The Son of Man must be killed by humans

For more commentary on this week's readings, see the Reflections on the Lectionary page, which includes Nuechterlein's current Living by the Word column as well as past magazine and blog content. For full-text access to all articles, subscribe to the Century.

In my lectionary columns and posts for the first two weeks in Lent, I am suggesting the Lenten theme of covenant. God’s plan of salvation is founded on a faithful relationship extended over time and space.

Over the past 20-plus years in my own faith journey, the Bible’s anthropology has taken primacy for me over its theology, providing a crucial reason for the importance of covenant to salvation. René Girard’s work proposes that what has “saved” us as a species—thus far—are the false gods of our own unconscious creation. As we evolved into a new species, the greatest threat to our survival was our own intra-species violence, Thomas Hobbes’ famous scenario of all-against-all. What saved us, however, was not Hobbes’s social contract to establish a monarchy, but a “natural” mechanism of turning all-against-all rancor into all-against-one collective violence—a violence which ultimately is only effective if it’s experienced as commanded from above, from a higher authority.