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The Mirror Model

God Is Showing Us What We’ve Done

WHEN I FIRST visited a doctor about back pain, I was in my midtwenties. After having me perform a couple of movements and describe the pain, he taught me three stretches and told me I would be okay until the pain got so bad that it kept me home from work. That started to happen about fifteen years later. The pain shot down the back of my left leg. Sometimes it was worse, and other times it was better. And while it didn’t keep me home from work, it did keep me up at night.

Then I had a couple of episodes that really knocked me flat. One morning about six, I started a sprinkler in the backyard. I turned on the hose and walked over to the sprinkler to adjust where it sprayed. I bent over, and my back seized. I fell to the ground, barely able to move. I definitely could not stand up, so I army-crawled my way toward the house. All the while, the pulsating sprinkler was soaking me. After probably ten minutes, I made it to the back door. It was locked. There I lay, getting doused, waiting for someone in the family to wake up and find me, immobile and in desperate pain. It was time to get help for my back pain.

First I tried massage. It felt great while I was on the table, but as soon as I tried to stand up I could tell that it had done no good.

Then I went to a chiropractor. He attached electrodes to my back and sent electrical stimulation into the muscles. It felt a bit like someone was rubbing sandpaper on my back, but it did nothing for the pain.

Next I went to physical therapy. They strapped me into a medieval torture device also known as a traction machine. The basic premise of these machines is that pulling the upper and lower parts of your torso in different directions will release pressure on the disks between the spinal vertebrae, thus allowing a herniation to retreat. After about six visits and no relief, I decided this was voodoo, too.

Cortisone shots came next. Lying facedown on a table in urgent care, a kindly physician’s assistant produced the biggest needle I’d ever seen. “You absolutely cannot move,” he told me, “or the consequences could be very, very bad.” When he inserted the needle into my back, I felt a sharp pain, followed by warmth, followed by a complete absence of pain. Cortisone is a steroid, and it’s used to decrease inflammation and mask the pain of a structural back problem so that the nerves and muscles around the injury will calm down. Because cortisone takes some time to kick in, the syringe also has a bit of Novocain in it, which is what provides the immediate alleviation of pain.

I received three cortisone shots over about a year. The first two times, the relief was immediate. As the third shot was going in and I felt no change in my back, I thought, Oh crap. Sure enough, it didn’t do anything. I walked out of the clinic in as much pain as ever.

That was the fall of 2008. In January 2009, I flew to Nashville to speak at a gathering of fifteen hundred Methodist teenagers, and I was hurting. I left my hotel room on Friday evening and walked to the convention center where the conference was happening. By the time I arrived, my left leg was numb below the knee, and I could barely breathe. I went ahead and spoke at the conference, but they had to roll me onstage in a wheelchair.

I met with a surgeon the next week and had back surgery the week after that. I had a bulge in one of the disks in my back, and it was rubbing against the sciatic nerve. When I awoke from the anesthesia, the surgeon showed me a photo of the part of my disk that he’d clipped out and told me it was one of the biggest herniations he’d ever seen. He also said that he couldn’t tell if the nerve damage was permanent or whether I’d regain feeling in my left foot. It was, and I haven’t.

I needed surgery. I needed someone to cut through my skin and remove the herniation, and no procedure less radical would work. Other methods caused temporary relief by masking the pain, but nothing short of surgery could fix the problem.

René Girard has proposed the most profound recent addition to models of the atonement, and it operates by a similar rationale. Here it is in its simplest form: Humanity developed a pattern of violent sacrifice meant to assuage guilt and appease the “gods.” It worked, but only temporarily. It took Jesus on the cross to provide the remedy that was really needed. Violence is our back pain; offering sacrifices to deal with our guilt is massage and cortisone shots. But Jesus and his work on the cross, that’s the surgery we need to really deal with the problem.

Girard’s view of the crucifixion can be understood like this: When we look at Jesus hanging on the cross, we are looking in a mirror. God is reflecting back to us the outcome of our systems of rivalry, sacrifice, and violence. Jesus’ death shows conclusively that those systems are bankrupt, that they do not assuage guilt, and that they do not minimize violence. Jesus is the final sacrifice because he reveals the fiction behind the entire enterprise of sacrifice.

The Violence Virus

René Girard is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and one of only forty members, or immortels, of the Académie Française. He received this honor—France’s highest intellectual honor—as a result of his groundbreaking anthropological work. His career has spanned many decades and is notable for an unfolding series of discoveries. He started by revealing the central aspect of all myths—triangular rivalry. That led him to see scapegoating and sacrifice as the means of dissipating the violence that rivalry engenders. He then realized that the Christian story reveals what all other myths hide—that the sacrificial victim really is innocent—and this led to Girard’s own conversion to the Christian faith. Let’s unpack this.

Girard is an anthropologist, and he came to his groundbreaking view of the cross not by asking theological questions but by examining the claim that the Jesus story was just one more in a long line of myths involving sacrificial death. But this only came after he had already become famous for his theory of mimetic rivalry.

In studying ancient societies and their myths, Girard discovered that human societies are all based on the same thing: triangular rivalry and the means to diffuse the violence that results from that rivalry. Common to all humans is desire—for a piece of land, a potential mate, a shiny red bicycle. But, when we live in proximity to other human beings, it’s inevitable that someone else wants that thing, too—in fact, when someone else desires something, that causes me to desire it all the more. That’s the triangular nature of rivalry: it’s between two (or more) people and the object of desire.

Girard came to his understanding of desire and rivalry by studying myths and other literature and looking for structural similarities across genres, cultures, and time periods. What he found was that the better the story, the closer the characters hew to this triangular transaction. This desire, Girard discovered, is the plumb line of all great literature, beginning with the ancient myths.

So, a human being desires what another human being has. This is not necessarily bad. According to Girard, it is a deep, anthropological truth, rooted in our evolutionary history. But it does lead to Girard’s second great hypothesis: Because human beings want what others have, violence results. Think Oedipus and his father; think Cain and Abel. Think Joseph and his brothers—they wanted the love of their father, which Joseph alone seemed to have, so they beat him and threw him in a pit and told their father he was dead. We fight for the things we want. And as human societies grew, rivalries also grew; in fact, they snowballed, and more violence ensued. Girard calls the spread of rivalry and violence contagion, and it’s his version of original sin, the problem that we’ve got to overcome. Desire is a seed planted within every human; rivalry causes the seed to grow and bloom; and violence then spreads across society like a virus.

The Sacrifice Vaccine

If rivalrous violence is a virus, then sacrifice is the vaccine.

Societies needed a release valve to relieve the pressure of increasing rivalry and violence, so the scapegoat mechanism was developed: On the brink of mob violence, a victim is chosen and sacrificed. Somehow, almost magically, when the victim is lynched, the mob’s desire for violence dissipates. Then, in an ironic twist, the scapegoat is often made a saint, or even a god.

The scapegoat mechanism is the foundation of all religion, says Girard. The priest or shaman or witch doctor explains the magic, telling the mob that the death of the victim appeased the gods, allowing them to go on with their lives. Girard argues that human society never would have gotten off the ground without the scapegoat because people would have fallen into violent, rivalrous chaos before they could form even a primitive government. Scapegoating and sacrifice make society possible. Like a car tire that’s overinflated, rivalrous violence threatens to destroy a society. But the scapegoating mechanism serves to let out some air, to relieve the pressure, so that the society can establish itself.

But this vaccine is not permanent. It’s only temporary. After a time, rivalries build, violence threatens, and at some point, another victim must be sacrificed to stop the virus from destroying society. The priestly class in every primitive society eventually regularized the sacrifices, setting holy days on a cycle so that mob violence would never overtake the scapegoat mechanism.

The priests also control the telling of the origin story. The genesis narrative of nearly every human society has a “founding murder”: Cain and Abel, Romulus and Remus, Oedipus and Laius, Marduk and Tiamat. In each, an innocent victim is “sacrificed” at the hands of another person, and society is then built on this pattern of sacrificial violence. Violence is covered, even justified, in the fact that the founders themselves engaged in the same behavior. And Girard is adamant that his fellow anthropologists have mistakenly classified these stories as pure myth, missing the truth that there’s a real murder behind the story. The myth shrouds the truth of violence behind a veneer of romanticized story.

The Jesus Cure

Girard considers the Hebrew Bible an exception to this scheme. He says it begins to subvert the pattern in a couple of ways. For example, let’s return to the story of Joseph. First, the story makes it clear that Joseph is an innocent victim. In other ancient myths, some stain of impropriety is imputed to the victim, some reason that the sacrifice is justified. But not here.

And even more significantly, when the tables are turned and Joseph becomes powerful as Pharaoh’s right-hand man, he does not kill his brothers. Instead, he grants them forgiveness. This is nearly unheard of in ancient myths. The story of Joseph and his brothers has many of the elements of other ancient myths—rivalry, deceit, violence, mistaken identity, false accusation, and role reversal—but it ends in a most unconventional way: the cycle ends because the protagonist chooses familial love over retribution.

This, Girard says, is how the stories of the Hebrews begin to subvert the pattern of all other ancient myths.

The story of Jesus tears away the veil of myth completely, once and for all showing that sacrificial violence is built on a lie. The lie embedded in myths of violence and sacrifice is that the victim deserved it. Because it worked—because the scapegoating mechanism of sacrifice really does mitigate mob violence—people convince themselves that the sacrificial victim must have done something wrong. Why else would it work? The myth provides an explanation about why it worked: because the victim deserved it, because the victim’s blood really did appease the gods.

But myths conceal a deeper, more unsettling truth: the victim is actually innocent, and the only reason that a sacrificial system works is because people have convinced themselves that it does. In fact, it’s the system of sacrifice that’s bankrupt, simply a trade-off of violence against the one victim for the violence of the mob. And the death of Jesus reveals that lie because the Gospels make it clear that Jesus is truly innocent. Instead of shrouding his death in myth, they expose his death as undeserved and unnecessary violence.

Some scholars of myth like James George Frazer and Joseph Campbell have claimed that the Jesus story is simply a bad myth, or at least a mediocre myth that’s been badly interpreted, for it lacks the complexity of other archetypal stories. Both Frazer and Campbell classified Jesus as just another hero myth, part of the monomyth.

But it’s the very unconventional nature of the “sacrifice” of Jesus that caused Girard to convert to Christianity as he studied mythology. Instead of repeating the mythic pattern and establishing a religion based on violence, Jesus’ death is a renunciation of violence, and upon the foundation of his death is based a religion of peace. Girard says,

           What I have called “bad sacrifice” is the kind of sacrificial religion that prevailed before Christ. It originates because mimetic rivalry threatens the very survival of a community. But through a spontaneous process that also involves mimesis, the community unites against a victim in an act of spontaneous killing. This act unites rivals and restores peace and leaves a powerful impression that results in the establishment of sacrificial religion.

                In this kind of religion, the community is regarded as innocent, and the victim is guilty. Even after the victim has been deified, he is still a criminal in the eyes of the community (consider the immoral and unethical behavior of the gods in Greek and Roman mythology).¹

The death of Jesus reverses the scapegoating process. The subversion of scapegoating begins in the Hebrew scriptures and finally culminates with Christ’s death, which Girard calls a “non-sacrificial atonement.” The trajectory begins in the Hebrew Bible, where the persecuting community (Israel) is pictured as guilty, and the victim (Abel, Isaac, Joseph, Job) is innocent. Then Jesus Christ, the son of God, is the final scapegoat. Precisely because he is the son of God, and since he is innocent, he exposes all the myths of scapegoating. He shows that the victims were innocent all along, and their communities were guilty.

In Christ, God becomes the one who is rejected and expelled. The scapegoat is not one who is sacrificed to appease an angry deity. Instead, the deity himself enters human society, becomes the scapegoat, and thereby eliminates the need for any future scapegoats or sacrifices.

Girard’s theory is commonly referred to as the Last Scapegoat theory, but he’s repeatedly said that’s a misnomer. Instead, he says that sacrifice was efficacious at mitigating rivalry, but only temporarily. And it was based on a fiction, that the victim somehow deserved it. So Jesus’ death is not the last in a long series of sacrifices, the ultimate sacrifice, better than any dove or goat or ox or virgin or prisoner of war. Instead, Jesus’ death shows that the entire system of sacrifice is bankrupt, that it never pleased God, and it never really solved human problems.

Jesus’ death does have some sense of ultimacy, to be sure. Girard writes, “The Cross is the moment when a thousand mimetic conflicts, a thousand scandals that crash violently into one another during the crisis, converge against Jesus alone.”² Rivalry is an illness that besets humanity. That sickness is meted out upon victims and scapegoats in many societies, but never more so than when it is concentrated on Jesus. As we see Jesus dying of the contagion of violence upon the cross, he’s saying to us, This is what your rivalry and violence have wrought. This is the outcome. Now you know, so you don’t have to do it ever again.

In Jesus’ crucifixion, God is holding up a mirror. We look at Jesus on the cross, and we see our own systems of violence and scapegoating reflected back at us.

Six Questions for the Mirror Model

What does the Mirror model say about God?

It’s a bit tricky to evaluate God’s role in the Mirror model because Girard explicitly avoids imputing activity to God. Because he’s an anthropologist and not a theologian, and because he wants his work to be taken seriously by his peers, he consciously avoids relying on his own faith in his writings.³ That being said, we can surmise some things about God in this theory. For one thing, God has never wanted blood sacrifice. However, because it worked at lessening violence, God accepted the sacrificial system, and God even endorsed it. What God did in the Hebrews was wean the people off of human sacrifice and move them toward animal sacrifice, which was a step in the right direction. God made it clear that the community (Israel) was not innocent in the violent transactions with enemies and with sacrificial victims. But God allowed humanity to evolve from early, primitive human sacrifice, to less primitive animal sacrifice, until we were ready to learn that sacrifice, in fact, does not please God.

What does it say about Jesus?

Similarly, though Girard may personally believe in Jesus’ divinity, his version of the crucifixion doesn’t rely on that. In the Mirror model, Jesus’ life is little more than a precursor to his death. His life is necessary to establish that he is truly innocent, that he does nothing to deserve a lynching. He lived a life of peace and charity, and he is lynched by mob violence. Jesus’ story is told by the Gospel writers and interpreted by Paul, and those authors do not hide behind the contrivances of myth. They do not pretend that God required this death or that Jesus deserved it or that the mob is innocent. Instead, they give us an unflinching account of an innocent victim lynched by a mob and a political apparatus. Jesus’ own self-awareness of his role is not Girard’s concern. Instead, his primary interest is how the Gospels and Paul differ from other, conventional stories in their depiction of this death. Jesus’ death is a game changer because it breaks the pattern.

What does the Mirror model say about the relationship between God and Jesus?

Girard writes, “There is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that God causes the mob to come together against Jesus. Violent contagion was enough.”⁴ God didn’t kill Jesus, but God let it happen. Lacking explicit theological answers from Girard, we’re left to wonder about the relationship between Jesus and God. Did Jesus consent to be the last scapegoat? Did he embrace his fate? Surely, the Mirror model concurs with the Pauline belief that God works all things together for good,⁵ for God took the violent contagion of the masses which put Jesus on a cross and used it to show us that violence is bankrupt.

How does it make sense of violence?

No view of Jesus’ death has a better response to the problem of violence than the Mirror model. Violence is endemic and epidemic among humans, rooted in our inevitable rivalries with one another. The sacrificial system allows human societies to exist by both regulating and explaining violence. Violence is regulated by the clergy in the sacrificial system, and it is justified as the method by which sin is expelled and God is satisfied. But over millennia and within one group, God gradually weans people from this understanding of violence. Then in one singular violent act, the entire system of violence is exposed as a farce. If we had really been paying attention, this should have ended violence once and for all.

What does it mean for us spiritually?

The ethics of this view of the death of Jesus are as plain as they are compelling. Once exposed as a farce, we can see how scapegoating permeates human relations. Whether it’s one country at war with another or a playground scuffle, we justify our violent tendencies by scapegoating people who are actually innocent victims. The Christian response to this realization is to call out scapegoating when we see it, to advocate on behalf of the victims, to seek forgiveness for past lynchings, and to dismantle systems that promulgate crucifixions. For ourselves, the spiritual discipline is shedding our rivalries, constantly challenging ourselves not to want what another has. If we can evolve past this very human trait, we will weaken the systems of sacrifice and violence that are set up to mitigate our rivalries.

Where’s the love?

It’s hard to love someone you’re trying to lynch. Even non-physical lynchings do violence to others—verbal abuse, nasty comments on websites, gossip, slander. By revealing the bankruptcy of the system of violence, Jesus opened the way to true charity toward others. His was a loving, sacrificial act in that he gave up something so valuable—his very life—to show us that we were caught in a loop of never-ending violence. We follow his example by doing the same, exchanging rivalry and violence for sacrificial love. When we choose love over violence, we step out of the loop, and we are cured of the contagion.

Evaluating the Mirror Model

Girard writes,

           Medieval and modern theories of redemption all look in the direction of God for the causes of the Crucifixion: God’s honor, God’s justice, even God’s anger, must be satisfied. These theories don’t succeed because they don’t look seriously in the direction where the answer must lie: sinful humanity, human relations, mimetic contagion. . . . They speak of original sin, but they fail to make the idea concrete. That is why they give an impression of being arbitrary and unjust to human beings, even if they are theologically sound.⁶

We can immediately see why the Mirror model has gained so much popularity so quickly, especially among more liberal and progressive Christians. But if Girard accuses other theories of being arbitrary and even unjust, the same can be said of the God implicit in his view. God assumes a quite passive stance in the Mirror model, both accepting the sacrificial system of the Hebrews and allowing the mob to kill his son. Yes, God uses the crucifixion to reveal the bankruptcy of scapegoating, but we can still ask, At what cost? Was Jesus a willing victim? And doesn’t his victimhood simply add another body to the pile of victims?

In general, Girard is weak on God—a result of his anthropological focus. His theory doesn’t even really need God to hold water. It could have been purely cultural and sociological forces that led early Christians to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the ultimate or final scapegoat. God’s involvement isn’t technically necessary. And, for that matter, Jesus’ divinity isn’t necessary either. Jesus could have simply been the innocent victim that came along at the right place and time for an ever-expanding group of people to see his sacrifice as redemptive. Maybe by the year 30 CE, humanity had finally evolved enough to see the bankruptcy of blood sacrifice, and Jesus opened our eyes to that.

But if we take this model and infuse it with God—if that’s God up on the cross—then it really becomes the Mirror model. Then it’s not just another innocent victim, lynched at the hands of a bloodthirsty mob—we’ve already got plenty of those. Instead, if God is truly in Christ, then our rivalries, our desire for revenge, our violent system of choosing and executing scapegoats, is truly condemned. God takes those into himself and shows them for what they really are. When we look at Jesus on the cross, we see what our sin has wrought: the death of God, the one truly innocent victim in all of history.

To the question of whether there could have been another way, the Mirror view says no. Only violence could reveal the failure of violence. We could not have been taught this in theory; it had to happen in reality. Just as the Divinity model says that God needs to enter into death to overcome death, the Mirror model posits that God needed to experience violence to defeat violence.

Two more potential shortcomings need to be addressed. The first is a theology problem. Girard pays almost no attention to a major concern of most Christians, beginning with Paul: how the death of Jesus redeems us from sin. For Girard, the crucifixion is the result of human forces—mimicry and rivalry and violence—and when understood correctly, it should put an end to those forces. But didn’t something cosmic also happen on the cross, something spiritual? Paul thought so: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”⁷ That quote and the many like it in Romans and elsewhere have led most Christians to believe that God was doing something supernatural on the cross. So, to many people the Mirror model will seem too human in its orientation.

The second concern is ethical: If Girard is right about Jesus’ death, why are systems of violence and scapegoating still so rampant? And for that matter, why did it take so long for someone to discover this truth? That’s not to say that we should be suspicious of this interpretation simply because it’s new. But it is fair to ask whether Jesus died for nothing, since nothing really changed when he died. (This is one of the reasons that so many people see the crucifixion more as a supernatural, spiritual event than a human, earthly one.) On the day after Jesus’ death, the Roman Empire was just as brutal and violent as it had been the day before. Innocent victims were scapegoated and even crucified—probably some on the very cross that held Jesus. And on and on it goes. Even today, parts of the world are rife with violence in Jesus’ name. Warriors with crosses around their necks fire guns at their religious rivals. Sacrificial deaths continue unabated. The contagion is spreading.

This question challenges any view of Jesus’ death: why hasn’t the world changed more as a result of the crucifixion? But it’s especially pertinent for the Mirror model, which rests on the idea that when we see Jesus dying on the cross, we should see that our own rivalries nailed him there.

We can’t see it because our rivalries continue to blind us to the truth. We can’t see it because we choose violence over peace. We can’t see it because our systems of sacrifice and warfare overwhelm us—they give us the dominant narrative by which we live our lives.

But if we look—really look—at Jesus hanging from the cross, maybe we can see those narratives of violence and revenge mirrored back at us. And maybe we can conjure up the courage to see that they’re empty, reject them, and instead choose a way of peace.