Altar and Table: The Christian Story of Sacrifice

A Guest Post from Evan at The Ruminatrix

Pilate condemns Jesus to die by Théophile Lybaert (ca. 1886).

A Note to Readers

This marks the first guest post on The Narnian! A few days ago,

Evan

from

The Ruminatrix

passed this along, believing it aligned with the themes explored here and would resonate with the audience. After reading it, I wholeheartedly agreed.

With that in mind, I’m open to featuring guest contributions on The Narnian. Perhaps this could be a way to unite our collective efforts in building what I’ve been calling Miniature Rivendells.

A special thanks to Evan for sharing this piece—I hope you all enjoy it!

—Josh

Introduction

Ritual sacrifice is perhaps the oldest expression of religious belief among mankind, alongside prayer and meditation. However, owing to its antiquity, much mystery surrounds it. Why did humans, disparate and diverse as we are, come to universally adopt such a practice? What purpose did it serve? What would such reasons and mechanisms shed light on about our own civilization? These questions are relevant and inevitable with this subject.

For Christians, the concept of sacrifice is very relevant. On a very basic level, sacrifice is part of our conscience because of the witness of the Old Testament, with its very sacerdotal and propitiatory religion. Sacrifices fill the pages of the Hebrew Bible. Yet, despite how the Old Testament might make us familiar with ritual sacrifice, this by no means makes us understand it. We are still left with a mystery on our hands. The matter, put simply, is that ritual sacrifice is so ancient, so universal, so intrinsic because it ties into a much greater story about the nature of mankind, its particular pathologies, and what men feel they must do to address these things. Of particular relevance to this conversation was the esteemed French literary critic and philosopher René Girard, who designed a thesis concerning the nature of ritual sacrifice that introduced fascinating albeit esoteric concepts to the conversation that have resonated for the several decades since. What I’d like to attempt in this essay to do is explain how the Girardian framework informs Scripture (or perhaps we should say the inverse) and reveals to us what the nature of sacrifice is, what it directs us towards, and, ultimately, how the arc of biblical revelation discloses the deeper magic that transcends and transforms the Girardian framework.

On Mimetic Desire

Girard’s thesis is simple: sacrifice ritualizes an answer to a problem. What’s the problem? Human conflict. Conflict, per Girard, is fundamentally because of “mimetic desire.” “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires,” explains Girard. Girard employs the graphic of a triangle to further explain this, with the bottom vertices representing a person A (or yourself) and a person B (your other) who share the third vertex, the object of desire (X). A desires X because of his mimetic relationship to B, seeking to imitate and internalize what he sees in B. It’s a pathological view of the communal nature of man, where we are defined in relation to others, but our relation becomes domineering.

Proceeding from this shared desire Girard doesn’t see cooperation as the consequent, but rivalry. Girard views this as a contagion, and it will spread throughout a network of relations (a society) until it approaches what we may call “critical mass.” When this point is reached, society is plagued by rivalry and disdain, and blood is demanded. However, as something of an immune response what society will do rather than give into chaos is find a release valve. This activates what Girard calls “the scapegoat mechanism,” in which an ultimately arbitrary person is selected by the group to bear the guilt for the chaos, and they are put to death. By ritualizing this as a “sacrifice” society is conditioned to feel “satisfied” by the death of this individual, and the pressure of rivalrous desire is released. A system of sacrifice, such as the classical pagans were famous for, constituted an immune system, then, wherein the contagion of mimetic rivalry is continuously dispensed of and society steers clear of “critical mass.”

Girard’s ideas were greeted with much discourse in the 1960s and 1970s, and they’ve actually withstood the test of time quite well. A growing library of secondary literature exists on Girard, whether furthering, synthesizing, or corroborating his thesis through interdisciplinary study. Work has even been done on the oldest of human societies, interpreting their archaeological record through the Girardian framework nearly 10 thousand years later. A scholar who I think can be synthesized with this thesis is John Walton, the Old Testament scholar. His explanation of ancient Near Eastern religion proves compatible with the Girdardian framework:

Imposed relationships between god(s) and people are perhaps the most common relationships by virtue of the gods being seen as kings and shepherds. For the ancient Near East, the patronage provided by the gods is an expression of what we can call the Great Symbiosis. In this view, gods had needs of food, housing, and clothing, and they created people to meet those needs. The people were expected to pamper the gods, who, in turn, would provide for the people and protect them so that they could continue to meet the gods’ needs.

Those familiar with Babylonian mythology should know how the view of mankind given in its fables is purely servile, the gods grow tired of their toil to survive and to keep up the cosmos, so they create humans to basically be slaves. Very indicative of a pre-Christian, ephemeral worldview. Given this, we can see the intent of ancient pagan religion as follows: humans needed to survive and exist in prosperity to efficaciously serve the gods, but the discord of mimetic rivalry would upset this system, so the gods are encouraged to have men offer sacrifices to them, with the significance being that by offering this sacrifice they release their hate and may return to slaving away at the gods’ behest.

This intention does seem to be understood by most ancient religions. It’s not just that basically all religions have a practice of sacrifice, but that the various ways they come to describe sacrifice ties into the Girardian thesis. In Confucianism, for example, ritual sacrifice is praised for promoting benevolence (仁, jen) among men, explicitly relating this “to observance of the rites through overcoming of the self” (Analects 12:1). “Overcoming of the self” we can interpret as indicating something akin to the resolution of mimetic desire, restoring a state of non-rivalry between men. This is the idea Girard detected in numerous cultures throughout time. Klejton Cikaj, summarizing Girard, presents this universal thread, “The sacrifice protects the whole community from its own violence. The sacrifice gathers, at least temporarily, all the societal turmoil, all the scattered elements of discontent, and realizes them into a surrogate target—the scapegoat.”

The Scapegoat

How scapegoating preserves societal order can be seen in when it fails, and a rather apropos example of that can be found in the storyline of G.R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. In the world of Westeros designed by Martin, the mimetic desire roiling under the surface from the beginning of the first book is the Iron Throne. Whether the Lannisters or Baratheons or more broadly the royalty and the Westerosi nobility, there are clearly two vertices of the triangle identifiable, and they are in rivalry over the power and glory that the Iron Throne represents. However, as this rivalry begins to reach “mimetic snowballing” (Girard’s actual term for what we called “critical mass”) the scapegoat mechanism is activating. Who is most fit to occupy this role? The story presents us with the character of Ned Stark, who while being a truly innocent person is an outsider, an enigmatic Northman who conflicts with the Machiavellian values of the King’s Landing elite.

As things start to get unsavory in the Seven Kingdoms, namely due to the death of King Robert, Ned’s scapegoating becomes inevitable, especially once this foreign interloper attempts a “coup” against the Iron Throne. However, a requisite element of the Girardian thesis is that a scapegoat should be morally ambiguous, or his innocence unable to be established, but Ned is a singularly unimpeachable name amid the flood of villains and shysters that fill the pages of Martin’s novels. While for a time his public condemnation and execution serves its purpose, this doesn’t hold forever and too many people begin objecting, unable to agree that Ned was a guilty man, especially the North. Thus, this attempt at achieving harmony through sacrifice doesn’t square the circle, which actually accelerates the mimetic rivalry, which demands another scapegoat (Renly Baratheon), which demands another (Robb Stark), and another (Joffrey), etc. By the time one gets to the fourth book they can practically feel the stickiness of all the blood that has been spilt, as the land is ravaged by war, famine, the dissolution of political order, impending foreign threats (the Ironborn and White Walkers), loss of honor, and more. As society fractures in a hundred directions, this leads to a hundred rivalries, which produces an ever-growing number of scapegoats, which unless somehow arrested would proceed to the vengeful slaughter of everyone in the land. It’s madness.

Now, understanding all this we should turn to Scripture. The primary vision of the Girardian scapegoat is found in Genesis 4, the notorious story of Cain and Abel. Two men desire the same thing, God’s blessing, but only one receives it. This produces a rivalry that spills into bloodshed. As these are the first brothers, in the both “sons of Adam” (sons of man) they represent two halves of humanity, and thus their rivalry is archetypal of all the mimetic desire and scapegoating that will infect the rest of mankind and set man against man over the following millennia. Cain and Abel are the source of war, and the source of sacrifice. However, whereas the pagan world saw sacrifice as resolving the problem of mimetic desire for the sake of pacifying man, sacrifice in the Hebrew mentality seems to operate much differently. Picking up from where we left off with Walton:

Yahweh’s kingship, in contrast, extends to all nations universally, but it also pertains more specifically to Israel and operates within the covenant framework. It is through his covenant that he provides and protects shi people on the condition of their covenant faithfulness, rather than on the condition of their ritual provision for his needs as in the Great Symbiosis.

Circumstantial relationships between gods and people in the ancient Near East also exist as the people are associated by their circumstances to the patron gods of their city, their guild, or their clan. In contrast, it is not circumstance from which Israel’s relationship to Yahweh is identified. Intentionality is evident throughout the literature to suggest there is nothing ad hoc about it. …

In the ancient Near East there is little attestation to a similar relationship [partner and marital] between gods and people. Nothing in the ancient Near East parallels the oft-intoned status found in the Old Testament: “I am/will be your God, and you are/will be my people.”

God is not seeking His relationship to the Israelites for the purposes of making use of them as servants, and this leads us to question if His sole desire for fitting them with a religious system is just to keep them from killing each other. Simply, the answer is no. Rather, as Walton further elucidates, Yahweh’s intention was to bring His people into His divine labor, not to outsource and enslave them to it:

This relationship between god and people in the ancient world is one that I describe as the “Great Symbiosis”... In this symbiotic relationship, the people took care of the gods…and the gods took care of the people so that their needs continued to be met by the people. Given that this is the way people thought about deities in the ancient world, it was essential for Yahweh to offer revelation of himself in order to provide the basis for a newly forged relationship with the humans he created. …As Yahweh revealed himself to Israel, this symbiosis of codependence, reciprocity, and mutual need was replaced by what we might call the Great Enterprise, which was established through the covenant. In the Great Enterprise, Yahweh protected Israel and provided for them just as the gods of the ancient Near East did for their worshipper. The difference was that instead of meeting the needs of the gods as their neighbors did, Israel was given a role in the plan and purposes of Yahweh.

God had a vision for the world, a vision He established in the Garden of Eden, one of cosmic viceregency with man over His world-temple. This is the vision to which He has worked toward restoring, both in the ultimate sense of the eschaton but in an inaugurated sense through the Church, as we see in the occurrence of the word “συνεργός” (sunergon) in the New Testament. “For we are labourers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building” (1 Cor. 3:9). Given this, the nature of sacrifice under the Yahwistic cultus was also manifestly transformed from the paradigm that had existed previously. “The testimonies to the sacrificial system in the Old Testament (e.g., Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham) all show continuity with the practices in the ancient world. We can therefore conclude that Yahweh built on existing sacrificial customs [rather than sacrificial purposes] in the ancient Near East . . . A couple of the sacrifice . . . address the need to clear impurity . . . from the sanctuary.

Nevertheless, other sacrifices have nothing to do with sin (e.g., thank offerings, vow offerings, freewill offerings). In order to capture the full range of functions, we should consider them exercises for participation in the cosmic order that contribute to maintaining harmony between people and deity. With the exception of the Passover sacrifice, the sacrifices take place in sacred space and are related to sacred space . . . The enduring theology is in offering Israel a mechanism for partnership with him in the Great Enterprise as it participates in his plan and purpose.”

In the biblical theology of sacred space, the Temple/Tabernacle was holy because it was where heaven met earth, and as I explain in an earlier essay, “heaven is a reality [more than a location], that of God’s perfect indwelling and His ultimate shalom.” Shalom is a word that means “wholeness,” it pertains to a cosmic order that is carefully put together with many chambers and functions and moving parts, all working perfectly under the proud watch of its Maker, like a temple. Shalom is movement toward the Edenic vision, of perfect harmony under God’s “very good” ordinance and sovereignty. However, man’s fallenness disrupts this order, and this is made clear by how Girard considered the Fall to be the primeval act of mimetic rivalry. So, in short, sacrifice is offered to God under the Yahwistic paradigm in order to resolve mimetic rivalry, and more so for the purpose of cleansing the impurity of desire and the making of a man who may participate in God’s Great Enterprise; this we may understand as the intent behind the saying “to this man will I look, to him that is humble and of a contrite spirit” (Isa. 66:2), that the humble and contrite spirit is the spirit that is unencumbered by mimetic desire and thereby able to participate in the greater story of God’s mighty deeds.

Understanding this, the sacrificial system becomes clear.

Mimetic rivalry produces, above all else, sin, a concept we may append to Girdard’s thought. Sin is disorder, it’s anti-shalom, and like particle physics explains how antimatter and matter annihilate one another, shalom and anti-shalom do the same. God despises anti-shalom, after all He is “Yahweh Shalom” (Jdg. 6:24), so in His heavenly presence, into which men must enter to have relationship with Him, anti-shalom must be purged. This is why Walton explains that sacrifices were not about sin, not entirely, but ritual purity, allowing Israelites to enter sacred space and worship Yahweh. Yet, these sacrifices were limited, and “can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect.

For then would they not have ceased to be offered? Because that the worshippers once purged should have had no more conscience of sins. But in those sacrifices, there is a remembrance again made of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins” (Heb. 10:1-4). How could mere creatures overcome their own nature, their own fallenness? Humans clearly are weak, and the whole creation is subject to futility as we’ve learned, if we presumed that creatures could save us then Scripture would bear false witness when it says, “safety is of the LORD” (Prov. 21:31) and “God is our refuge and strength” (Ps. 46:1). As the Confession of the prayer book puts it, “there is no saving health in us.” So, something was intrinsically deficient within this system, meaning a full expiation of memetic rivalry was unable to be attained, and thus not fully delivering man from his disorder.

When The Man Comes Around

This was the case until a certain man came from Galilee. Taking the story of Christ in broad strokes, when Christ descended from Heaven to Earth His first move is to be baptized as John, who welcomes Him with the acclamation, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” (Jn. 1:29). The first thing said of Him is that He is the Paschal Lamb, as we understand in hindsight. Afterwards Christ enters the wilderness, descending further into the cosmos, for the wilderness is symbolic of the underworld (which is made clearer if not anything else by the appearance of Satan in the wilderness), so that what we see is Christ descending from the realm of ultimate shalom into the realm of ultimate anti-shalom. In this realm He’s tempted with mimetic desire, but arising from this ordeal blameless (“a lamb without blemish and without spot” - 1 Pet. 1:19) He shocks the world, and in particular Girard: “The innocent scapegoat, the One Who breaks the cycle, He has come!” That this narrative sparks the scapegoating of Christ is clear in relation to other verses: first, that He is driven into the wilderness just as the actual eponymous scapegoat was, and second, that He spurns the demonic powers in this episode, which depart “for a season” (i.e., “until a more opportune time”), and we know that it was these powers who instigated His crucifixion (1 Cor. 2:8), meaning it was from this point that Christ had been scapegoated, condemned to die on behalf of the evils of others.

The sacrifice of Christ is something that leaps off the pages of Scripture if one has eyes to see and ears to hear. At the very outset of the Passion we find Christ entering Jerusalem on a date we can calculate to be the tenth of the month, which would be the time that a lamb would be brought into the household for Passover (Ex. 12:3-6). Then, when the time comes, the priests come to take Him, binding Him in ropes (Jn. 18:12) just as the sacrifices were (Ps. 118:27), and taken to where the priests are. From here, after being prepared, Christ is taken to His place of sacrifice, which is outside the city (Heb. 13:12), where He is offered up. Christ is being executed in the minds of His persecutors for blasphemy, for opposing Yahweh’s will, and thus He is subjected to the penalty of the Mosaic Law for the greatest offenses: “he shall be utterly destroyed” (Ex. 22:20). Therefore, even in the minds of His persecutors you can say that Christ was clearly being offered up as a sacrifice to God.

Further, when Christ is led to Golgotha to be sacrificed by the Levitical priests as it were, we learn that Christ is crucified at the third hour (Mk. 15:25) and dies at the ninth (vv. 33-37). These reflect the religiously significant times of morning and evening when lambs would be sacrificed at the Temple daily (Ex. 29:38-39), indicating that Christ is superseding these other lambs as the true sacrificial lamb of God, and His death at the ninth hour is very significant because this is the time that the Paschal lamb proper would be sacrificed (Ex. 12:6). Then, of course, just as the blood of the Paschal lamb would bleed into the wood of the altar, or of the lintels of Jewish households, Christ’s blood seeped into the wood of His cross, “poured out for many for the remission of sins” (Mt. 26:28) just as the blood of the sacrifice (Lev. 7:2). The Cross was the altar of Christ, upon it was the bound Lamb laid, upon it the Lamb was offered up by the priests, upon it the Lamb was cut open and bled out, upon it was declared, “It is finished” (Jn. 19:30). And this sacrifice was the sacrifice because it transcended the limitations of the sacrifice of creatures, for in fulfilment of what we saw earlier it was God Who provided us this safety, this refuge, this sacrifice was not of a finite, frail creature, but of the infinite and almighty God (Heb. 2:10; 4:14-16; 5:9). Therefore “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Heb. 10:10).

Thus, we learn from Girard that Christ is the antithesis to the scapegoat. A scapegoat can only work if it’s possible that his guilt is believed or ambiguous, ultimately not focused on and forgotten to history. However, with Christ this was repudiated. He was so blameless that He said even if men were silenced the very rocks themselves would be moved to proclaim His majesty (Lk. 19:40), for “He hath made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). Therefore, the scapegoat mechanism is blown open and mankind is made to look at itself closely in a mirror. As Girard himself explained:

What I have called “bad sacrifice” is the kind of sacrificial religion that prevailed before Christ. It originates because mimetic rivalry threatens the very survival of a community. But through a spontaneous process that also involves mimesis, the community unites against a victim in an act of spontaneous killing. This act unites rivals and restores peace and leaves a powerful impression that results in the establishment of sacrificial religion.

…

But something happens that begins in the Old Testament. There are many stories that reverse this scapegoat process. In the story of Cain and Abel, the story of Joseph, the book of Job, and many of the psalms, the persecuting community is pictured as guilty and the victim is innocent. But Christ, the son of God, is the ultimate “scapegoat”—precisely because he is the son of God, and since he is innocent, he exposes all the myths of scapegoating and shows that the victims were innocent and the communities guilty.

“Atonement” has often been given the folksy etymology of “at-one-ment,” and while many seasoned theologians will give a half-hearted smile hearing that they won’t totally dismiss it because it does communicate the basic idea. As I explained above, the issue sacrifices answered in the Yahwistic paradigm was how to get man to be able to participate with God in His cosmic enterprise, an intrinsic disruption which is synonymous to the issue that atonement seeks to answer. “And, having made peace through the blood of His cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Himself; by Him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven” (Col. 1:20). The Cross atones us by answering the scapegoat mechanism, allowing us a means by which to reenter the Great Enterprise, and the act of entrance, the moving of the legs, is metaphorical for our justification by faith. Our act of participation, our enterprising, comes from this, “for we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

This is indeed part of Christ’s earthly mission, for He remarks as He bids farewell to His disciples and gives a reckoning to them of His mission that “in my Father’s house are many mansions” (Jn. 14:2), a saying with implications that have long been mistaken. To summarize a great deal of Greek and John’s own language, we are bidden to associate to some degree “Father’s house” with the Temple (see Jn. 2:16), and the promise of “mansions” (that is, to explain the King’s English, any room or chamber) is a promise to not be kept outside of the Temple like most Isralites (or pagans) but to be called into the service of a royal priesthood in which we all worship and rule with the Father (1 Pet. 2:9), participating in the divine rule that the ancients saw emanating out of the cosmic role of the temple. Therefore, by Christ we are made clean to enter into sacred space and minister with God over Creation.

Ultimately, this explains to us why the Eucharist is so important. I already explored in an earlier essay, “The Ark of the Cross,” how the Eucharist’s typology teaches us Real Presence, that it carries within it the Lamb of God. Hence, for centuries the Eucharistic Prayer offered in the heritage of the prayer book has made some declaration of this fact, such as in the original 1549 Prayer Book:

Christ our Paschal lamb is offered up for us, once for all, when he bare our sins on His body upon the Cross, for He is the very lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world: wherefore let us keep a joyful and holy feast with the Lord.

Christ’s sacrifice as the anti-scapegoat is celebrated not just because God commanded, but because as the ultimate and true sacrifice it fulfills all sacrifice (once for all) and makes atonement for us. There’s an interesting line in Hebrews 10, following the talk of the ultimate and eternal nature of Christ’s sacrifice, where the author says this:

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh; And having an high priest over the house of God; Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water (vv. 19-22).

We enter the Holy of Holies, that is, into the Temple, and especially into the place where God Himself was made present (Ex. 25:22), which would’ve been shocking to the Hebrew readers of this epistle. This entrance is made possible, the passage says, “by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh.” By the body and the blood, we are allowed to enter into God’s presence, this is Eucharistic terminology. We draw near in full assurance because “having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water.” Christ has cleansed us and made atonement for all, but this too is Eucharistic language. “Hearts sprinkled,” just like the sacrificial blood (Lev. 1:5, 11; 3:2, 8; 5:9; 7:2, etc.), and the sacrificial blood poured out on the Cross; “bodies washed with pure water,” which was also done to ritually purify the priests (Ex. 40:12-15; Num. 8:5-7), like the water that poured out of Christ’s side and doused St. Longinus (Jn. 19:34).

Of course, in that story of St. Longinus both symbols are combined, blood and water sprinkle/wash/cleanse the Roman soldier, and He is washed in the blood of the Lamb, and drinks from the “well of water springing up into everlasting life” (Jn. 4:14). The Eucharist has this power because it bears the Real Presence of Christ, and we communicate with His sacrifice, which imparts to us the grace by which we are made aware of our mimetic desire, and thereby purged of it, so that we may be made wholesome in spirit, preparing us to “love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 Jn. 4:7-8). By venerating the Paschal Lamb we are made aware of our sin nature, the mimetic rivalry and scapegoating, and we realize how asinine the whole system is, how devoid of purpose, and how contrariwise purpose and reason and truth is found in Christ.

As Brian McDonald explains:

[Girard] saw in the culmination of the biblical witness, the passion of Christ, a permanent exposé of the “the things hidden from the foundation of the world”—that both the order and disorder of human life are founded on the clashes of mimetic desire relieved by the lie of the scapegoat mechanism.

Hence, Girard identifies the foundational principle of culture as “Satan,” since it mirrors perfectly Christ’s description of “the Prince of this world,” who was moved by envy and was “a liar and a murderer from the first.” By laying down his life to expose and overthrow this kingdom built on violence and untruth, Christ also introduced the world to another kingdom, one “not of this world,” whose fundamental principles are repentance for sins instead of the catharsis of scapegoating and love of God and neighbor rather than the warfare of mimetic desire.

This is why Paul takes such umbrage with how the Corinthians treated the Eucharist. “Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord” (1 Cor. 11:27), because this is not just “a meal,” “a memory,” “a symbol,” but the body and blood of the Lord. “Guilty of the blood” is a term that is used elsewhere in the Bible to mean guilty of murder or subject to a capital offense (e.g., Ex. 22:2; Num. 35:27; Lev. 17:4; 20:9-18; Ezek. 35:6 LXX; cf. Mt. 27:24), how would mere bread make you guilty of such an enormous crime?

The answer is that it couldn’t, but rather divinity is truly present with the substance of the bread, and you are not “eating” but “communicating,” and to feast on it as the Corinthians were to impugn the significance of the Eucharist. It was not a meal, but the means by which we “draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Heb. 10:22). To be worthy of the cup and loaf, then, is to be humbly and penitently aware that it’s “the communion of the blood of Christ” and “the communion of the body of Christ” (1 Cor. 10:16), a communion with the ultimate sacrifice that purges us of mimesis. “And those who henceforth ‘eat’ his flesh and blood renounce any participation in killing the innocent victim and feast on the spiritual body of love and forgiveness he has offered them,” concurs James Williams.

From The Altar to the Table

From the altar of the Cross, then, the sacrifice is brought down to the Table of the Lord, which is the popular verbiage in Protestant worship, for we are not sacrificing Christ at worship, but receiving Him, and so we beseech God to “bless and sanctify, with Thy Word and Holy Spirit, these Thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine; that we, receiving them according to Thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ’s holy institution, in remembrance of His death and passion, may be partakers of

His most blessed Body and Blood,” and after communicating we thank God that He “dost assure us thereby of Thy favour and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of Thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people; and are also heirs through hope of Thy everlasting kingdom, by the merits of His most precious death and passion.” Very members incorporate, part of the Temple, workers of the Temple, participating jointly in God’s sovereignty over Creation, freed from sin, for we cast our “burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee: He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved” (Ps. 55:22) and “are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Therefore, what can we say at long last? Precisely what St. Paul says: “Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened,” ridded of mimetic desire. “For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed,” once for all fulfilling all weakness and frailty that the offering of mere creatures, subject to futility themselves, cannot measure up to. “Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil,” of mimetic desire and scapegoating, “but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” found in Jesus Christ Who died on behalf of all that they may be reconciled to God by His sacrificial death. Let us therefore rejoice in the Gifts of God for the People of God, taking them in remembrance that Christ died for us, and feed on Him in our hearts by faith, with thanksgiving. Thanks be to God!