Habitat for Spirituality - Not Our Judge, Not Our Jailer

Not Our Judge, Not Our Jailer

Saturday, 05 March 2005

Altar, blood, high priest, lamb, offering, Passover, priest, sacrifice,
scapegoat, sin. In ancient times once a year a goat would be brought into the centre of the town and upon its back the priest would, symbolically, heap the sins of the community. The animal’s throat would then be torn and it would be hounded out into the desert to die. With this sacrifice the great God would be appeased and everyone was now out of danger till next year. Poor Goat. Poor God. What an astounding image of deity this theology presents us with.
A god who will punish the broken, the separated, the lost, the foolish, the mistaken, the unloved - unless another a scapegoat (a blindman, a Christ child) can be sacrificed in the sinners place. In our reading today we are given a man born blind. Now obviously according to this atonement theology someone has sinned. Was it this man sinning in utero or was it his parents? Did this evil couple give birth to their very own scapegoat? How very clever of them. The question asked by the disciples presupposes that suffering only occurs because a sin has been committed. Because, as everybody knows, bad things only happen to bad people. So In order to unpack this passage a little further we must define sin. The possibilities of this definition range from the tangible, physical abuses which are so common thoughout our past and present right up to the more psychological or metaphorical.

For theologian Paul Tillich the root meaning of ‘Sin’ is separation, sin is to be ‘put asunder’.
Tillich's term for this sundering is estrangement.
Oh God we are strangers in a strange land.
Oh God.
And when you are in a strange land you often feel frightened and this fear can lead to self preservation and obsession with self preservation can lead to a life lived in a state of primal anxiety and primal anxiety can lead to primal behaviour. Behaviour like 'survival of the fittest,' 'attack rather than be attacked,' 'go to war on them before they declare war on you,' burn their books, pull down their temples, deny their faith, take away their children, smash their babies heads upon the rocks - anything, anything, anything as long as it keeps me and mine safe. So we recognise that sin can emerge from a place of insecurity. The next question: Does God punish us for these sins?

What do you think?
What does your heart say?

In western patriarchal monotheism, ruling-class males have constructed
theologies in which the shedding of innocent blood is assumed to be
necessary in the making of right relationship with God.

What do you think
What does your heart say?

Feminist Theologian Carter Hayward writes of how the theology of atonement for sin, which is essentially what we are talking about here, seems to her to be an amazing thing.

To imagine that the only way to get right with the source of love and justice in cosmic history is to offer him the blood of innocent victims - extraordinary!

‘We need to say No!’ Carter cries. No to a tradition of violent punishment and to a God who needs throat cutting and crucifixion in order to forgive.

What do you think?
what does your heart say?

Some time ago I spent a years field placement at the children's hospital. In the chapel there was a book, a prayer book, and in it parents would write
down their hopes and fears for their child.
Dear God, please look after Johnny, don't let him die
Dear God, he’s not getting better, why are you doing this to us. Dear God I will do anything, stop drinking, be kinder, anything, anything, anything. Dear God please. Dear God, Oh God, Oh God, and then the letters would stop.

Which person sinned? This parent or that child? Oh God. Many of us may like to think that we are not a superstitious people. And yet for most of us you only have to scratch the rational surface a wee bit before the magical thinking emerges. Magic like cutting the goats throat. Magic like a God who punishes the bad
and rewards the good. Magic like if I am very careful and follow all the rules then nothing terrible will ever happen. The one thing that the new age, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Hindu and
fundamentalist Christian, Jewish and Muslim movements have in common is their readiness to blame the victim when disaster falls. Call it Karma. Call it punishment from an all powerful deity. Call it what you will.
But it all boils down to the same thing.
A desperate desire to feel safe and in control of your own destiny which is natural and so very human but it is not what God in Christ came to reveal to us- not at all.

Blaming the victim is not only something we do to others. It is often most destructively something we do to ourselves. A friend of mine has a brother who is suffering from cancer. He has had all the treatment he can but still a tiny section of cancerous cells remain and are growing and this young man thinks its his fault because he has sinned, he is guilty, he did not do all he ought or love as he could
have loved.
You know the story.
So he is reading books about letting go of anger and mediating on white light.
You know the story.

None of these things are bad or foolish in themselves and some of them
may well be useful. We are mind body and spirit after all.
But its the motivation which is so distressing and so ancient and so familiar.

God give us the courage to not make scapegoats of ourselves and others. Give us the wisdom to recognise the broken fragility of the world. To know that sometimes, bad things, frightening things, devastating things just happen and that you are not our judge, nor our jailer, but simply our holy one, our shepherd from the 23 Psalm, who holds us in our pain.

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