I have preached a couple of times at Aldenham School in South Hertfordshire and when I have done so I’ve stood in front of the large blank east wall of the chapel. It’s blank the painting that used to hang on it was sold to pay off the school’s debts. And that painting was this one.
It is by the English artist, Stanley Spencer. In fact it’s the last painting he produced before he died. Spencer was a wonderfully eccentric English painter who rejected much traditional art theory and the grand themes of continental artists in favour of unashamedly honest and ordinary images. He painted his subjects with an, at times, grotesque frankness which is what we see in this depiction of the crucifixion. Jesus’ face is serenely raised to heaven, but the canvas is dominated by faces distorted with anger and violence. It reminds us, when so many images in art and sculpture domesticate and even beautify the crucifixion of Jesus, the reality of this event was appalling – one of the worst imaginable ways that human beings could devise to torture and slowly kill another human being. Spencer wants us to be confronted and offended by the brutality of what actually happened. And when we are reminded of the appalling violence of the cross we are inevitably compelled to ask the question, who is responsible? Who killed Jesus and why?
I think Spencer wants us to consider two suspects who are not to be held responsible. The first point we are to take from this painting, remembering that Spencer painted this as the truth of Auschwitz was coming to the British public, is that we cannot say Jesus was killed by the Jews. We in the Western Church have come so far in considering that point that it may seem too obvious. But the history of the Church tells a very different, darker story of the readiness of Christians to forget Jesus’ own Jewishness and to hold the Jewish race accountable for his death.
St John Chrysostom wrote in 387 that in killing Jesus the Jews had committed the most heinous crime imaginable – deicide – the murder of God. “Demons dwell in the synagogue,” he wrote, “not only in the place itself, but in the souls of the Jews”. It may seem absurd to us that Chrysostom should blame Jewish people living over 300 years after the event for Christ’s death. But, of course, much has been read into Matthew’s account of Jesus’ trial where Pilate washes his hands before the crowd and proclaims “I am innocent of this man’s blood, see to it for yourselves.” Then the people answered as a whole, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (27:24-5). This verse – the so-called ‘blood-curse’ – has created the idea of some enduring guilt on the Jewish people.
This day, Good Friday, was for centuries a day in which Jews in Europe could fear violent persecution by Christians. The Third Council of Orleans in 538 forbade Jews from even appearing on the streets between Maundy Thursday and Easter Monday. So at this time of year the Church needs to reflect on how the persecution of Jews under Hitler, which Spencer saw in his lifetime, was tragically rooted in the history of the Church’s understanding of the death of Jesus.
The aftermath of the holocaust has seen a slow acceptance on the part of the Western Churches for this scandalous collusion with anti-Semitic hatred. In particular, we have come to read the gospels in the light of the situation that their authors faced in being primarily Jewish people who had been expelled from the synagogues and faced persecution by their fellow Jews for adopting faith in Jesus as the Messiah. The Council of Christians and Jews has been established and at the start of the new millennium, Pope John-Paul prayed for forgiveness for the past wrongs of the Church at the Western Wall, the holiest site for the Jews whom he described as “the first to hear the Word of God”.
Christians have finally learnt that they cannot hold the Jews responsible for Jesus’ death. Spencer’s English Caucasian faces tell us that too. But the second “suspect” from whom I think Spencer wants us to withhold blame has been more difficult to overcome. And that is God. Many Christians seem to hold that the answer to our question “who killed Jesus?” is simply “God killed Jesus”. We can see how they come to that conclusion. Last night we remembered Jesus’ anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup of suffering from me; yet, not my will but yours be done”. Jesus’ death appears to have been the will of the Father. Jesus seems to have felt this to have been his destiny from the beginning, the vocation laid before him by God the Father. But what does that mean about the nature of God? What kind of Father is he? And how is it that he loves the Son (and all the rest of us) when this fate is what he inflicts on the one whom he loves? I sometimes think that the perceived “logic” in this view of the atonement is so familiar to us that we ignore what is obviously troubling about it.
The horror of this understanding of the divine nature has been explored by the American novelist David Guterson in his book “Our Lady of the Forest”, a compelling exploration of profound theological themes through the lives of ordinary American people with difficult and complex lives. Tom is a bad father who bullies his son, essentially because his son is his competitor for his girlfriend’s attention. And he knows it and struggles with it, but he looks to the gospel for some strange kind of justification for his abuse of Tom Junior. These are his words:
…when you thought about it even merciful Christianity with all its talk of a forgiving God had this disturbing mystery at its heart: that God gave his only Son to murderers and had him crucified. Had him nailed though the hands and ankles, the stabbed in his frail gut. Where was the Father’s mercy in that, where was the Father’s love? … God couldn’t love until his hate was purged. A man was finally civilized by guilt, tamed by his own transgressions. And what was the worst transgression possible? Kill your own son, like God.
Tom, of course, has made the critical (and easiest) mistake in theology – to seek to understand the ways of God according to the ways of humans. And what we’re fundamentally missing here is an account of the Trinitarian life of God, and how the perfect communion of the Father with the Son, and of both in the Holy Spirit, means that we can never talk about the imposition of the will of the Father onto the Son. To say that Jesus fulfils the will of the Father on Calvary is not to say that he submits to a divine execution. But this is how many popular understandings of the atonement have perceived things. That holds particularly for those Christians who have sought to understand redemption according to the metaphors of criminal law and punishment, and it’s been noted that those Christians have usually lived in societies where criminal justice has been particularly harsh and where the death penalty is staunchly defended. Those metaphors, as they are used in the New Testament, provide some insight. But so do the several other scriptural metaphors used for the atonement, and none of them can be pushed too far. If we do that with the metaphor of penal justice, we get into very disturbing territory when we find ourselves concluding that God killed Jesus.
So it wasn’t the Jews and it wasn’t God. Which other suspects remain? Spencer’s message to the boys of Aldenham was clear. When he was invited to the school to talk about the painting he said to the boys, “It is your governors, and you, who are still nailing Christ to the Cross.” Aldenham school is supported by the City Livery Company which is based on the brewing trade. The two men hammering in the nails so energetically are depicted as brewers and, to make the message clearer to the boys, the thief at the back is being secured to his cross by a school boy. The spectators too, the ordinary residents of Spencer’s town Cookham, appear voyeuristic, craning their necks to see the brutality, and so they too are complicit in this injustice. Who killed Jesus? You and I, answers Spencer. He had seen first hand the violent struggles of Europe in the twentieth century, serving in the Second World War as an official war artist. And so we can well imagine why he is so conscious of this dark side of each one of us, the violent hatred that is hidden away in every human heart.
But I’m not without my concerns about this unqualified conclusion either. How are we to connect with the idea that we are responsible for the death of a man who died two thousand years ago? One modern hymn includes the line:
Behold the man upon a cross,
My sin upon His shoulders;
Ashamed I hear my mocking voice
Call out among the scoffers.
It was my sin that held Him there
Until it was accomplished
But how are we truly to make sense of that? I was not there. I did not nail Jesus to the cross. I want to believe that I have resources within me to resist that level of violent behaviour. How does it help me to think otherwise? And if there is some mysterious metaphysical sense in which the things I have done wrong in my life brought Jesus to Calvary 2000 years ago, how can I be accountable for that or even begin to make any sense of that kind of supernatural logic?
There is much cause for concern about the kind of understanding of human nature that this theology produces and, more sinister still, what motivations there might be for propagating it. Even before a human begins to act we are reminded that our intentions are so corrupt and murderous that we have murdered even God. Little wonder many have accused Christians of disempowering people with a message of human wickedness. So in the inevitably disciplinarian environment of a school I can’t help but have my reservations about a picture that is as explicit as this one might be taken to be about individual accountability for the death of Christ. What does this tell young people about who they are and what good they might bring about with their lives?
Well, perhaps we need not read the painting in such wholly negative ways. There is, of course, another view of the human present – Mary, the figure of the Church, prostrate on the ground, crushed by this act of violence against her son and against God. Mary is, after all, human too and we may choose whether we identify with the brewery boys banging in the nails or with her, mourning the death of righteousness. So perhaps what Spencer is doing in depicting ordinary figures of Cookham in this painting, is not so much an accusation that you and I are the murderers of Christ as the answer to some kind of theological whodunit. But rather in placing the story of the Crucifixion in an ordinary high street, in an ordinary English town, with ordinary people watching and participating, he is saying that what is happening here is not so unknown to us. Indeed we see it going on time and again in our lives and we struggle ourselves to be free of it. What is happening? An innocent victim is being made a scapegoat as some kind of catharsis for the things that other people have done wrong. That’s what all human societies have called sacrifice.
Anthropologists have pointed out that this is a way of behaving with a very long history. The most primitive of sacrifices were human sacrifices, an atrocity that we still occasionally hear of. But anthropologists have shown how this was gradually transferred over time into animal sacrifices. This is what took place in the Temple at the time of Jesus. The High Priest would enter the Holy of Holies (the part of the Temple believed to be the dwelling place of the Lord) and sprinkle the blood of a sacrificed goat on the Mercy Seat and the Ark of the Covenant. The priest would then emerge through the veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple and sprinkle the blood on the rest of the Temple as an image of the Lord’s forgiveness emanating from the Mercy Seat. At that point, the priest would then symbolically imbue the sins of the people onto a second goat – the scapegoat – who would be driven out of the town to the edge of a cliff where it would be cast down and killed, so that the people’s sins would be taken away.
That all sounds pretty alien to us and we might congratulate ourselves on how our modern society has moved on from these kinds of primitive rituals. But have we really moved on? We may not literally kill animals onto whom we have projected our failings. But how often do we seek to substitute an innocent other to displace our own guilt? To go back to what I was speaking about earlier, can’t we say that the Church has often masked its own failure to live up to the Gospel of Christ by blaming and persecuting Jews? And when we stop and think about it there are so many ways in which this scapegoating process is going on all the time. How often do I build up my confidence in defining my success against someone else’s failure, someone who I am tempted, in more or less subtle ways, to undermine? How often does one racial group overcome its own insecurities or isolation by stigmatising another racial group and violently harassing them? How often have men redressed their feelings of emasculation in directing violence towards women? How often do those people confused about their own sexual identity assert their heterosexuality by directing violence towards gay people? How much is the Western world redressing its lack of moral vision in its demonising of the Muslim world and its military campaigns against so-called terrorist groups?
Substitutionary mechanisms are everywhere: on the high street of Cookham, on the playgrounds of Aldenham School, in Hampstead, and seemingly in all human societies that have ever lived. And it is to this murderous way of organising human society that Christ submits himself. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Behold the one who exposes the untruthful way in which human beings live. Behold the one who submits to our mechanisms of sacrifice in order to show us that we don’t need to live by offering sacrifices. The violent image of the Cross that Spencer so graphically illustrates tells that we don’t need to live violently, that there is an alternative way of organising human society than the endless sprinkling of blood that Spencer spent so much of his life illustrating as a war artist. We don’t need to sacrifice anything to God to prove that we are worthy, because God has sacrificed himself to us, and in so-doing has shown us that this isn’t a religious way to live, its a murderous way to live.
So who killed Jesus? The way we live our lives killed Jesus. And going deeper into the mystery of that death and receiving the gift of what happened three days later is the only way in which we might learn a new way of being justified. The veil of the Temple has been torn in two. The Lord has come to forgive. No more sacrifice is required. No more blood must be shed. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
Chrysostom, Sixth Oration Against the Jews
David Guterson, Our Lady of the Forest, London: Bloomsbury 2003, p.111
Quoted in Harries 2004, p.120