From Christ’s passion to the pain in Gaza: violence, responsibility and civilization

When, at three o’clock on Friday afternoon, Jesus sighs and gives up his spirit to God, we begin to ask ourselves “What have we done?” To the distracted, it must be nothing more than one more guilt for the collection. We Freudians, however, understand that question as the origin of civilization.

It is a matter of geolocation, if you catch my drift.

Where are we, exactly, after having murdered the Creator? If we are among those who put that question to ourselves, as in the myth of parricide, very well. Something like that has the potential to gentle us. But if we are beyond the border of responsibility, we are lost.

It is in that latter place that the individual cheers for a Jesus who “lays the whip” on the thieves — without realizing that he himself is the thief mentioned in Scripture. He cheers for the outrage against the Pharisee leaders, without realizing that the Master outrages him at the very moment of reading.

I wrote about this phenomenon in a chapter called “the narcissism of small differences” (it is a psychoanalytic concept). In short, hatred is even more talented than love when it comes to uniting human beings, forming armies, churches and organized fan clubs.

Anyone who opens a Bible printed in the 1970s or ’80s — translated by João Ferreira de Almeida, with pink pages, cut by a tactile index — finds Palestine in the maps section.

That is to say, until “yesterday,” no one had any doubt that the Jesus we killed was Palestinian. What made us change sides, besides money?

René Girard’s philosophy coincides with Christian practice in the formation of a religion out of violence, just as that same violence generates civilized humanity for Freudians. But this author is particularly provocative when the dead man is Jesus. Ever since we killed an innocent, the wheel of violence has been spinning in a void.

If Easter renews in Christians the hope of resurrection, may it also renew in all of us some assurance that, at least once a year, we ask “What have we done?”

Image of the passion

The photograph for this article, taken by Mohammed Salem of Reuters and released by World Press Photo, won the World Press Photo of the Year award. The image shows Inas Abu Maamar, a 36-year-old Palestinian woman, in a moment of deep pain as she embraces the body of her niece Saly, only 5 years old, who died in an Israeli bombing. The scene took place at Nasser Hospital, in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip, on Oct. 17, 2023.