Eric’s very appropriate reference to our God being a God desiring mercy and not sacrifice 
is a really good cue to plonk something else about Girard here (It’s some notes I name a few years back, a lot of which are based on articles by Mark Stein). This is the gospel for non-scapegoaters – and I hope some will find it stimulating and see its relevance to the topic.
(I want to post it in memory of Alan Turing. I see from Google that it is the 100th anniversary of his birth today. He was the brilliant mathematician who cracked the Enigma code used by the Nazis during the war. Without his efforts Britain would almost certainly have lost the Battle of Britain – and Churchill acknowledged that no single person had made a greater contribution to the war effort than Alan Turing. Turing was also gay. Soon after the war there was a burglary at this house, and he had to tell the police that his gay lover was in bed with him when this took place. He then faced a choice of imprisonment or chemical castration. He chose the latter and the process seems to have contributed to his suicide).
**An understanding of the relationship between the Bible and the myths found throughout the cultures of the world is central to Girard’s thinking. Thinkers from the pagan philosophers who debated with Christian apologists in the 2nd century, to Joseph Campbell in the 20th have pointed out that the kernel of the Christian story - the sacrificial victim who is revealed as being divine - is also found extensively in the myths of other religions. Therefore, they have argued that the Christian story, far from being unique, is no more than the re-telling of an archetypal myth. Indeed, this view has been influential in strands of Liberal Christianity.
Girard’s extensive research in comparative mythology, literature and anthropology has led him to a very different conclusion. For him, the story of the divine sacrifice is none other than the disguised story of the murder of the scapegoat – the original founding act of human communities that is ’the thing hidden since the foundation of the world’. Girard argues that whereas in the myths of the world the story is told from the point of view of the lynch mob concealing the sordid truth of the murder of the innocent victim, in the Bible the same story is told from the perspective of the victim. Thus the mechanisms of human violence that generate the lynching are unmasked and ‘demythologised’
To illustrate Girard’s point I’m going to tell you a story (nicked from Mark Heim)- .
*Christ – the sacred lamb sent by God – visited a great city in the form of a swarthy stranger from a distant province, in order to call back those who had fallen into ignorance. He did many acts of power and the people worshipped him and made him their king. He taught them how he would become God’s son.
However, in those days there was turmoil in the city, each house was set against another; and so Christ prepared his final wonder.
One day he called to him Mary, his mother and his dearest disciple. He went with her into the temple and ate bread in the holy of holies that no person is to touch. Then he lay with his mother near the altar throughout the night. The earth shook, many in the city were stricken with a deadly disease, and the people were afraid.
In the morning the people came to the temple seeking to know what evil had been done to bring these troubles upon them. They found nothing but the smallest mustard seed carrying the entirety of divinity within it. All the people were greatly distressed at this and were seized with trance-like awe. With one spirit, they rushed to form a great procession and carried the seed to a stony hill outside the walls of the city. Each person, without exception, threw stones in to cover it.
Miraculously the seed immediately grew up into a great tree, and Christ himself was the fruit of that tree. All who ate of this fruit discovered the joy of eternal life. The people returned to the city rejoicing; and health and peace ruled again in those walls. And they worshiped at Christ’s tree of life in every generation.*
This story has all of the features of a myth of the sacrificial victim. We note that Christ is a stranger and therefore bears one of the archetypal marks of a potential victim. There is an unresolved crisis of rivalry in the City – and conflict and crisis are always the context for sacrifice in myth. Christ commits heinous acts of sacrilege in the Temple and this results in a plague (the implication being that he is guilty as the source of pollution and the cause of the crisis – as in the mob’s view he is). His expulsion and death at the hands of the mob is not referred to explicitly. Rather, it is covered up in the sanitised euphemism of the crowd’s procession with the seed and their ritual placing of the stones over the seed. This use of euphemism is another hallmark of myth and is not entirely propaganda – once they return to normal life, the individuals who form the crowd feel genuinely disconnected from the violence they have done in a unified frenzy. It is as if a wrathful god has visited them while they were in a trance. This ‘misrecognition’ results in misrepresentation. Peace returns after Christ is killed; and, paradoxically, the source of pollution becomes a source of blessing and Christ becomes a divinity. This all accords with universal pattern of narrative myth but it is unnecessary for me to point out to you that is not what we find in the Bible.
‘What myths hide, the Bible reveals’ and Girard points out that the vindication of the victims of the scapegoating is there in the Hebrew Bible from the start. Abel’s murder cries out to heaven. Joseph is cast out by his envious brothers – but is vindicated by God (and events). Crowds also unite against the victim in the servant songs of Second Isaiah, as they do against Jeremiah, Job and the narrators of the penitential psalms. However, in none of these instances is there any attempt at a ‘cover-up’. The story is told from the point of view of the victims who are vindicated by Yahweh. Indeed the murder of the very first victim - Abel – whose murder is the thing hidden since the foundation of the world – cries out for vindication.
Of course, the voice of the victim is not the only voice in the Hebrew Bible – we also have the ideology of the Hebrew sacrificial cult, which Girard would admit does contain mythological elements. As he says, ‘the Bible is a text in travail’ In Hebraic sacrifice, an animal was substituted for the human victim. However, if the ritual went wrong the priest could become the victim as happens, for example, to Aaron’s sons in Leviticus. This is portrayed as an instance of the descent of ‘the wrath of God’. However, it is not difficult to discern that what is actually being related is an event in which rivalry in the community becomes so intense that the sacrifice of an animal is not effective and there is a frenzied reversion to human sacrifice as a safety valve for human wrath. Indeed, Girard argues that the bible is a text in travail in which t
The later prophets repudiate the notion of redemptive sacrifice completely, telling the people of Israel that Yahweh despise the stench of their burnt offerings and requires works of justice and mercy of them instead. However, Girard argues that even in the most progressive texts of the Old Testament such as the fourth Servant Song in Second Isaiah there is ambiguity. Sometimes the crowd is presented as the sole instigator of the persecution but sometimes Yahweh is also implicated.
It is in the New Testament that Girard sees the complete unmasking of the scapegoating mechanism, and an accounting for ‘the blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world’ (Luke 11:50-51). Now it is Christ who is the innocent victim against whom the mob unanimously unites. However, his vindication is complete through his resurrection; and it is through this resurrection that those who joined in with the lynch mob (Peter through his denials and Paul through being the instigator of persecution) are able to see the truth without myth/satanic lies, and live according to the order of life rather than the order of death.
The Gospels also unmask the anatomy of human destructiveness that makes scapegoating necessary. The Greek word Skandalon occurs many times in the New Testament, especially in Matthew’s Gospel. It has a richer and more nuanced meaning than the English word ‘scandal’ and is best translated as ‘stumbling-block’ rather than ‘moral offence’. It implies an addictive process of overwhelming compulsion. The unavoidable obstacle’ both attracts and repels each time we stumble against it (and each time we do this we suffer progressive psychic damage). For Girard this term encapsulates what happens during the process of rivalry; it speaks of the core of our human problems – of our ‘anthropology’.
When two people desire the same thing they become each other’s ‘stumbling blocks’. As rivalry escalates, the contested object of desire becomes forgotten and the antagonists become fascinated with each other instead. The more they block each other’s desire, the more they imitate each other. In effect, they become each other’s ‘Doubles’ as mutual fascination gives way to envy, indignation, and hatred and – in the end – to annihilating violence (hence the repeated motif of warring twins in world mythology and to a certain extent in the early books of the Bible). However, the more they become ‘the same’ in their actions, the less they can see the violence in themselves. Each only sees the violence in the other.
On a number of occasions in the Gospels, Jesus warns the disciples with great severity and in quite shocking language against the dangers of scandals. A pivotal example comes in Matthew’s Gospel when Jesus first predicts his violent death at the hands of the worldly powers (Matthew 16: 21-23), and Peter protests that this must not happen. This suggests that Peter believes his Master should be capable of beating these worldly powers at their own game on their own terms (a temptation that Jesus has already struggled against and rejected in the wilderness). Jesus rebukes him harshly with ‘Get behind me Satan; you are a skandalon to me.
Girard’s interpretation of this is that instead of imitating Jesus, Peter is expecting Jesus to imitate him. If Jesus succumbs to this temptation, it will probably initiate a cycle of infighting in which he and Peter become rivals for the leadership of a politicised messianic movement. However, Jesus, who has God the Father as his model of how to live, has nothing to do with violence and antagonistic desire. He shows the way to live a life free of the scandals that generate violence. However, if we instead choose possessive and antagonistic models we choose the ‘satan’ as our model who is scandal personified: hence, Jesus’ harsh rebuke to Peter.
Jesus question, ‘How can Satan cast out Satan’ (Mark 3:23) suggests the answer ‘He does this through the scapegoat mechanism. Satan is the instigator of the scandals that force communities to disintegrate – but also provides the mechanism for their pseudo-resolution. In exposing the mythical lie, Christ becomes a focus of division rather than reconciliation. In the Gospel of John Jesus testifies to the God of love who has nothing to do with our ‘sacred’ mechanisms of expulsion, violence and death – and yet everything he does has a divisive effect. Likewise, in Matthew 10:34 Jesus says, ‘’ I have not come to bring peace but a sword’’. Girard comments on this that ‘if the only peace humanity has ever enjoyed depends on unconscious victimisation, the consciousness that the Gospels bring into the world can only destroy it’. In this connection, he sees the apocalyptic dimension in the New Testament not as an alien element but as a revelation of the turmoil we need to go through as scandals proliferate, to reach a peace beyond the peace of victimisation.
Very importantly, Jesus’ death is described as a skandalon. Before the passion drama begins, Jesus warns his disciples – and especially Peter – that they will become skandalizien by him. An ironic reading immediately suggests itself – Jesus who has lived and taught us how to live without scandal is being made the scapegoat for scandals. For Girard this use of skandalizien also confirms that the force at work in the scapegoat lynch mob - in which violence spreads like wildfire through what Girard terms ‘mimetic contagion’- is indeed the same as the violence at work in mimetic rivalries between individuals. It is a type of violence that makes everyone the same, everyone blind. The crowd turned into a unified mob in the Passion narratives is a tinderbox of complex and envious rivalries for power both within and between groups comprised of rebels, collaborators and the occupying forces. The death of Jesus prevents a riot and brutal reprisals through its cathartic effect. The mob disperses peacefully. At the end of his Passion narrative Luke writes, ‘’And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other’’ (Luke 23:12). However, this camaraderie is a ‘satanic’ parody of Christian reconciliation being the cathartic effect of the scapegoat ritual.
Any reading of the atonement informed by Girard’s ideas will be non-sacrificial. Certainly
Christians say ‘blood shed for us’ but they mean blood shed once for all. They say ‘We are reconciled in his blood’, but they mean we are freed to live without the reconciliation that requires the blood of the scapegoat- victims of such acts will never be invisible again – they look too much like Jesus. We can turn to finding a new basis for peace, such as that found around the communion table. **
Thanks Eric!!!
Johnny - will have a chat about the very niteresting questions of whehter gay relationships actually can be seen in the Bible - and if not ,why not? - when we meet. I reckon that’s a very good issue to take up when we’ve looked at the relvant New Testatment texts (which everyone is champing at the bit about 
)
Warm regards and blessings to all
Dick
, if only temporarily).
.
and I don’t know how to fix it??? It says they are ON, but IF I click on one it erases all that I’ve written, maybe that’s a sign from God that I shouldn’t be writing, or maybe that I just shouldn’t be using “smilies.” 
. Give me a day or so. 
I agree whole-heartedly AND this time around, thank God, it has taken on a whole NEW tone… one of love and grace… just sayin’ I’m REAL grateful!!
too. Yes that lecherous, paranoid monster of cruelty 
?