Desire, Despair, And Belonging

Advertisements often show very little of the product they're selling. Consider car commercials. The product itself is often almost background noise. They will show you stylish and chic men or women portraying all the trappings of success in a culture, and the car, well it's there, sort of. What is actually being presented to you is a certain quality of life to be desired it is subtly implied that you can have it if you only purchase the car. The aim is to make you unconsciously desire, not the car, but that quality of life, the quality of "being" it supposedly gets you. This is far more powerful and pervasive than a need for mere physical conveyance.

Whether or not you can afford a car the mechanism causes one to think that you may not attain the quality of life the world tells you you must possess to be accepted and successful. The inability to attain it can lead to anxiety, depression, or could simply lead to being enslaved to debt to possess it. Is it any wonder that consumer debt is wreaking havoc on so many people. Passions, borrowed from often unseen and unexamined sources, draw people into the abyss of crushing financial burden. But this only skims the surface.

One root of this pull is a longing for validation that is often denied in a world of inequalities of every sort. It's not "do you possess" but do you possess that more, other thing or sense of being? There is no end of the objects or measures of meaning presented to us by others.  The masses would deny this reality (even if it were told to them) because it creates disonance with the illusion of having a form of "individuality". Blindness to this further exacerbates internal conflict and rivalry with others.

The Apostle Paul wrote in Phillipian 4:11 that in whatever state he found himself in to be content. This is one real way of contending with the problem of imitated human desire. Why are so many not content? Because there are models of desire everywhere around us promising fullfillment and meaning. We feel the draw and all to often either internalize this "lacking" or blame others for it. The first leads to anxiety and depression, the other to anger, discontent and ultimately violence either in word or deed. All the while consciously oblivious of the mechanism and how we are being pulled along like driftwood in a stream.

Once we have what we need we don't know what we want; we want what our neighbor has because if he desires it it must have value. We always desire what we do not possess, once we possess it it soon loses value as it ceases to arouse desire in us and in those around us, which validates our choice and ourselves. It no longer "functions" for us and interest wanes.

The Decalogue closes with what begins as an enumeration of desires to be avoided only to be realized by the writer, at the end, there is no end to the desires for "your neighbor's" anything. There is never an indication that desire originates anywhere else. This prohibition is problematic because we don't even understand the way in which our desires are not our own but are "modeled" for us by our neighbor and appropriated as our own. This dynamic invariably both puts us at enmity with some and binds us to others as our competition for objects of desire ultimately result in rivalry and hatred.

We want, or more appropriately need, others to validate our choices or the pleasure of having the object of desire diminishes and we discard that which at an earlier place we would have fought over. Value is wholly dependent upon and subjective to whether or not somebody else desires it. Consider the adolescent ploy of "making someone jealous". There's a break up, the one who is rejected may seek out a partner, not because he/she desires the partner, but because it is a form of self-validation and that it will show the other that he/she is, in fact, desirable. If this fails the patsy will be discarded, or a pseudo-relationship will be formed but will be, in time, doomed as this false desire, a mere manipulation of another, has no real or lasting power.

The dual purpose is both to reaffirm his or her value and to make the other desire anew. In repeated stories of crimes of passion someone kills the one they supposedly love. This is merely a way of possessing the other, and if one cannot gain possession of the object of their desire then possession is gained by taking that life; literally, possessing their life by a violent perversion of love. This is too often also a characature of the "love" of God; a god after our own image.

The dynamic and pervasive nature of imitated desire does however play a crucial role in human advancement. We can and do pass on, through imitation, an incredible amount of knowledge and learned experience in a very compressed time frame from an evolutionary standpoint. Desire is a gift that has formed us and powers advancement. But it also holds the capacity to destroy us utterly and completely.

Therefore, whatever state we find ourselves in we should be content or we may, in due course, find ourselves extinct.

Same World, Different Day

There was a conspiracy launched by one of the most capable and trustworthy voices in centuries that many people hardly remember. In spite of the profound credibility and penetration that this voice had in modern times the conspiracy failed to gain traction,  failed to go "viral".

One might ask why?

I think for a conspiracy to be successful it must always play upon the zeitgeist of the times. It must tickle the ears that hear it and feed fear, distrust, suspicion, and hatred of one against another which is the spirit of every human age.

"With your values and formulae of good and evil, ye exercise power, ye valuing ones: and that is your secret love, and the sparkling, trembling, and overflowing of your souls..."(This Spoke Zarathustra, 34. Self-Surpassing)

You see here the keen observation of Nietzsche as he answers the question of why, in that ancient mythical garden, that the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden to man.Why the first conspiracy seems to have failed is that it started with ideas that are antithetical to the normal social ordering that follows on the theme further elucidated by Nietzsche:

"Let it be very justice for the world to become full of the storms of our vengeance"... "Vengeance will we use, and insult, against all who are not like us" (This Spoke Zarathustra, 29. The Tarantulas)

We can fully apprehend this logic as lived experience and every inclination formed by this logic becomes a god to rule over us. It takes shape as a manipulation of one's passions with the intellect in fast pursuit; Thought rarely precedes passion. We have been assured in accordance with the above mentioned failed conspiracy that the pathway to peace and truth is narrow and hard and few find it. I believe Nietzsche had grasp of the truth and understood the path only to reject it. He was honest, at least.

His reported last words before his death were: “Mutter, ich bin dumm (Mother, I am dumb).” The modern west is at a similar juncture as was Nietzsche in his time only not as sighted, nor honest, nor likely to meet a better end.

Girard's Individual?

As I was reading a moderate rated review of Rene Girard's work' "Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World" I noted a few things. First even though the reviewer rated this work three stars this was his second book by Girard and had ordered two more.

Secondly, it was clear that in spite of some reservation he found the thoughts put forward in this magnum opus irresistibly compelling. Third, something that I found thought-provoking was the lament that there is an absence of the affirmation of the "individual" or the concept of "individuation" in Girard's work.

I've accepted the idea long ago that the concept of the individual is illusory. I've let this sit in my thoughts for a long time, occasionally tossing in other ideas and insights as they come along, sort of the way one would bake a cake. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, and bake at 350° for 30 minutes.

I'm stirring the batter a little this morning.

The writer was at odds with losing the category of being "individual" and was finding this unbearable. However I find an allusion to this expressed in literature with the repeated (twice in Matthew & Luke) statement by Jesus:

"Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it."

I believe this is much more nuanced than what we've been able, or allowed, to see.

I am nothing but the aggregated influence of every unnamed and unnoticed desire put before me. The earliest words from and observation of my parents, friends, to the bullies in the school yard. They've all become part of what is collectively called me.

In social structure we call the VISIBLE manifestation of this dynamic peer pressure. The most energetic and affective elements of this are not so visible.What Girard expounds on are these hidden movements of desire, that which we cannot see, nor even search out until that first - and fatal to our preconceptions - unveiling.

Those hidden motives that always remain just beyond our cognition; Those - as a truth - that are addressed when Jesus, from the cross, repeatedly utters the words: "Father forgive them, for THEY DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING." Lk 23:34

This not knowing is deeper and broader than our religious traditions have allowed any to see and it is in this realm that Girard shows his brilliance!

We always carry pieces of others around within us, as part OF us. We are not alone, because the truth is, we are, in this sense, in one-another, just as when we say of those who have passed on that we carry them in our hearts; No, it's much more than that. Part of them continues to literally live within you, for better or worse.

"...so that they may all be one. Just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be one in us..." Jn 17:21

Our uniqueness is only and precisely a particular manifestation of all the "other" contained within us. To hate your neighbor is, by extension, to hate yourself. And if we fill the world with self-hate disguised as love what hope do we have?

What you have done to the least of these brothers of mine, you've done for me Matt 25:40

For when you pass judgment on another person, you condemn yourself, since you, the judge, practice the very same things. Rom 2:1

How can you say you love God and yet hate your neighbor? 1Jn 4:20

All these references function to remove the distance between us all, if we would let them.

Well, there's more ingredients for the bowl and another day.

Primary Mimeticism and The Apple or The Fruit And the Nexus of Human Being

"[René] Girard breaks from traditional philosophical conceptions branching from Plato to Hegel that view consciousness as preceding any acquisitive behavior." [1]

Extant philosophical conceptions have already laid a framework for our thinking about ourselves almost before we are actually thinking about ourselves, our world, and our origins. It seems everything follows on the supposition that we acquired consciousness and that this acquisition of consciousness constitutes the beginning of all else; the foundational moment, the beginning of human "being".

What these philosophical conceptions seem to lack in my unlearned estimation is a coherent and plausible explanation of how this consciousness came to be. Girard posits that acquisitive desire precedes all consciousness, language, or symbols and has articulately shown how this can be. As a Christian considering this idea I was moved to re-visit the narratives of origins that we know as the book of the Genesis.

When considering the primary theme of one of these originating stories in Genesis - I am convinced that there are more than one story told in the book that have been woven together over time - in the light of Girard's counter view a rather interesting picture of origins unfolded. Only briefly, the creation narrative culminates in the introduction of a man and a woman who lived in what appears to be an idyllic setting charged with subduing, [kaw-bash'] literally to "bring into bondage", the created world.

From Genesis 1:26-31 we have what appears a synopsis of one complete creation narrative. The man and woman are created in one act as an image or "phantom" [tseh-lem'] of God. They were, in some way, instructed to multiply (have unbridled sex) and fill and subdue the earth, and they were given all "grain bearing plants and fruit trees" for food. This concisely completes the creation story of man from beginning to end. The story concludes that "everything was good" and marks the end of the sixth day of creation. We then have an intermission with the seventh day where God rested from his work.

In Genesis 2:4-25 we have a different and more embellished account of the creation myth. Here there are at least two significant thematic divergences from the first story. We have the introduction of prohibition, which appears before the creation of the woman, then, of course is the divergence of the later advent of the woman; whereas in the first narrative man and woman were created simultaneously. 

In this idyllic setting the couple were free to wander around naked - if we splice this information in from the second story - and to do as they pleased. Food was plentiful and wild for the taking as needed with not a care in the world. As a matter of fact such an existence seems to parallel all the other creatures; free to roam, eat, drink, live, and sexually procreate shamelessly; having their place in the created order. There is a single element in the second narrative, that of prohibition, that seems incongruent with such a setting and I think it appropriate to ask why is it there?

One thing missing in both of these narratives up to this point is desire. The storytellers of the second and more colorful narrative also tell us that the couple were naked and not ashamed. This seems at least a very interesting piece of information. Generally this condition exists in observable creation in every form of life; To live, eat, drink, roam, and reproduce so why is it that the writer finds it necessary to mention the absence of shame?

This appears to me that the writer is maybe intuiting something that he might not be fully cognizant of himself. I propose that these first two representatives of humanity weren't exactly, or yet completely human as contemporarily understood. Following this interesting statement regarding shame, the story takes a dramatic turn. What we find in chapter 3 verses 1 through 5 can easily be framed as an evolution of desire. We have the requisite object, in the fruit, we have the model combined with prohibition, and we have the subject.

The triangular structure of desire as Girard discovered has all its elements.

                                               

                                                     Fruit

            Eve                                                                          God

I have for some time viewed the sequence in verses 1-5 as an internal dialectic going on within the mind of one of these participants in the story. This seems to be made clear by "the tell" within the story that the woman ate the fruit "then gave it to her husband  who was with her." Here we have two very telling pieces of information contained it one phrase: "Husband" and "was with her". The use of the term "husband" should tell us that this is a very late piece of writing, as the establishment of anything resembling marriage would have been quite far in the future.

Secondly, "her husband" was with her. If this were in fact something like a real event then surely the "husband, who was with her", aware of the risks, would have intervened in this discourse between his woman and the serpent. Desire appears, the husband desires also, according to the desire of his "wife" and desiring to have the knowledge she would now possess and the first cycle of imitation is complete. We have become human. They become as "one accord" yet very shortly in the story we see that a specific type of division has manifest itself that is unique in all creation; that of the accusation.

Never-the-less near the end of this part of the story in verse 6 we have desire winning the day. What I find interesting is that desire had not yet existed in creation - as far as the story reveals. Whether the creation had been in six days or six million years is of no consequence. Desire is appearing as something uniquely human, or conversely something unique-called humans-appeared subsequent to desire!

And what might we think of that original desire? What was it for? I posit that it was for autonomy. Autonomy from God, and each other. To gain identity apart from, independent of, the other. The story tells us this in verse 5:

"Even God knows that on the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you'll become like God, knowing good and evil."

If we "become like" another then we are no longer in need of nor are related to this other; we have assumed him in ourselves. Now, these freshly "minted" humans have their autonomy, their individuality, which is separation.  This is something we were never created to function within. We have this striving to be, without the other, yet we are bound by imitated desires according to the other. We would annihilate the other so we would become primary, yet empty, without the other, only to endlessly repeat the pattern.

We desire to be like some other without the other; without neighbor, without spouse, friends, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers, subsuming their lives into us. The only thing we can't seem to function without are enemies and we make them continually to stamp our identity over and against them and the more we do this the more we become like them, bondage to them frustrating our longing to be. The great "romantic lie" of modernity according to Girard is that we are autonomous individuals.

So how does good and evil function in our hands? It is used as a line of demarcation that separates ourselves from the other. It promises to temper our desires, yet this is a lie and it repeatedly fails. The taboo sets us at enmity with all others who are "not like us" yet the binding that it provides to those "like us" is founded in death as we strive within "our camp" for identity and autonomy at the expense of those closest to and most like us. The more we become like the other, the more we hate them for "stealing" our identity as we strive harder for differentiation, by stealing theirs. This "individuality",  is forever fleeting because it is not in our nature, it is a false god.

Only God knows the truth and has taken great pains to show us.

1Jn_3:14  We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love one another. The person who does not love remains spiritually dead.

1Jn_4:7  Dear friends, let us continually love one another, because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born from God and knows God.

1Jn_4:12  No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

"This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you."

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[1] See Girard , To Double Business Bound, 203; Girard and Müeller, "Interview", 11

Teaching Our Children to Sin

Reading. Or at least I was. Maybe it's adult ADHD or maybe, since embarking on what has now become a nearly ten year journey of discovery, the reading across disciplines of theology, history, anthropology, and others I find that interconnected tones lead off into reflection.

Still reading "The Age of Reform 1250-1550" and Ozment is now looking at the life and work of Martin Luther. The consensus of the scholarship seems to show that Luther's earlier religious life before and after monastic life were marked by anxiety and neurosis. Of course in the middle ages the religious method of clergy (which was thrust in lesser measure to the laity) was marked by a deeply penitential structure; i.e. "paying your way" toward salvation through structured forms of self-loathing and penitential, ascetic practices.

From where does this derive? It isn't Ozment's purpose to answer that question, and it's probably there in the writing if I'd read with an eye to find it. But it isn't a leap to take this all the way back to the myth of a garden called Eden.

James Alison writes[1]: "One of the first fruits of the fall was the knowledge of good and evil, does it not suggest that that knowledge, at least in its current form, is inappropriate to us?"

Reflection on this can reveal much about not only Luther's life and times but our own. There is so much anxiety and neuroses in our culture and this anxiety seems to be behind much of the hatred and vilification of "the other". So just how deep do these roots go?

It would be foolish to argue that there is no difference between good and evil, there is. But it seems we are not supposed to know that there is! This is surely a complex arrangement. But in the story when it connects the knowledge of these two states to death is where a larger panorama opens up. The fact that we know the difference leads to death. Death has two players, one is the dead, the other is the killer. When we teach others the difference between good and evil are we in fact instructing them in a methodology of how they may die or, even more disconcertingly, to kill and be justified in doing so?

This obviously creates a huge problem. There is also, biblically, this other connection made throughout. "Sin" = death. So then we have this: knowledge of good and evil = death; sin = death; knowledge of good and evil = sin. This is no mere syllogism.

So then in this way "sin" (whatever it is) is not connected with "evil" in a strict sense but with knowing the difference between it and "good" and that this leads us, or others, to death. We, as a species, use this knowledge as a method of justification for just about every type of evil one could imagine.

Alison continues[2]: "Any accusatory knowledge of sin has a particular propensity to blindness about complicity and that only forgiveness enables us to see."

For when you pass judgment on another person, you condemn yourself, since you, the judge, practice the very same things. Rom 2:1

In light of this what should we teach others? What should we relate to our children, our neighbors, our friends, or maybe more importantly, our enemies if not some sense of moral certitude if our moral certitude is a part of this pattern of sin and death as told us by the Christian scriptures?

I am assured that Jesus gave plenty of clues for those who have ears, and eyes to at least begin working this out.

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[1] Alison: "The Joy of Being Wrong, Original Sin through Easter Eyes" pp 263, Crossroad Publishing Co. New York.

[2] Ibid. pp 265

The Desire of Nature and The Nature of Desire

I woke up a few days ago with the following axiom on my mind: 

"It is our preconceptions that give us the insight that we have into something but paradoxically they are also the source of our blindness for what is right in front of us." 

One example of this is contained in my exposition of 1Kings. Language that is taken uncritically hides the patterns of preconceived notions of meaning. It's not just the words in one's bucket but it is also the size and shape and color of the bucket that counts too. Similar to a wineskin as I've written about here.

A phrase such as "old nature" is already layered with centuries of meaning provided by a particular notion of that nature being something distinct to individuals. What if it can be shown to be of a completely other thing? One that can only be properly understood in a cultural or sociological way related to origins. It would seem that Jesus' counter-revolution is structured not around individuals but around community and this sense of community is to contain a very distinct counter-culture and type of sociology.

Are our natures bounded and shaped by a world which we have shaped in a way that serves our nature? Kosmos, which is translated world, means an "orderly arrangement" and can refer to a completely naturalistic structure, a hypostasis, of purely human origin. I propose it is this orderly arrangement that is the container for and shape in which any sense of "old nature" is derived. It sets the very boundaries of what we can know about this kosmos at all! It is the very human way that societies are ordered around creating and maintaining "peace" by giving and receiving death in the making of enemy others and by sacrificing those others summum bonum.

Jesus is found everywhere juxtaposing the kingdom of God/heaven against the kings/kingdoms, i.e. principalities/powers of this world; the "orderly arrangement" of human being. God's orderly arrangement falls along certain ethical-though not only ethical-lines and the content of Jesus' teachings seem to flow from this understanding as they appear as subversive and anti-normal from a human perspective. It goes against our "natures" to even imagine ordering a society around a notion of enemy love and forgiveness or justice as mercy. But is this not exactly what the community project that began from his work is called to be and do in stark contrast to the principalities/powers and kings/kingdoms of earth as a sign to the world, a lamp on a stand, a message of hope in the midst of despair?

"What if I told you that the Matrix is the world that is pulled over our eyes to blind us to the truth?" Morpheus.

What if there was no such thing as an "individual"? That the idea of autonomous being is merely a romantic illusion? This would constitute a change in perspective that changes everything else. This can precisely be a way that we are "joined" with the Adamic narrative in scripture. Not by some sense of individual genetic progeny, nor in some mysterious metaphysical attribution of sin, but by means of a certain form of sociality and culturalization, something structuring and functional, and none could even see it much less escape it, because from the moment we're born we enter into this human predicament. This is a part of Alison's[1] thesis as he has built upon the insight of the interdividual psychology of Rene' Girard. I am continually being formed by my imitation of the desires of another, I exist only in my relationship with others.

This is what Girard has so keenly observed and systematized over a lifetime of study and it has very deep explanatory power by which to see the world and ourselves.  View the Asch experiment on YouTube to see how early researchers in the 50's had already had a basic view into this without fully recognizing it's significance or the scope of its influence. Reinhold Niebuhr, an American theologian, in "Moral Man, Immoral Society" dances all around this in 1932 but was never able to grasp the insight into it that Girard later did.

The biblical "creation" narrative of Adam and Eve's temptation is not toward disobedience but toward desire-I am aware that Paul uses this story in a different way but, on a close reading, to make a similar point-though this is not just about desire per se but about how it is acquired. It appears from the story that desire to be like God (whatever that means) was original and good. God is portrayed as a completely gratuitous giver, man the grateful receiver, every desire always gratuitously fulfilled and therefore seeking and desiring for nothing. 

The break that occurs is when the serpent "tempted" or caused Eve to desire, but not just to desire but TAKE for herself what had been previously gratuitously given; likeness to God. Were they not, after all, created in his image and therefore already "like" him? This doesn't just represent a single action but presents itself as a model of being malformed by acquisitive desire. She "received" ,or took as in "taking a cue from", her desire from the serpent, likewise Adam "received" his desire from Eve. 

What happens next is an amazing reversal. In the tale Adam and Eve both hide from God; who has no nefarious intention. When confronted over this peculiar behavior Adam blames, is willing to sacrifice, i.e. scapegoats, Eve for his desire. Eve likewise deflects blame, is willing to sacrifice the serpent who is the final scapegoat in this story, one through whom Adam and Eve can regain unity. What we have is a rupture within the structure of human relationship where it now requires an enemy other to be sustained! In much later writings this "serpent" becomes referred to by the moniker "accuser", that is to say the principle of accusation, and it functions precisely as a force though which we can identify scapegoats in order to create social order.

Of necessary importance to this mechanism's functioning is our blindness to it. Jesus gives us some insight into this unconsciousness from the cross when he prays: "forgive them Father for they do not know what they are doing."  Quoting Girard[2]: "To have a scapegoat is precisely to not know that you have one, you think that you have a culprit." He would say in an interview [paraphrased]: "In the 17th century nobody would have made the claim to be a witch. We have that now but not then. In the seventeenth century the term witch was merely an accusation". As such it served to ameliorate social crisis at that time by the expulsion and murder of others accused as being responsible for the crisis.

So within the Adamic narrative it is only after eviction from the garden, essentially being "given over to their own desires"[3], do we see any working of death (of which God has nothing to do with) in the story of the murder of Abel. This being given over to our own desires is something that requires a much deeper discussion of its own on the nature and shape of judgment or punishment.

Now addressing the continuity and discontinuity of  "natures" old and new. The writings of James Alison, N. T. Wright, and others show that there is a certain continuity between the here and hereafter; what we are and what we are to become. Would that we desire to be the kind of people who would "be at home" within a world, a Kingdom, such as Jesus describes, this continuity already would exist and might allow one to make a more-or-less seamless transition while for others "it would be like going through fire"[4]. Now as to the manner in which we are constituted as human beings. If we are constituted as being formed by desiring of the desire of another then this continuity can remain. Only the manner in which desire is appropriated need be transformed. Psalm 37:4 should probably be taken quite literally on this point:  Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart. This giving of desires is frequently misunderstood in a self-appropriative manner i.e. If I delight; Lord gives me things I desire. This might instead be understood as desires will be established within one in a non-appropriative way.  This correction of origination of desire could happen in an apokalypic-as unveiling- way to us within mind and spirit simultaneous and inseparable. This would represent a type of undoing the effect of the original distortion of desire; original sin if you can accept it.

In the Revelation of John we have an image of the way this apocalypsis might appear: Rev 1:7  Look! He is coming in the clouds. Every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. This rich symbolism seems to represent a mass 'repentance' or a simultaneous re-ordering in which 'all the tribes of the earth' have a fundamental cognitive shift. This mourning or grieving, not in fear of some retributive act, but because of the sudden recognition in which all creation at once and finally sees its complicity in a culture of death and death dealing, victim making, and violence. It includes the tacit recognition of  not knowing what we were doing that is now being revealed not only in what we have done but also how we have reconstituted ourselves from the beginning. So who is this group of "those who pierced him" except all humanity? Matthew[5] records this fact yet the one who is pierced still calls us friends.[6] But thankfully all who mourn will be comforted.

I close with the following citation which refers back to my original observation on preconceptions:  Paul Ricoeur: The Intersection Between Solitude and Connection by Kathleen O'Dwyer

Freud, Marx and Nietzsche… All three recognized that meaning, far from being transparent to itself, is an enigmatic process which conceals at the same time as it reveals. Kearney, in his introduction to Ricoeur's short thesis, "On Translation", explains that for Ricoeur, translation "indicates the everyday act of speaking as a way not only of translating oneself to another…but also and more explicitly of translating oneself to oneself". (Kearney, 2004: 7, 8).

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[1]James Alison, The Joy of Being Wrong. Original Sin through Easter Eyes.

[2] Rene Girard from an interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Y8dVVV4To

[3] See also Romans 1;24  for an instance of judgment shaped as a "giving over" to our desires.

[4] 1Co 3:15  If his work is burned up, he will suffer loss. However, he himself will be saved, but it will be like going through fire.

[5] Matt 26:31 Then Jesus told them, "All of you will turn against me this very night, because it is written, "I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered." (quoting Zech 13:7)

[6] Zech 13:6 "Someone will say to him, "What are these injuries to your hands?" He will reply, "They're what I received at my friend's house."

Reimagining Sacrifice

An exposition of 1 Kings 3:2-28

How do we understand sacrifice? 

As Rene´ Girard was developing mimetic theory he was confronted with the challenge from his critics over the use of the word "sacrifice". He understood the scriptures throughout to reveal an anti-sacrificial message but he was still hemmed in by having to use the word "sacrifice". He stated that he believed "the answer to everything" was somehow within the story of Solomon's Judgment and he carried that story in his mind continually.

Therefore the primary insight here I have borrowed from Girard but in pursuing a better understanding of this I observed other meaningful interpretive elements in the texts cited above. Here is the first scene as I examine some of these elements.

After two introductory verses we come to verse 3:

Solomon loved the LORD, and lived according to the statutes that his father David obeyed, except that he sacrificed and burned offerings at the high places.

It seems clear from this text that this sacrificing by Solomon was regarded as a negative attribute in his appraisal as king. The word rendered sacrifice could as well be translated "slaughtered" as every meaning of the word zaw-bakh includes slaughter; brutal or violent killing. Further it is to be noted that this "slaughtering" is not connected by the writer with any form of idolatry. Too much should not be made of the allusion to high places as it previously states in verse two that sacrifice was occurring throughout the land at "high places" simply because there was, as of yet, no temple.

Verse 4 cites one such location, in Gibeon, where Solomon sacrificed 1,000 burnt offerings. So we have here birthed a nascent awareness that there is something amiss with this sacrificial behavior and or orientation.

Verses 5 through 8 recount the dream that Solomon has where God makes an offer for Solomon to "ask for whatever you want" and this results in Solomon wisely asking for the following in verse 9a:

"So give your servant an understanding mind to govern your people, so I can discern between good and evil..."

The specificity of Solomon's request should not be overlooked: "so I can discern between good and evil."  This point and the discussion of sacrifice above taken together provide the interpretive key that unlocks the fuller meaning of what follows in the text.

This scene in the narrative closes with God being pleased by such a request and the granting of riches, etc., in consideration for such a humble request. Now we move on to scene two.

Scene one closes with Solomon waking up and realizing he's "dreamed a dream" and sacrifices and throws a party for all his servants.  Scene two begins with this: "Right about then". It almost seems as if the writer doesn't want you to forget the previous keys before you get to the door that needs unlocking. I reproduce the text of the second scene here for reference:

1Ki 3:16  Right about then, two prostitutes approached the king and requested an audience with him. 17 One woman said, "Your majesty, this woman and I live in the same house. I gave birth to a child while she was in the house. 18Three days later, this woman also gave birth. We lived alone there. There was nobody else with us in the house. It was just the two of us. 

19This woman's son died overnight because she laid on top of him. 20She got up in the middle of the night, took my son from me while your servant was asleep, and laid him to her breast after laying her dead son next to me. 21The next morning, I got up to nurse my son, and he was dead. But when I examined him carefully in the light of day, he turned out not to be my son whom I had borne!" 22"Not so," claimed the other woman. "The living child is my son, and the dead one is yours." But the first woman said, "Not so! The dead child is your son and the living one is my son." This is what they testified before the king. 

23The king said, "One of them claims, 'This living son is mine, and your son is the dead one' and the other claims 'No. Your son is the dead one and my son is the living one.' 24"Somebody get me a sword." So they brought a sword to the king. 25"Divide the living child in two!" he ordered. "Give half to the one and half to the other."

From verse 23 it is clear that Solomon cannot make a just determination from this as he recognizes their competing claims and the impossibility of being able to discern the truth of the matter between them. As brilliant as the tact he applies is to this situation in verse 24-25 this really only leads us to the true revelatory structure of the text itself, leveraging the prior interpretive keys a) the explicit leaning against the idea of sacrificial slaughter and b) the longing for discernment between good and evil.

Now we come to the point in the story where is the revealing of a distinction in our language of "sacrifice".

1Ki 3:26  The woman whose child was still alive cried out to the king, because her heart yearned for her son. "Oh no, your majesty!" she said. "Give her the living child. Please don't kill him." But the other woman said, "Cut him in half! That way, he'll belong to neither one of us." 

What we should be led to here is the fact that both women were willing to "sacrifice" the child. But the nature and understanding of that sacrifice is completely subverted away from slaughter and toward a form that is a redemptive self-giving, non-retributive, and non-violent. It is in fact an anti-sacrificial sacrifice. So then if we are to consider that Solomon received the ability to "discern good from evil" then we should ourselves make a distinction here. But exactly where or how should we do this? 

Referencing the interpretive keys above and one other detail from verse 16 we should be able to rightly divide this text. Verse 16 tells us that these two women are prostitutes. It seems significant that the writer includes this detail. At minimum their moral status as prostitutes has no bearing on a judgment here regarding the issue of good or evil. That one of the women, in her obviously grief stricken state would have no regard for a child that is not hers and would see it killed rather than suffer a second loss of a child doesn't seem to quite fit either. There is no corresponding good with which to juxtapose this understanding.

Therefore I propose, and think this is supported by the textual arrangement here, that what is really being judged by Solomon is, in fact, sacrifice. One is a "good" or "acceptable" sacrifice, and the other an "evil" or "unacceptable" sacrifice. 

There is here in both instances the same object of sacrifice, the child, yet the manner and at least as importantly is that the motivation for sacrifice is completely different. The woman who would see the child slaughtered was moved by grief and brokenness; unable to escape from the pain and fear that dominates her moment. Wanting that some other would "know" her suffering. The true mother of the child is willing to surrender all claims to the child, giving it over completely to the other so that the child could live.

It is in this second woman, a prostitute no less, that we find, in a christological reading of the text, the image of God and the only acceptable sacrifice that is a self-giving one following Christ's self-giving to us to become our victim and open our eyes to the fact the we are all, at the end of this story, portrayed as the one who says: "cut him in half" or more contemporarily: Crucify him! There is here a clue to the secret of living out a life that begins to mimic God and it is revealed in the prostitute/mother who would abandon all claims so that another-or others-might live.