Gods of the Accused & the Accusers

Some concluding thoughts...

We could certainly have gone on and on with this cloud of archetypes (and I may have gone on rather longer than I needed to). We might have mentioned Joseph in prison, or Moses facing the mob, or Jeremiah in the dock, or Peter before the authorities, or John the Baptist languishing in Herod's dungeon, or Rebekah being interrogated by her enraged father, and so on and so on. But for now I believe we've said more than enough to reflect a little on what can be made of all these deviant narratives. 

There are many threads in the narratives of biblical tradition, but it would seem fair to say that the malady of the accused is rather common among this cast of characters, whether they deserved it or not. Having grown up on these stories, it always seemed to me that the narratives sympathised with the accused, rather than the accusers. It is the accused who are the subjects of the tales, even if they were guilty. There might even be some paradigmatic clue in the fact that the world's cosmic opponent is named "the Satan," which is not a name, but a Hebrew word, meaning "accuser." 

Forgiveness is an ingredient in this general view of things, but so also is vindication. The upshot of so many of these tales is often not so much that the characters needed forgiveness (though, no doubt they did), but that the social and legal frameworks of "justice" were in fact not just. Justice is not ultimately a legal structure, or a balancing of sums to be managed by some authority who holds the monopoly on violence over others. “Justice” or arightedness, as I prefer to translate the word these days, is a restoring of the web of relations. This cannot ultimately be legislated or managed, though there are times when it is perhaps the lesser evil to try. Management and legislation are themselves expressions of a break in the web of relations. Arightedness is a posture we adopt; a faithful way of being. If there is a final arighting event, it doesn’t come from any One Percent of the human creatures, who believe they know best. The centrality of this host of accused characters serves partly to reveal the inherent injustice of the many justice systems to which they were subjected. 

But of course, none of the above has prevented imperial readings of these texts from proclaiming an image of God, not as vindicator of the accused but as the first subject of some cosmic punitive legal system. We see as we are, not as it is. I should almost admire the morally innovative imagination that conflates the God-character of this tradition with the Accuser, such that the messiah is understood to be bribing God to drop the charges, or absorbing God's punitive justice. How did God become complicit in the ancient Roman practice of nailing colonised peasants to trees and watching them slowly die of asphyxiation?

I don't wish at all to sanitise the ethically complex images of God, or beat the language of divine judgment out of the tradition. Quite the opposite. Within the tradition, judgment is the longing hope of the oppressed. Judgment is the song of all who live with a boot on their necks. I recoil from all attempts to domesticate images of God into one benign mascot or another. God is Other, and I can't speak for God beyond the impressions of my own strange and, no doubt, subjective encounters. But wherever God is painted as a punitive authoritarian who must be bought off by some messianic figure, I suspect some punitive authoritarian holds the paintbrush. And so, this sacred under-history of the vanquished, the oppressed, the scapegoated and the marginalised–indeed, this history of the accused–has been endlessly "corrected" by those who could not find a flattering image of themselves within it, nor an endorsement of their own “just" rule. 

My interest is not so much religious as it is political. I'm more interested for now, in how portrayals of God function as projections of the interests of those who draw them. We draw God in our own image, to legitimise our place in the world. The issue is thrown into stark relief amidst these archetypes of the accused, because this God who is so often portrayed alongside the accused as a kind of whiley and mysterious advocate—indeed this God who is portrayed as the accused—is so squarely re-drawn by imperial Christian history, as a judge in a wig who executes law. This mythos has done a good job of propping up a hierarchical and retributive political imagination, in which a powerful group hold a monopoly on violence, over the rest. Meanwhile, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament remain that most unusual thing: a history written by the losers, and the deviant testimonies of the accused.

Judge not, lest you be judged, as the saying goes. These reflections have been about accepting a strange invitation: to empathise with the accused, and not with the turning wheels of justice systems; to try to understand the story of the accused, in their various shades of guilt and innocence. Our judgments close up and harden our maladies, and widen gaps of power. But to understand is something different. Sincere attempts to understand open all kinds of possibilities. When we stand accused, the one who seeks to understand will be the one who is able to heal and liberate.