The last time I stood up here in front of you, I used the title “Whose fault is it?” I wanted to share with you some of the thoughts of a philosopher and anthropologist and theologian all wrapped up in one person, whose name was Rene Girard. He was born in France in 1923, but he came over to the United States when he was 25 to do his PhD at Indiana University. After that he had a teaching career in French language and literature that took him to Duke University, to Bryn Mawr, then to Johns Hopkins and finally ended up at Stanford when he was 58 years old and he stayed there until he retired from academia in 1995 and died in 2015, eight years short of living 100 years. During his career he wrote more than 30 books in all sorts of different fields – but he was probably most famous for his diagnosis of the human condition and what the life of Jesus tells us about God. To remind you where we got to a month ago:
First, Girard asks, Why are we such a violent species? Because we want what other people want just because someone else has them – things we don’t need and never even thought of until we saw that someone else wanted them. Here’s James 4: the first two verses: “Those conflicts and disputes among you,,, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder.”
Second, Girard asks, How do feel safe in such a violent world? We blame someone else – it’s their fault. The beginning of “us” versus “them”. Scapegoating. We pick a minority group or a foreign group and say “it’s all their fault” and so we keep peace with each other, because we have a common enemy that we can direct our violence toward.
And it affects our theology, also. Our God is a violent God – he punishes us for our original sin of violence. He is a God of justice and he demands that someone has to pay for our violence. demands payment for all this violence in the world. Someone has to pay. So we have pagan sacrifices, Salem witch trials, and all those Biblical stories where God is vengeful and will punish those “others,” or even us, unless someone protects us from the wrath of God. And from around the tenth century onward, we have adopted Anslem’s notion that Jesus is the one who pays the price for our sins. It works pretty well, doesn’t it?
But, says Girard, Jesus’s life is a totally non-violent life, and he shows us a non-violent God. It was our violence that killed Jesus, and God had to bring him back to life again to show us how wrong we were about a violent God, And now we can understand that God loves us, God forgives us, and Jesus shows us how to live together as children of a loving God. We don’t have to imitate other people by wanting what they want. We have a new person to imitate, the one that imitates God and shows us what God is like and how we should be living in the world God created.
And that’s where we left it a month ago. And historically, it seemed to be working pretty well – early Christians were peaceful, they were known for loving each other. They were thrown to lions rather than fight back when persecuted. Some historians think that things went wrong when Constantine conflated Christianity with military power. So then we could go to war and return to violence, and God is on our side this time. And we have the Crusades – we are back to a violent God who punishes his enemies, and so way down here in the 21st century, churches are condemning people to hell because they don’t have the right beliefs and God is going to punish them, or we are going to punish them in God’s name. And this notion of God is why some of us left the churches of our childhood.
But we study the life of Jesus, vindicated by God’s resurrection of him, and we discover that God is kind, merciful, like a good parent. We learn that the answer to violence is forgiveness – and we want to imitate his way of life, and in so doing we become transformed into non-violent people who love even the unlovable people of our own time and place. And as we draw more and more “others” into our circle of love, the world itself becomes transformed. That is, if we don’t destroy ourselves first. The great fear of nuclear war in the mid-twentieth century was gradually replaced by concern for how we are devastating our environment. Now the situations in the Middle East and between Russian and Ukraine, many people again are fearful of nuclear war. And so the gospel does not say everything will end well; there is no way to guarantee that the circle of love will grow fast enough to outrun the violence of our species in general. What we do know that Christ promised to with us till the end of the Age, even if we bring it to an end ourselves.
Finally we get to the apocalypse of my title for today. So what do we mean by apocalypse?
The Dictionary says
- Apocalypse is the complete final destruction of the world, as described in the Biblical book of Revelation, and
- It has also come to mean an event involving destruction or damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale, e.g., “a stock market apocalypse”
Some churches have been founded on and continue to exist by peddling the notion of God coming in great wrath – the so-called Battle of Armegeddon. They predict when it will happen and how it will happen and what the mark of the Beast is and how God will separate the sheep from the goats, The harvester lets the weeds grow along with the good grain because when it’s time to reap, he will keep the good grain and throw the rest into the fire. In Jesus time, they were thinking of a fire such as existed at the dump outside the city walls, where refuse was thrown, and the fire just kept going as long as people added fuel to it. (I don’t recall that there was anything that didn’t burn up in that fire.)
Girard says we need to find a new way to interpret the last book in the New Testament. First remember that Revelation uses the imagery of its day. Suppose an archeologist of the future who doesn’t know about our sports teams finds a document that says “Bears rip Eagles to shreds.” What would they make of that? Or they find pictures (cartoons) of an Elephant and a Donkey fighting”.
So we don’t know what the Riders of the Apocalypse means, be we have chosen to see it as God attacking us. Perhaps it doesn’t mean that. Maybe it means that we have no protection against our own violence until we learn to love each other.
The White horse rider carries a bow, indicating the military – the military is not going to save us from our own violence.
The second rider takes away our peace may mean that if peace was based on the military, that peace was an illusion.
The rider of the Black horse carries scales, suggesting weighing and measuring things. This might indicate the economy. Necessities become so expensive that many people living in poverty die of starvation. Capitalism is a system in which others become our competitors, and the winners are the ones who accumulates the most wealth and possessions. The economy cannot protect us from our violence.
The rider of the Pale Horse traditionally represents disease, natural accidents. In Jesus’s day, Caesar brings peace (pax Romana, the Roman Empire), but can he provide peace from natural disasters, disease, fire, animal attacks, things that can also threaten our peace and lead to violence?
The significance of the riders may be that humanity realizes the “cracks” in our military, political, economic systems. God is not threatening us with war, disease, famine, death, He is showing us that chaos can take over, and we could easily be the victims of our own violence. Christ frees us from violence by giving us a real picture of God and showing us that love and forgiveness are what we can now imitate and be transformed by, as we try to follow the example of Jesus, who said as he died, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.”
Remember when Jesus compared the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed ? So tiny, yet look what happens. When it is planted it grows quickly to over nine feet tall and provides sanctuary for birds. So the Kingdom of God may start out tiny, but it can grow till all humans will be liberated, because God welcomes everyone and God is the one bringing it about.
We live in this very polarized world with capitalism as our economic base – a system based on us wanting to have more and more things that we don’t need and that don’t make us happy. It encourages us to see everyone else as our competitor, out to take advantage of us. The winners are the ones who accumulate the most wealth and possessions. This is not saving us from violence.
So what will we turn to next? The temptation (for me at least) is politics, but we must not raise up another group to hate. The only way to escape is to refuse to act violently against anyone –we must give ourselves over to non-violent direct action. And our salvation is that God is helping us along, step by step, all the way. We are called to live and continue to grow — and we are to give up asking God to end the world. The gospel does not guarantee a happy ending to history. It simply presents Humanity with two options; either imitate Christ, giving up all violence, or run the risk of self-destruction (Warren 2013, p.334).
Remember that Scripture tells us that the best end to the story is that all nations will come to worship God. We have been given a chance to escape our own violence and see past it to everything good God has given us. So we come to this room each week to be encouraged by God and by each other to go out into our world and widen the boundaries of our ability to love and forgive and thus bring in the Kingdom of God.
This message was given to Spokane Friends by Lois Kieffaber during Sunday morning worship on March 3, 2024.
References
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SCnonH0Yr4 An Introduction to René Girard, Commons Church. This is a series of 6 short videos (10-15 minutes each) summarizing the theories of Rene Girard. Best place to start.
Thomas Gates, New Light on Atonement; No More Scapegoating, Friends Journal, Dec 2022.
Hardin,Michael (2013) The Jesus-Driven Life: Reconnecting Humanity with Jesus (JDL Press)
Stuart Masters, A Quaker Stew https://aquakerstew.blogspot.com/2015/09/r-is-for-rene-girard-human-violence-and.html
Warren, James (2012) Compassion or Apocalypse? A Comprehensible Guide to the Thought of Rene Girard (Christian Alternative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard
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