James Alison

In the face of those who have no voice, we must, above all, avoid being strong with the weak (cf. 1 Cor. 10:23-30).

Elijah, when he entered into rivalry with the prophets of Baal became one of them, because God is not to be found in such circuses, nor in the murders which go along with them. At the end of his undeceiving, Elijah is more Yahwist, more atheist, less of a shaman, less of a sacrificer, because God is not like the gods, not even so as to show himself superior to them.

The only places in the gospels where the paternal voice of God appears independently of Jesus is precisely to indicate that it is to Jesus that we must listen, and that in him God is glorified.

It is in this wrestling that Jacob 'prevails with God', and realises that he has seen God face to face. He has overcome not God but his own rivalry. After this mysterious struggle he was able to recognise his wrongdoing and look his brother Esau in the face. Thus he was able to learn to live in peace with his brother—and become Israel, a community of brethren.

Now, here is Jesus' point: he is not only the culmination of the project, but the project itself, God made brother, offering us to become siblings, but vulnerable to fratricide.

The 'I', the 'self' of the child of God, is born in the midst of the ruins of repented idolatry.

... [I]t is our being bad brothers and sisters that leads us to be bad fathers and mothers, not our having bad fathers and mothers that has made us bad brothers and sisters.

The moment I realised that I was dealing with a mechanism whose participants were its prisoners, at that moment I was able to take distance from what had happened, and forgiveness started to become possible.

In a world where nobody understood the viewpoint of the victim, we would all be right to side with the victim. But we live in a world where almost nobody 'comes out' as a Pharisee or a hypocrite, and it seems to me that the way to moral learning proceeds in that direction.

There is no wicked and numinous paternal 'they'. There are only brothers and sisters like ourselves: fragile receivers and mete-ers out of ambivalent and often fratricidal fraternity.

We cannot understand the preaching of the resurrection if it is understood as a miraculous moment which founds a new religion. If it is taken thus, we are in fact denying the force and efficacy of the resurrection. For the resurrection brings about the definitive installation in our midst, as a constructive hermeneutical principle, of the cult of Yahweh who knows not death, and who is worshipped in a continuous apprenticeship in participating in and not being scandalised by the collapse of the sacred. A sacred whose secret is always the victims which it hides, and on whose sacrifice it depends.

Being good can never do without the effort to learn, step by step, and in real circumstances of life, how to separate religious and moral words from an expelling mechanism, one which demands human sacrifice, so as to make of them words of mercy which absolve, which loose, which allow creation to be brought to completion.

Sin is resistance, in the name of God, to the creative work of God which seeks to include us all.

All human paternity comes internally structured by fratricide and, as paternity, is incapable of truth, because it will always be protecting itself against the 'other'.

What is new is that this sort of belonging to a group defined by an inherited paternity is shown to be an idolatrous belonging, and by idolatrous, understand a belonging demanding sacrifice. Jesus appears in the midst of such a group and, by showing up its structure for what it is, provokes it into tightening its group frontiers, into acting ever more obviously according to sacrificial type. And the threatening, destabilising element in Jesus' teaching and mode of acting out is that he refuses to concede any divine element at all to inherited group belonging.