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Sacrifice is built into human life. It's unavoidable. Even though we don't slaughter animals in worship, sacrifice still happens every day. We either sacrifice other people, or we offer ourselves in sacrifice for them.
That's what John is saying when he contrasts Cain with Jesus. Cain "butchered" he brother, John says, using a word that occurs in sacrificial contexts in the Old Testament. Cain saw that his sins were evil, and his brother's were righteous, and he killed Abel in a vain effort to atone for his sin.
When three siblings gang up against one, and feel the pleasure of uniting in torturing him, they are butchers. When a wife takes out her frustrations by screaming at her husband, she is treating him as a sacrificial victim. When a church blames all its problems on one troublesome member or a group of members, they have turned those members into scapegoats.
The alternative is to act like Jesus rather than Cain. Our resident Greek scholar John Schwandt points out that there is a pun on "Cain" and the pronoun that refers to Jesus, "ekeinos" (v. 16), which means "that one." Instead of butchering others, Jesus divested Himself of His own life on behalf of others.
We are to imitate Jesus' self-sacrifice, but there is more here. Guilt demands satisfaction. When we are gripped with guilt, we look for someone to slaughter. But we have no need for any victim. Jesus has died once for all, and we can imitate Him only if we trust in His once-for-all death. All of our butchering of one another, all of our scapegoating, all of our sacrificing of others arises from unbelief, from our failure to trust the One Scapegoat, the Sacrifice of the cross that ends all sacrifice.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Sunday, November 26, 2006 at 08:10 AM
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