When I was in high school I read for the first time
Shirley Jackson’s great short story called “The Lottery”
and most people in high school in America read it,
so you might remember the plot.
It’s about a festive gathering in a small American town
in the heartland and it’s summertime and there’s good food
and there’s music and festivity and it soon becomes clear
that at the heart of all this is a lottery
and you assume that whoever the winner is,
is going to get some great prize.
But then the story, as it progresses, darkens quite a bit
and then we discover that when the winner, in quotes, is chosen,
she reacts with great fear protesting the injustice of it all
as the townspeople close in on her with rocks and stones in hand
and the story ends with their coming upon her
to stone her to death.
A story that still haunts me this day.
Anyone that’s read it has that reaction.
Now go back to the pre-Columbian Aztec civilization.
Aztecs would choose a handsome and brave warrior from a rival tribe,
maybe someone they’ve captured in war.
For year they would wine him and dine him,
they would treat him like a celebrity,
they’d dress them up in the best clothes.
At the end of the year, he’d be marched to the top of a pyramid
where he’d be sacrificed
and his still beating heart taken out and offered to the gods.
Go back now to ancient Rome and we find most famously in the Coliseum,
but other settings as well,
gladiators engaging in hand to hand combat to the death
to the entertainment of the mobs.
And we know these games were used very cynically by the political powers
to manipulate the masses and to control them, etc.
Then go way back to ancient Greek mythology,
in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.
Remember, it was the King of Athens was obliged by the king of Crete,
who had defeated him, that every year he had to send in tribute
seven young men, seven young women to Crete,
and they were brought into the labyrinth, this great maze,
and they had to do battle with the Minotaur,
and of course, they were all killed.
They were sacrificed essentially to the Minotaur
until Theseus finds a way to make his way through the maze,
kill the Minotaur, and make his way out and he kind of undoes this practice.
Okay. Why am I mentioning all this?
Well, because of the most popular movie right now in America,
called “The Hunger Games”.
And I knew nothing about hunger games to about a month ago.
I was on a plane coming home from the West Coast
and there was a guy next to me reading this book “The Hunger Games”,
reading it with great interest, and I thought:
“I wonder what that is?”
And then after that I saw everywhere
ads “Hunger Games”, “Hunger Games”, everywhere.
So I knew I had to go see this movie,
which is based on these wildly popular novels that appeal to,
I guess, young people largely but more broadly as well.
As I watched “The Hunger Games” all I could think of was
all these antecedents of stories of human sacrifice
and the reality of human sacrifice in our history.
So for example - “The lottery”.
There’s a great lottery at the beginning of “The Hunger Games” where,
in this post-apocalyptic America it’s now divided into 12 districts,
and each district has to send young people to the capital city
and they’re going to engage in this mortal combat.
Well they’re chosen by lottery, so that reminded me
of Shirley Jackson’s story.
Well, then a young man and a young woman
- it’s a bit like the Theseus story there-
a young man, a young woman are chosen and they are taken by special train
to the capital city and there they are treated like celebrities
and they are wined and dined,
they are dressed in fancy clothes, they are given special training in media
and they are the ultimate celebrities of the society.
They are on the most popular talk show.
Well that reminded me vividly, of course, of the Aztec story
of the victim who is prepared during a long year as a celebrity
and then he’s put to death.
The Roman connections are made very clearly in the story as these games,
these battles to the death are performed for the whole country
through television and they become the riveting drama
the entire country is watching.
Furthermore, the government -and it’s Donald Sutherland who plays the president-
is clearly using them to manipulate, control, dominate the populace
–very much like ancient Rome.
A lot of the style and even the language of the movie too
is evocative of ancient Rome.
And then finally the Theseus story,
as I mentioned with the young men and young women having to come
and basically make their way through this dreadful challenge
until in this case there’s this couple
-the rules are bent a little bit, I won’t to give the whole movie away-
but this couple kind of undermines the whole process, and undoes it.
So anyway, all that was sort of floating around in my head
as I watched this rather compelling story.
Well, here is what was coming back to me:
Why is it…why is it that this dynamic of human sacrifice is so dominant
in our culture -in our fiction but also in our behavior-
from ancient times to the present day?
Why is this dynamic so dominant?
And again, here I go back to -I think one of the great intellectual players
in the late 20th and early 21st century-
namely Rene Girard who’s the French literary theorist who uncovered this dynamic.
He did it through his study of Dostoevsky and Shakespeare and many others,
but discover what he called the “scapegoating mechanism.”
In a word, tensions arise within human communities rather naturally.
What do we do to solve the problem?
By this mechanism –and that word suggests it’s largely unconscious-
by this mechanism we choose someone to blame,
someone to isolate, someone to ostracize.
At the limit, someone to kill. And we discharge our anxiety, our tension,
our fears onto that person or that group.
In that process, Girard says, we come to a kind of peace
which is precisely why this activity is sanctioned so often by the state and by religion.
Why is there a religious overtone?
Again think of the Aztecs there. It’s a good example.
It’s surrounded by religion. The Romans as well.
“The lottery” in its own way, too.
Think of religious sacrifice to the gods, all that.
So Girard says that’s why it’s given this sanction.
But then he discovered something else.
He was born and raised a Catholic but kind of lost his faith.
But rediscovered it when he read the Bible because in the Bible he saw
-yes indeed this whole dynamic is on display,
the Bible knows that as well as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky-
but the Bible also shows the way out because at the heart
of the New Testament revelation,
the climax to the whole Bible you find, indeed, a scapegoated victim.
Caiaphas says:
“Wouldn’t it be better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed?”
There’s the voice of scapegoating violence,
from ancient times to the present day.
But in this case, God is not sanctioning that act.
In fact God is identified with the scapegoated victim.
In that the scapegoating mechanism is unveiled
-hence the revelation of Christianity for Girard-
it’s unveiled and it’s sort of disempowered and now a new vision of life emerges.
It’s based upon not scapegoating violence but based upon love
and forgiveness and compassion and connection
and especially identification with the victim.
What’s really interesting about “The Hunger Games”
- I’ll have to give way a bit of the ending here I suppose-
but these two young people who effectively resist
the momentum toward scapegoating violence.
They, in a funny way, don’t play the game.
Now it’s deeply disconcerting to the powers that be
and that’s very clear in the movie,
and that’s right because the state will depend upon this move.
But these two young people are operating, you might say,
out of a more Christian worldview.
Now, here’s the last thought and this was striking me all through the movie.
The society in “The Hunger Games” is a futuristic society,
so it’s sometime in the future.
We assume a very sophisticated, we see that in the capital city.
Everyone has very high-level sophistication.
The Aztec civilization was a very sophisticated civilization.
Roman civilization -one the most advance sophisticated we’ve ever seen.
All of those -this is fictional and non-fictional-
but all of those were compatible with human sacrifice.
Human sacrifice emerged right, in fact, at the heart of those civilizations.
I think we comfort ourselves or flatter ourselves and we say
“Oh, that can never happen now, that’s old times.”
I like the fact that “The Hunger Games” is set in a futuristic society,
where human sacrifices reemerged.
And see, I would argue what keeps human sacrifice at bay
is none other than Christianity…
is this great religion that says “No” to scapegoating violence
-that unmasks it- that identifies with the victim.
That’s the system of thought, and we might be going on its fumes right now.
We are to some degree a post-Christian society,
but we’re still going on the fumes of a Christian civilization.
God help us if that totally fades away!
Because I think it’s altogether possible that in the midst even of a
very sophisticated civilization something like human sacrifice could reemerge.
And that’s why I wonder if this movie in an odd way
is prophetic and very disturbingly so.