by André Rabe
Jesus will have none of that egotistical self-confidence. He clarifies the fact that of himself, he can do nothing. His self was not formed in a sense of lack-of-being. Rather, his sense of self has no being without God , and therefore whatever being it does have is nothing less than the gracious self-giving of God. His sense of self is not an independent self, but it is one intertwined in the otherness of the God who sustains all things. He does not separate his self from a sense of union with God (17:21). Outside of this union, the self is indeed a limitation and a stumbling block. When we live for the preservation of the self, we lose what is most essential about us - the opportunity to give ourselves for the sake of another. “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it ” (Matthew 10:39).
And here we also witness the profound power of divine mimesis. Jesus does not achieve authenticity by denying his mimetic nature but by embracing it fully. His gaze is on humanity’s true model - God - the one who’s image and likeness define what it means to be truly human. In fully embracing our reflective nature, knowing that without God we have nothing to reflect except our own twisted insecurities, something truly amazing opens up. We begin to see the Father for who he truly is; he is not the one withholding as imagined in Genesis 3 but the one who loves us and shows us all things that he himself is doing. We can live in this place of astonishment!
The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing; and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.
- John 5:20 NRSV
Notice that the Father shows , not tells . If the Father tells us what to do and we listen, then we are obeying him. But the Father shows us what he is doing. The proper response to such a showing is imitation. And it is in the act of imitation that we are astonished to see the enormity of the work he can accomplish through us.
In conclusion, it is not a sense of lack-of-being that is predominant in Jesus’ self-consciousness but rather a sense of the superabundance of God’s self-giving love. Consequently, Jesus can say things like: “All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you ” and “the Father loves the Son, and has given all things into his hand ” (John 16:15 and 3:35).
The Mind of Christ
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name.
- Philippians 2:5-9 RSV
What is this mind-of-Christ that we are to appropriate? We have seen how the twisting of desire is the basis for misunderstanding God and ourselves in Genesis 3. This imagined god withholds what we think we lack. The felt lack within produces impatient grasping for what we are not able to bear. We grow up too quickly and in so doing forfeit the gift.
But in Jesus we see what it looks like to be at home in the story, to allow the unfolding of beauty without haste, to receive and give rather than grasp and possess. Without the illusion of lack, there is no opportunity for desire to be twisted. Beholding the favor of his Abba eliminates any opportunity for a sense of inadequacy. Gazing on this favor becomes the source of his sense of sonship, of belonging, of approval. If my own existence is desired by God, what room is left for a sense of lack? The story has been reversed! The first archetype hastily tried to possess because of his sense of lack. The final archetype pours himself out because of the overwhelming awareness of the inexhaustible gift of God poured into his existence. Christ implanted within human consciousness a new way of being human.
All of creation is incarnation. The unconscious truth about creation is that every moment is made possible and sustained by the One who holds all things together. We are not excluded from this union but invited into the fullness of its bliss. Our memory of original wholeness is more than a nostalgic longing for the naive innocence we experienced before self-consciousness emerged, rather it is an inner drawing to once again acknowledge the depth of being, the presence of Christ.
History Reinterpreted
It is not only the individual’s narrative that is reversed by Christ, but the community’s narrative as well. The collective consciousness of humanity needed healing just like individuals needed healing. Girard showed how similar events birthed similar myths. Let’s now look at how Jesus enters this drama to unveil the hidden truth and open our eyes to the cycles of delusion we’ve been part of.
Tensions are high in the occupied territory in which he finds himself. Even among the Jews, many factions are escalating the conflict. Desires are raging. Frustrations find utterance in blaming. This is nothing new. The ancient cycle of redemptive violence is steadily building momentum. Someone is going to die.
When Jesus speaks of his own inevitable death in Matthew 23, he does not refer to it as a unique event but as something that has always happened. It is not the event of his crucifixion that is unique, but his interpretation of it! In him all these acts of scapegoating and the blood of victims will find new meaning - a new conclusion. The actual logic at work in these events has been hidden since the foundation of this world, but Jesus comes to unveil these secrets (Matthew 13:35).
We have created our identities by negation, by who we are not, by opposition. Our tribes are formed by who we exclude. Civilizations are founded on the tombs of our victims. Like our archetypes, Adam and Eve, we have found someone to blame but never dealt with the turmoil within. We thanked God for victory over our demonic enemies and found some peace in the belief that God justifies our violence. But the things kept hidden since the foundation of this world were about to be revealed.
God enters the drama in a form of clarity never seen before, embodied in Jesus. He chooses his character - the outcast, the scapegoat, the victim. He takes us back to the very event that formed our sense of the sacred, the event in which we created gods to pacify our guilt and legitimate our order. This event is not only the founding event of our civilizations but also of the formation of our first archetype. Something went wrong with our story. In our haste for solutions, we closed ourselves off to possibilities. A fundamental misinterpretation took place that changed the trajectory of human history towards violence. Jesus brings us back to that formative event to uncover the truth and reset the trajectory of the human story. What actually happened? Who are the characters and what roles did they play in this founding murder?
Where and who is God in this act of sacred violence? He is the victim! He suffers our violence; he does not justify it. But … this means the victim is innocent. And if the victim is innocent, the victor is guilty. Can’t we find someone else to blame? Where’s the Satan? Is he not the evil behind this tragic play?
Satan Reinterpreted
Scripture confirms that it is the event of the crucifixion that defeats the Devil (Heb. 2:14). How? Notice, the closer we move to the actual event, the less visible the character of Satan becomes. Is it because the very form of the satanic is transformed in the process of its exposure? Indeed, it is the exposure of evil that defeats it. The principalities and powers would not have crucified our Lord if they knew what was happening (1 Cor. 2:8). The very principles on which our societies are founded, the powers by which they rule, would be unveiled in this event. “I see Satan fall like lightning ” (Luke 10:18). I see this mythical personification of evil exposed as the very earthly process of accusation and violent sacrifice. When we do not creatively deal with the chaos within, when we make no room for the spirit of Elohim to hover over us in silent contemplation, when we hastily blame others rather than patiently transform, then we project our turmoil. It becomes a monstrous other and so we contribute to this satanic cycle of violence. Jesus reinterprets the satanic as the cycle of accusation that leads to sacrifice.
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Facing the crucified Jesus, we are made to realize that standing by while victims suffer, is an act of rejecting God. It is in this moment, when the full weight of our responsibility is felt, that God chooses to make his acceptance of us absolute. And Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do ” (Luke 23:34). Jesus demonstrates a God who does not get caught up in our cycles of retribution, who never enters into rivalry with us, but forgives.
Violence Reinterpreted
And so we come face to face with our own violence in the cross. It is in the act of violence where our story took a wrong turn; where we misidentified God and in so doing lost touch with our true selves. We had no patience to work through conflict, no appetite for conversing with our perceived enemies. But Jesus demonstrates a new way of being human and, consequently, a new way of being a society.
Why did Jesus have to suffer such a violent death? Why could he not pass away with a really bad cold and still have the same impact? Why the violence? By inventing gods who justify our violence we have become ever more callous towards it. Today, still, we outsource our violence to our governments and in so doing absolve ourselves of all responsibility. The centurion, who was present at the crucifixion, had seen many gruesome violent events like this before. He was a professional in the art of violence - unmoved, unfeeling, and fearless through years of practice. No doubt he found solace in the belief that he was only following orders, and the gods authorized those in command. The violence he witnessed inflicted upon Jesus was nothing unusual. But God opens his eyes: “And when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that he thus breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’ ” A new interpretation of human violence is given when we too, like the centurion, stand facing the crucified Christ. God does not justify our violence, he suffers it! God is present in our victims!
In the mythic stories, the sacrificial death of the victim brings the chaos to an end for a season. It could only be for a season, for sacrifice is a solution that only deals with the symptoms and not with the cause. However, in myth, this event marks the end of the story for the victim. But something truly new is about to unfold. For these myths, so deeply encoded in human consciousness, to be subverted, a dramatic new event has to break the cycle.
Resurrection
The resurrection transforms the human story like no other event. For the first time we come face to face with our murdered victim. Before this event we consoled ourselves with the belief that the brutal death of our victims must have been the will of God. Otherwise, why would he allow it? But when Peter declares that the one we killed was raised up by God, it is obvious that God is not complicit in our act of murder. Stephan too, in his address to the religious leaders, makes it clear that Jesus was betrayed and murdered by humans. But God raised him up and honored him. It is Stephan’s vision of Jesus at the right hand of God that is unbearable to those who hear him.
What is even more surprising is the message of the resurrected victim. The blood of all our victims prior to Christ called out for one thing - vengeance! But Jesus’ blood speaks a better message than the blood of Abel (Heb. 12:24). Jesus breaks out of the cycle of retributive justice, offers forgiveness, and calls both victims and victimizers to repentance. We can understand why victimizers should repent, but why would victims need repentance? Because both have allowed themselves to be formed by violence. Even in resisting injustice, the victim too is formed by violence. The resurrected Jesus transcends both these categories and shows us what it means to be fully human. To resist rivalry and refuse to be defined by violence is essential in returning to the image and likeness of God.
Paradise Restored or New Creation?
In what way does the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus save us? Does he restore us to an original state of perfection? We have already established that there never was a historical state of perfection. At most, it was the pre-conscious experience of wholeness. And we cannot return to the pre-conscious condition in which we were enveloped in the whole. We cannot undo self-consciousness, neither should we desire to. Having no value system is not desirable. But most importantly, there is a depth of relationship that only happens between independent wills, a richness of intimacy that is only possible when the borders of distinct persons are crossed and they willingly intertwine. To lose that is to lose what makes us fully human.
The conscious self has introduced us to new experiences - loneliness, separation, value judgments, and death-consciousness, but also the intimacy possible between independent beings. The path forward is to bring these distinct parts of ourselves, conscious and unconscious, into new and meaningful relationship. Now that these distinct complexes have developed, new connections between them can also develop. The aim is therefore to nurture a relationship between the intuitive wisdom of the unconscious and the logical wisdom of the conscious. This is where the redemptive work of Christ becomes central. Where our first archetype stopped the creative process of becoming the image and likeness of God, Jesus, the new archetype, resets the process. Through him we may again enter the Eden of possibilities, the flow of becoming divine. Through Christ we can exit the state of grasping and enter a position of receiving.
The haste of sin is finally a desire for closure, a wish to be done with waiting, which can manifest itself as much in the decision to settle for far lower than what is intended for one as in a grasping after what is higher. The uniting factor in both cases is the desire no longer to be liable to the operation of another. 6
If the essence of human error was the haste with which we sought to bring an end to uncertainty - the sense of lack that urged us to possess and the act in which we closed ourselves to the possibilities of divine gifts - then restoration is placing us back in that position where we may once again be open to divine possibilities. The salvation Christ offers is neither a restoration to a state of original perfection, nor an advance to the end of our journey, but a positioning in which the gift is possible again. It is partaking of the mind of Christ in which both the logic and creative novelty are operative. Divine logic is not the kind of certainty that closes us up to possibility. Neither is divine creativity the kind of imaginative spirituality that has no grounding in reason. The mind of Christ is both the sober insight into reality as it is and the joyful expectation that reality may be transformed.
Conclusion
Somewhere within human history, a turn was made towards violence. The narrative took a turn and its trajectory pointed towards futility. It became a boringly predictive dead-end story. The fear of death became the underlying anxiety that motivated the human drama. These cycles of self-preservation and violence were deeply embedded in our psyche. Adam is the personification of this history and if you are human it is part of your story. Today still, this narrative framework is the confinement within which many understand themselves and view the world.
When security becomes more important than the adventure, when the comfort of the familiar becomes more attractive than the thrill of the unknown, when we grasp for certainty at the expense of being astonished, and when we embrace an order so rigid that there is no space for bewilderment, then the same fallen narrative of the first Adam continues to imprison us. As our frameworks of interpretation become hardened, life becomes brittle and the inevitable takes the place of the possible.
Jesus models a new way of life, an openness to the God of possibility. His confidence is not in the correctness of his own desires or ideas, but in the assurance that comes from another. He discovers a source beyond himself. And it is in relationship with this Creator that his own creativity comes into its fullness. Union with God does not dissolve him but enables him to become more distinctly, truly, and freely himself. And this God-man union has surprising implications for God as well. God is not limited or reduced in this union but finds opportunity to love and exist fully and freely. Jesus is the archetype of this union. He is the realization of this ideal within human history.
God is excited about your
life my friend! In you God sees an opportunity to live and move and have his being in a way that is absolutely unique. Nowhere else does he have the relationships he has in you. And what he offers is nothing less than the freedom and ability to co-create with him. Together, he anticipates a journey filled with astonishment, wonder, and beauty - a path with surprising obstacles and even more surprising and creative ways of navigating those obstacles.
Can you hear His whisper: “What beauty and meaning are possible for you? Something truly new is possible for you. Bring forth life .”
Endnotes
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Regier, Michael, and Regier, Paula. Emotional Connection: The Story & Science of Preventing Conflict & Creating Lifetime Love . MPR Press (May 25, 2017)
Additional Resources
Mimesis Academy Online School - https://www.mimesis.academy
An online program drawing from cutting-edge research in psychology, anthropology, philosophy and theology.
Many of the students who have completed this program describe the experience as an intellectual conversion. Others speak of transformation. What these comments reveal is that the outcome of this program aims to be more than simply confirming what you already believe. Rather, its aim is to unveil reality in a fresh way and enable individuals to re-orientate themselves around these new realities. Each of the programs below consists of 6 courses and runs from January to December.
Ministry website - https://alwaysloved.net
A list of books, albums and other resources can be found here.