Holy Saturday; Exodus 10:8 - Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it Holy (also 4th Commandment)

Luke 23 "The Burial of Jesus"

50 Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright man,

51 who had not consented to their decision and action. He came from the Judean town of Arimathea, and he himself was waiting for the kingdom of God.

52 Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body.

53 Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid.

54 It was Preparation Day, and the Sabbath was about to begin.

55 The women who had come with Jesus from Galilee followed Joseph and saw the tomb and how his body was laid in it.

56 Then they went home and prepared spices and perfumes. But they rested on the Sabbath in obedience to the commandment.

Source

Girard’s theory of victimization has a deep connection with the founding of culture and religion.64 s the group senses the calm and peace that follows from ridding the community of the scapegoat, it also tends to credit the victim for this renewed order and calm, a peacefulness highly prized in primitive cultures without other methods (such as laws or prohibitions) to constrain uncontrollable violence. Fascinated and awestruck, the community now regards the previously-perceived evil one as having sacred, godlike qualities. If sacred figures are deemed so because they have the ability to expel or externalize violence and pain, then the sacred must be a form of human violence. The mechanism that kicks in when pain or violence is too much for an individual or community is the unleashing of that violence onto a third party, thereby making a god of the scapegoated one since his being killed allowed the community to transcend violence. The community is captivated by this peace and set on preserving it somehow, most commonly repeated in the form of ritual—channeling the violence, preserving order, and al-lowing culture to develop. Cultures, then and now, live by human sacrifice “from the civic temples of ancient city states to the ritualized expulsion of the king every four or eight years by the process of elections.”65

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The mid-century was also a time when ethologists were examining “redirected aggression”—the tendency for an animal to suffer pain and then pass that pain onto another. But this work too, as with displaced aggression, fell out of favor and has only recently seen a resurgence. Barash describes studies of redirected aggression among rats repeatedly subjected to electric shocks.58 Upon autopsy, these rats show physical syndromes such as adreno-corticoid secretion, hypertension, ulcers, and the like—what scientists otherwise refer to as “subordination stress.” But when the rats are given a wooden stick to chew on in the midst of being shocked, it is as if their stress gets transferred to the stick, thereby reducing the rats’ subordination stress. Even better for the rat is the case where another rat is present in the same cage. This time, the shocked rat can redirect its stress onto the other rat and show the lowest amount of subordination stress of all three scenarios. And humans are no less likely to engage in this stress-induced displacement of aggression. Robert Sapolsky reminds us of what subordination stress looks like in human life:

Consider how economic downturns increase rates of spousal and child abuse. Or consider a study of family violence and pro football. If the local team unexpectedly loses, spousal/partner violence by men increases 10 percent soon afterward (with no increase when the team won or was expected to lose). And as the stakes get higher, the pattern is exacerbated: a 13 percent increase after upsets when the team was in playoff contention, a 20 percent increase when the upset is by a rival. . . . Far too often, giving an ulcer helps avoid getting one.59

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Thus, even though the scapegoating process allows a society to manage its crisis, avert mutual destruction, and restore peace, it does so only because it is able to disguise from itself the reality of its actions. As the myth prevails because it hides the truth we cannot bear to see, we recognize that scapegoating only works when we don’t know it’s working—that is, it only works when we are thoroughly convinced that the victim deserved to be singled out.

Notes:

58 David P. Barash, “The Three Rs: Retaliation, Revenge, and (Especially) Redirected Ag-gression,” in How We Became Human: Mimetic Theory and the Science of Evolutionary Origins,eds. Pierpaolo Antonello and Paul Gifford (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2015), 121-133.

59 Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (New York: Pen-guin, 2017), 132.

64 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 89ff.

65 Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992), 6.