In the story told by the Gospels, the experience of the night in Gethsemane opens the cycle of the Passion of Christ. Behind him is the joyous entry into Jerusalem, the light of the city that jubilantly welcomes its Messiah. Unarmed, sitting on a donkey and a colt, “the foal of a donkey,” as Matthew recounts (Matthew 21:5), Jesus of Nazareth enters through the gates of the city. The people, the same who will later, at the time of the Passion, stridently call for his death with hatred-charged violence, welcome him joyously, exalting his glory:

 

Most of the crowd spread their garments on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him shouted, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” (Matthew 21:8–9)

 

During the period between the enthusiastic Hosanna and the dark anguish of Gethsemane, Jesus’ preaching becomes harsher and more radical. Christian subversiveness collides with the codified religion of the priests and their more traditional symbols, including the Temple of Jerusalem. Here we touch on a key point in Jesus’ experience: the power of speech animated by faith tends to clash with its institutionalization. It’s a theme that has been taken up forcefully in psychoanalysis by Wilfred Bion and Elvio Fachinelli: the mystical always comes into conflict with the religious. The thrust of desire and the passion for truth inevitably clash with the institution, which stubbornly defends and preserves its own identity so as to avoid any form of contamination. At the same time, when the free force of speech is institutionalized—is rigidly regimented into an established code—it risks losing its generative power. The history of religions and of every type of School testifies to this: when a doctrine is institutionalized it tends to lose the authentic thrust of desire and the capacity for opening up. Institutionalization coincides with a movement of closure in contrast with the movement of the words, which aspire instead to open up and expand. “Organizing,” as Pasolini would say, prevails in the end over the propulsive thrust of “transhumanizing.”1 That’s why the chief priests of the temple, the scribes and teachers of the Law, become the preferred targets of Jesus’ anger. Entering the Temple, which has become a place of commerce and degradation, he, as Matthew tells us, “drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons” (Matthew 21:12).

Jesus empties the Temple of the objects and idols that fill it, he cleanses it, reopens its “central place” so that it can continue to be a house of prayer. Prayer exists only if there is a “central place,” an experience of emptiness, if the fetishistic presence of the object is eliminated.2 For this reason the institutionalization of faith always carries the risk that it will be assimilated into a formal code of behavior, as the Gospels vividly describe through the image of the sterile fig tree incapable of producing fruit (Matthew 21:18–22). Not surprisingly, Lacan likens Jesus to Socrates, starting precisely from the subversive power of their speech, which can open a breach in the life of the city.3

The fault of the temple priests is that they represent a faith that has forgotten itself, that has lost contact with the potency of desire, that has grown sterile in the exercise of power; they haven’t properly interpreted the stakes of inheritance. Who is a just heir? What does it mean to inherit? What does inheritance of the Law mean? Here is the priests’ greatest fault: they have interpreted inheritance solely as continuity, as formal replication, as ritual repetition of the Same, crushing it through pure conservation of the past. They are, in Jesus’ famous words, “whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matthew 23:27).

 

Authentic inheritance of the Law—the inheritance of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—doesn’t consist of repeating it, cloning it, preserving and thus killing it. Rather, inheritance implies a forward movement that aims at fulfilling the Law without reducing it to a dead body. In a harsh parable that Jesus recounts right inside the city walls, the temple priests are likened to the tenant farmers who don’t recognize that the vineyard where they work belongs to their landlord. These tenants don’t respect the rental contract that they have drawn up with the legitimate owner of the vineyard, and they kill and mistreat the servants who are sent during harvest time to collect the share due to the owner (Matthew 21:33–36).

Inheritance implies a discontinuity within the continuity, whereas the murderous tenants claim an obscure property right, ignoring every form of symbolic debt. They forget the origin of the land they work, they forget the symbolic agreement that binds them to the owner of the vineyard. Thus they are bad heirs: they want to possess their inheritance rather than recognize that inheritance is above all a relationship with our origins, and implies a responsibility to cultivate what we have received from the Other but without ignoring the debt.

Faced with the violence of the tenants who have killed his servants, the owner decides to send his only son to collect the share of the fruits of the farm that is due him, and in the conviction that against his son—the legitimate heir—they wouldn’t dare perpetrate the same violence. But the tenants take this opportunity to seize the inheritance definitively by ruthlessly killing the owner’s son (Matthew 21:37–39). The theological-political metaphor is very clear: the temple priests are like the murderous tenants who brutally eviscerate the complex process of inheritance and usurp the highest meaning of the Law, pursuing their own interests against the Law’s. For this reason the parable concludes with a warning: “When therefore the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?” (Matthew 21:40).

What is the more properly ethical meaning of this parable? To be just heirs we have to recognize the symbolic debt that binds us to our origin. The just heir works the land he has received with the freedom to produce new fruits. But if the debt is ignored, if inheritance becomes appropriation or usurpation, if the debt is “betrayed,” nothing is produced; there is only death, and the transmission becomes the transmission of violence alone.

It’s no coincidence that Jesus tells this parable shortly before the night in Gethsemane. In the tenants’ brutal killing of the just heir he demonstrates the inevitability of his fate. The Pharisees and the scribes reject Jesus’ speech; they experience it as a threat. They don’t answer the call, they don’t welcome the arrival of the just heir among them. They hold tight to their properties without acknowledging the symbolic debt that binds them to the father. They kill the just heir in order not to lose their power; they harden the defense of their identity rather than welcome he who comes to bring a new image of the Law. Their orthodoxy is nothing but a sterile fig tree, a dead field, the absence of desire as the leaven that alone can restore life to the Law, and without which the Law is nothing but a “heavy burden” laid “on men’s shoulders” (Matthew 23:4), a weight that, requiring sacrifice, oppresses life.

In reality only the call of desire—incarnated by Jesus—can promise to free life from the sacrificial weight of the Law: “Come unto me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).

 

 

 

1 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Trasumanar e organizzar [Transhumanize and Organize] (Milan: Garzanti, 1971).

2 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1997).

3 Ibid. The Seminar. Book VIII. Transference (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).