The Sacrificed God

The Sacrificed God

*This article previously appeared in an issue of _Creation Spirituality_ magazine.*

From infancy I have heard and believed the Gospel of Christ, and yet never have I understood the crucifixion. This did not occur to me as a child; it was just another of those inexplicable equations that parents gave and kids accepted. After my invaluable years as the prodigal son, however, I returned to the faith of my family. But this time, I did not accept the pat answers nor play the power-games. When something didn't make sense to me, I stalked it until I pinned it down. When I came to the vicarious atonement on the cross I met my match. I scrambled through innumerable commentaries and systematic theologies (an oxymoron, I think) trying to find a suitable explanation. Just what happened up there on that cross, anyway? "Jesus died for my sins" makes no sense in itself. How does an historical event 2000 years removed have the slightest bearing upon my life today? What are the cosmic mechanics involved? What exactly happened on the metaphysical level? I found a lot of words, but no answers. Not only that, how could I reconcile the God of wrath my Calvinism taught with the loving Father of Jesus' teachings?

Then I ran across a Catholic theologian who used the phrase "the mystery of redemption." That's it! Of course! There is no human explanation: it is a mystery. That I could take on faith. I didn't need to understand it-it was beyond human comprehension.

That answer satisfied me for many years, until I began to study a little farther afield. When I picked up the Upanishads, the later collection of Hindu scripture, I read about Prajapati, the primeval being alone in the void. Prajapati was all that was at the time, and when he thought the words "I wish I had a body," lo, he had one. But he desired not to be alone even more than he desired a body, and so he performed the first sacrifice. He offered up his own body to be the stuff of the universe. This Hindu Creation myth casts Prajapati in the peculiar role of being the sacrificer, the sacrifice, and the god to whom the sacrifice is offered. This Prajapati posed many questions about my Christology-is this a myth revealing the work of the Pre-incarnate Word? In the beginning of John's gospel it is written "through him all things were made." But the word rendered "were made" is egeneto, which is more correctly rendered "became." If through the Word all things became, we get a picture through Prajapati of the universe as the body of God, offered up for his/her own pleasure, the pleasure of community with his/her Creations. It foreshadows the Crucifixion, and as we shall see, forms the beginning of a cosmic continuity of which the Cross is the paramount sign. Even in the celebration of the Eucharist, we echo Prajapati's act: Christ is the sacrificer, the sacrifice, and the God to whom the sacrifice is offered.

As I have stated before, it is my belief that Christ is the unique product of the union of matter and the Spirit of God. Prajapati, then, is the Eastern equivalent of the Cosmic Christ, in whom "we live and move and have our being" throughout all eternity. This is panentheism, the union of the Spirit of God with the material universe. What does this have to do with the gory tragedy of the Crucifixion? Simply that in the Cross we are given an unquestionable symbol of reality: that the spirit of God remains in union with flesh, even though we taunt, spit on him/her and torture him/her, even though we murder him/her. On the cross, Jesus gave us a powerful symbol of what has always been true: despite our ghastly offenses, God remains enfleshed among us. As Alan Watts states in his excellent book Behold the Spirit: "God has wedded himself to humanity, has united his divine essence with our inmost being 'for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health' for all eternity....The fact is the fact: we have been given union with God whether we like it or not, want it or not, know it or not."

The crucifixion was not for the satisfaction of a bloodthirsty Deity who must have an object upon which to unleash his vengeance, but the result of a loving God who does not strike back or interfere, letting our own resentment and violence run its course, which resulted, as it so often does, in murder. As Raymond Schwager, S.J. writes in Must There Be Scapegoats?, "Jesus could die for all because all had already turned against him. All joined together against him and by crucifying him, concretely transferred to him their resentment against God and their will to kill." "For the love that creates the world," writes Ian Davie, "is the love that lets it be, and the love that lets it be is the love that suffers its being so."

The redemption may not end with us, either. Perhaps God, too, needs to be redeemed. In Jung's Answer to Job, God's permitting of Job's suffering is unethical, and the immaturity of the Old Testament Yahweh is not redeemed until he/she, in Christ, endures like suffering. Indeed, in Davie's Jesus Parusha, he says "Jesus consents to die in order that our humanity shall no longer be separated from his. In the cry of dereliction from the Cross ['Why have you forsaken me'], he experiences abandonment by God... In his own death, he suffers the death of all." Not until death, did Jesus experience the totality of the human experience. And then, God could be reconciled with us.

In Prajapati, we see the divinity of our being. In the crucifixion, we see the humanity of God's. And yet they are mirrors of the same reality. To quote Davie again, "Must we not say that there is an eternal Passion of Creation enacted in the unfolding drama of the universe, and a temporal Passion of Redemption which is the enactment in time of that eternal Passion; and yet that there are not two Passions, but one?"