mercy, Tenderness.
Nothing strange that tomorrow they denounce a temple, for placing a crucified figure full of blood and showing all the sensationalism of how Jesus’ Death was. We need only remember Benedict XVI when he speaks of the symbolism of water in Johannine theology, in his work: Jesus of Nazareth; explaining the passage of the people of Israel through the sea fleeing the slavery of Egypt, the people of Israel see glory when they cross the sea and when the Egyptian people are drowned in the waters. It would seem that one needs to give death, torture and see the other below, humiliated, as the psalm says “make your enemies a footstool for your feet” (Ps 109, 1)… That was and is the glory that the Church desired and desires.
Julián Bedoya Cardona