** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rant Number 782 22 August 18 SACRIFICE & THE SCAPEGOAT

EID AL-ADHA, THE MUSLIM FESTIVAL OF SACRIFICE, TELLS OF GOD TESTING ABRAHAM'S FAITH. THE TRAGIC FIGURE OF THE SCAPEGOAT CHALLENGES ALL MONOTHEISTIC BELIEVERS.
------------------------------------------------------------

Muslims all over the world are celebrating Eid al-Adha, their great festival of sacrifice. The Qur’an shows Abraham/Ibrahim and his nameless son as the protagonists. An awesome, dark story which Jews and Christians basically share. At God’s behest, Abraham is ready to slay his son as the sacrificial victim, until, at the last moment, God stays his hand and provides a ram instead. That’s why Muslims sacrifice that animal, to be divided into three parts: the poor, friends or neighbours and the family.

The ultimate test of faith. So the philosopher Kierkegaard terms the
Creator’s bloodthirsty demand. In Fear and Trembling he argues that infinite resignation to God’s will must be man’s apposite response. Everything belongs to God, even your beloved child. Abraham saw that and submitted, although a secularist or a sceptic would come to the opposite conclusion: no deity who makes such murderous request is worthy of worship. Disgust, revulsion and anger are called for, not obedience.

Writer Rene Girard’s view is more positive. Violence and aggression are intrinsic to human nature – as indeed Freud contended in Civilisation and its Discontents. The solution? To find a victim, a sacrificial being, a scapegoat. Like a lightning rod, the victim will take society’s violence upon himself and so act as a social reconciler. Of course, it matters morally whether the scapegoat is willing or not. Abraham did not ask the boy Isaac (or, for Muslims, Ismail) whether he consented – if that is at all imaginable - to be sacrificed. That is partly why this religious narrative is so shocking, even repellent.

Even dumb animals display an instinctual aversion to being slaughtered. A dramatic detail in the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum inspired poet John Keats to pen ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’. He sings of a ‘heifer lowing at the skies’, the same creature the priests are dragging towards the sacrificial altar to have its throat cut. Look at the frieze: isn’t the poor, harmless beast imploring the Powers above: ‘What sins have I committed? Why do I have to die?’ Young Isaac might just as well have begged the same of his pious, ruthless father.

Ancient myths? Archaic ideas? Outdated notions, like those of divinity, worship and the sacred? Nope. The scapegoat is alive and well, a well-nigh universal, if unpleasant, concept and practice. Ever worked in an office? A shop? A multinational company? Even a church or synagogue or mosque? Surely you can recall the odd individual, ‘the outsider’, the odd man out, one who does not fit in, who is different from other members of the group. He is the scapegoat. People unite in making fun of him, in having a go at him, in blaming him for whatever goes wrong. It all may appear harmless but it is not. The scapegoat brings about unity and cohesion in those about him while drawing unto himself all the latent, pent-up hostility of others. Rivalries are forgotten or eclipsed, everyone directed his spite towards the scapegoat. Members of the group are happy. They feel reconciled.

Scapegoating operates not just at individual level. Nations, peoples can also become sacrificial victims. The tragic fate of the Armenians – ‘the Christ amongst the nations’ - illustrates that. The oldest nation to convert to Christianity, the Armenians in the Middle Ages came under the rule of Islam, represented by the Ottoman Turks. A people mostly of tradesmen and merchants, they were different from their pastoral or nomadic neighbours. Sultan Abdul Hamid II accused them of disloyalty and ordered horrendous massacres of the outsiders. Later, the godless Young Turks took advantage of the difficulties WWI caused to Turkey to carry out systematic, hideous deportations and genocide of the Armenian people. The whole Armenian race had become a scapegoat. A warning to all humanity.

The history of the Jews, old and new, provides another terrifying example of the fate of the scapegoat. It culminated in the holocaust the chosen people suffered in WWII. Significantly, the notion of an animal victim offered to God in atonement for the sins of the people harks back to the Old Testament, Leviticus 16. As part of the rites of Yom Kippur, a goat was driven into the wilderness to be devoured by the demon Azazel. Thereafter the Hebrew people have embodied in their own flesh a bloody symbolism of perennial validity.

Girard points out how Jesus Christ’s supreme oblation on the Cross differs in a morally radical way from that of Abraham’s son. Isaac knew nothing of his impending destiny. Like the innumerable human victims of Aztecs sacrifices, he did not agree to be killed. ‘Father, I see the fire and the wood but where is the lamb?’ the boy innocently asks in Genesis. By contrast, Jesus, the Lamb of God, was the first and ultimate scapegoat who understood the supernatural reason for his own death. In submitting to the Father’s will, Jesus proves his divine nature.  The innocent Messiah willingly takes upon himself the sins, the guilt burden of the whole world. He freely accepts they should be discharged on him for the salvation of all. And in each celebration of the Eucharist, the sacrament that makes present Christ’s eternal sacrifice, the Christian believer transcends violence, pain and hatred in contemplating the smiling face of God.

My Muslim friends will not agree with the last paragraph, alas. What can I do? Well, I shall wish them a tranquil and blessed Eid al-Adha!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

------------------------------------------------------------

============================================================
** follow on Twitter (https://www.twitter.com/eugenevonsavoy/)
| ** friend on Facebook (#)
| ** forward to a friend (http://us7.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3ae40cde0c299583529f1448a&id=647462c9d8&e=5707b9e8db)

Copyright © Fr Frank Gelli
Email Marketing Powered by MailChimp
http://www.mailchimp.com/monkey-rewards/?utm_source=freemium_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=monkey_rewards&aid=3ae40cde0c299583529f1448a&afl=1
** unsubscribe from this list (https://simplesite.us7.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3ae40cde0c299583529f1448a&id=f9573901af&e=5707b9e8db&c=647462c9d8)
| ** update subscription preferences (https://simplesite.us7.list-manage.com/profile?u=3ae40cde0c299583529f1448a&id=f9573901af&e=5707b9e8db)