The Eucharistic Redemption of the Traumatized Victim

Abstract

In his passion, Jesus Christ was a victim of the intentional violent acts of others, which were highly likely to have been traumatic for him and those around him. In the Eucharist, traumatizing acts and events are represented through symbolism, narrative and action. Although the body is a common doctrinal and eucharistic trope, particularly in Paul, the flesh, which is prominent in Johannine imagery, is a more distinctively Christian symbol as well as being more generative for a eucharistic theology of the victim. In the eucharistic elements of separated bread and wine, Christ the priest is presented as also the paradigmatic victim. His shed blood, which was not reassimilated into his flesh at his resurrection, indicates an abiding earthly humanity in solidarity with other victims. For traumatized victims, where space in the Eucharist is provided for the acknowledgement of suffering and other negativity, participation in it may be a pathway of transformation. Traumatized victims might themselves continue this priestly transformation in the world, bearing, like Christ, the sins and woundedness of others and contributing to Christian witness, instruction and healing.

1. Introduction

In his passion, Jesus Christ was a victim of the intentional violent acts of others, which were highly likely to have been traumatic for him and for those close to him. In the Eucharist, traumatizing acts and events are represented through symbolism, narrative and action. I shall first discuss the theological and biblical significance of the flesh for a eucharistic theology of the victim. Then I shall present Christ as the paradigmatic victim, addressing theological understandings of his blood, especially in relation to his humanity and its post-resurrection location. Next, I shall consider Christ’s priestly victimhood as traumatic, addressing his inculpability, and shall interrogate the ambivalence of some theologians about the significance of the Eucharist for traumatized victims. I shall then argue that the Eucharist, if conceived and led in an appropriate way, has the potential to offer traumatized victims a pathway of transformation. Finally, I shall identify ways in which traumatized victims might themselves exercise transformative priesthood in the world. I employ a theological methodology that is grounded in the eucharistic liturgy, addressing experiential, affective and pastoral aspects through these rather than making them my focus. I use the phrase ‘traumatized victims’ in preference to ‘victims of trauma’ because I understand trauma as a subjective (although extremely powerful and involuntary) response to acts or events in which individuals are victimized or become victims. In so doing, I am not suggesting that all victims will, or should, experience trauma.

2. Prolegomena: Body and Flesh

In the second part of Corpus Mysticum, Henri de Lubac (2006, pp. 121–264) traces the complex interrelations of the Pauline body (soma/corpus) and the Johannine flesh (sarx/caro) in eucharistic theology, which was closely linked to biblical interpretation and reception. During the medieval period, body language became closely associated with representations of the Church because it could be used to image unity in diversity. Suggestive of an organism with different members exercising their particular functions in an overall harmony, body imagery supported Pauline ecclesiology. Given these associations, it is unsurprising that body imagery has been frequently deployed in modern ecclesiology and eucharistic theology. Indeed, it provides the title for de Lubac’s own study. Yet flesh, de Lubac rightly suggests, has typically been used to indicate a more specifically sacrificial and christological reference than body. The latter was also used in secular Roman political discourse to refer to the ‘body politic’ with the emperor at its head, reappearing in later medieval political theory in the notion that the people compose the body of their sovereign (Lee 2006, pp. 34–39; Kantorowicz 1997, pp. 207–32). Flesh discourse, in contrast, has a biblical lineage, being used to designate the ‘sacrifices of the ancient law where the bodies of animal victims prefigured the flesh of the divine Victim’, and later became fundamental to Christian theology in the doctrine of the incarnation as the taking on of flesh (de Lubac 2006, p. 123). Especially in John’s gospel, flesh is suggestive of divine presence and of the Eucharist’s life-giving power. At the same time, from a theological perspective, flesh, being a term more resistant to abstraction than body, connects more deeply with material life. As Karen O’Donnell (2018, p. 155) writes: ‘When it comes to extending this eucharistic presence beyond the doorways of the Church, then the physical, fleshly presence matters. It is this physical, fleshly presence that has real effect on the world. It is the Real Presence of Christ in Christians that rolls up its sleeves and gets its hands dirty in the filth of poverty, death and disease’.

With regard to eucharistic theology and practice, flesh imagery was called sharply into question in the Berengarian eucharistic controversy. This reached a head in 1059, when archdeacon Berengar of Tours was forced to recant the commonly held doctrine that, in the Eucharist, Christ was present spiritually but not substantially, by accepting that the bread and wine ‘sensually, not only in sign, but also in truth … are handled and broken by the teeth of the faithful’ (quoted in Macy 1999, p. 21). However, church authorities soon recognized that they had gone too far in promoting Christ’s physical eucharistic presence, and the concept of mystical flesh came to be displaced by the ideas of spiritual flesh and the body (de Lubac 2006, pp. 159–62, 171–75). De Lubac nevertheless portrays ongoing tension between these Johannine and Pauline traditions, with preference for one over the other governed by theological concerns. Yet he, and his book’s title, testify to an unavoidable fact: ‘the unity of the Church was, despite everything, more naturally expressed by the metaphor of the body than by the metaphor of the flesh’ (p. 185).

By promoting flesh above body, this article advocates the retrieval of what became a minority tradition in eucharistic theology and ecclesiology. In the Bible, flesh (basar) is more prominent. It has multiple Old Testament referents, including literal flesh (both human and animal); meat; genitals and sexual urges; whole individual or collective bodies; and family, relatives or kin (Thomas 2020, pp. 32–66). In the Septuagint, basar is usually rendered sarx, and in several places is associated with spirit (ruach/pneuma) and life soul (nephesh/psyche). After the Flood, God promises to remember ‘every life soul in each flesh’. Moses and Aaron petition the ‘God of the spirits of all flesh’. In Leviticus, it is repeatedly stated that the life soul of the flesh is in the blood (Gen. 9.15; Num. 16.22, 27.16; Lev. 17.11, 14). Flesh is sometimes presented as shared, particularly with blood relatives. For instance, after Joseph’s brothers cast him into the pit, Judah urges them not to kill him, on the grounds that he is their own flesh (Gen. 37.27; also Lev. 25.49).

In many instances, Paul continues the Old Testament’s neutral usage of flesh (sarx). Moreover, he recognizes that flesh is not only human, with different types of living being, including humans, animals, birds and fish, possessing distinct kinds of flesh (1 Cor. 15.39). Yet Paul’s key innovation is his sarx-pneuma (flesh-spirit) antithesis in relation to humans. He instructs the Galatians to walk by the spirit and not to satisfy fleshly desire, presenting an opposition between flesh and spirit and their respective works and fruits, and, when writing to the Romans, associates the flesh with sin and death, and the spirit with peace and new life (Gal. 5.16-26; Rom. 8.1-17). The precise interpretation of Paul’s understanding of Christian flesh depends on how his conception of the law is understood. If faith in Christ entails that the Jewish law no longer applies, fleshliness is indicative of weakness of will resulting from sin, from which those in Christ are set free, being justified in the sight of God by faith in him. Alternatively, if the law and its basic requirements remain in force, then the Christians to whom Paul is writing remain ‘in the flesh’ (en sarki) in the sense that the observance of at least some positive law—certainly by Jews, and maybe by Gentiles too—is, notwithstanding their corruption due to sin, both possible and a condition for salvation (respectively Thomas 2020, pp. 96–115; Wright 1992, pp. 193–216). While the first construal problematizes positive theological engagement with fleshly human life, the second suggests that, from a Pauline perspective, flesh is a more neutral domain that may be theologically engaged for constructive purposes.

In any case, in John’s prologue, the Word is emphatically identified as itself born ‘not of bloods (sic), nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man (aner), but of God’ (Jn 1.13). He was not born of menses and semen, which were viewed as the two types of blood that, when mingled, brought about conception. This has contributed to the interpretation of the two wills following as respectively female and male: the second by noun gender and the first by implication (Gen. 2.23; Eph. 5.28-9; see Martin 2011). So, the Word was not originally flesh, but became (ginomai) flesh, which is neither inert materiality, nor body, although it is never without the body. Flesh is anyway the principle of life, vivified by God and enabling sensation and emotion (Behr 2019, pp. 288–96). For John, the statement that the Word became flesh indicates not a merely apparent inhabiting, nor an adoption that is temporary, but an indwelling that was permanent until death. It attests to Christ’s humanity more strongly than Paul’s description of Christ in the form of God emptying himself and being born in human likeness (homoioma) (Jn 1.14; see Edwards 2014, p. 108). Importantly, John’s signs mostly heal or restore flesh: the healing of the official’s son in Capernaum, the healing of the paralyzed man at the pool of Bethzatha, the feeding of the five thousand people up the mountain, the giving of sight to the man born blind in Jerusalem, the raising of Lazarus of Bethany (Jn 4.46–5.9, 6.1-15, 9.1-41, 11.38-44; Lee 2002, pp. 36–37). In contrast with Paul’s tendency to subordinate the flesh to the spirit, with John, flesh and spirit are fused and transform each other in a contrapuntal movement: in the incarnation, divinity takes flesh, then, through glorification, flesh becomes divine. As Dorothy Lee (2002, p. 49) writes, ‘divine glory is now revealed in the symbol of flesh with transfiguring power’.

It is in principle more inclusive to ground human solidarity in the idea of being born as flesh (basar) than in the notion of being made in God’s image (Cunningham 2009). Not only does this flesh encompass animals as well as humans, but it cannot so easily be construed to suggest that some humans display God’s image more than others. In wider biblical perspective, flesh features at key points in the Genesis narrative: Eve and Adam are of one (echad) flesh; the Flood comes after all (kol) flesh, both human and animal, is found to be corrupt; in the flesh of their circumcised foreskin, the male descendants of Abraham signify the divine covenant (Gen. 2.21-24, 6.12-17, 17.11-25). It is on all (kol) flesh that, following tribulation, God’s spirit will be poured out, bringing prophecies, dreams and visions (Joel 2.28). Yet in historic theological reflection, as well as in domains of modern secular life such as advertising, women are more likely to be identified with flesh than men. However, by virtue of his incarnation, as well as his passion, Christ is similarly identified. Referring to the purported superiority of spirit over flesh, and with the biblical genealogy just presented in view, Lilly Nortjé-Meyer writes: ‘The intersection of the Logos as flesh with women and animals as flesh, should bring a new worldview to change the master paradigm of dualisms. There is no hierarchy between flesh and flesh. It is not the spirit that connects woman and Earth (animals) with the Logos, but flesh’ (Nortjé-Meyer 2022, p. 144; also, now classically, Adams 1990). The tension between the biblical inclusivity of the category of flesh and how it may in reality be associated with objectification will remain theologically and pastorally important as the discussion moves on.

3. The Abiding Humanity of Christ the Victim Through Blood

It is easy, due to long familiarity, to overlook the theological significance of the eucharistic presentation of Christ’s blood as a substance distinct from his body. Rarely, even at death, is blood separated from the body, and such separations are normally viewed as significant. The obvious biblical example is the animal sacrifices that took place in the Jerusalem temple and other locations across ancient Israel. Exsanguination by means of cutting the neck arteries with a sharp knife was the easiest and, at the time, the least painful available killing method. In the Jerusalem temple, the surplus blood from an offering was poured onto the outer altar to mingle, in the water channel below, with the blood already there. The resulting mixture was washed away and could be purchased for use as fertilizer (Barker 2003, p. 65; for details, Tractate Yoma 5.6, in The Oxford Annotated Mishnah 2022, vol. 1, p. 612). So far as human shed blood is concerned, Jesus places himself within a lineage stemming from Abel, who was killed by his brother Cain, with Matthew echoing the Genesis imagery of blood poured out ‘upon the earth (epi tes ges / min ha’adamah)’ (Mt. 23.35; Lk. 11.51; see Gen. 4.10-11; Heb. 12.24).

Thomas Aquinas identifies the separation of the blood from the body as a principal characteristic of the Eucharist, explaining of Christ that his blood is ‘consecrated separately from the body; because it was by his passion than his blood was actually separated from his body’ (Aquinas 1964–1981, Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 78, a. 3, ad 1, vol. 58, p. 179). Following Aquinas, Pope Pius XII associates this duality with Christ’s status as victim, stating in his 1947 encyclical Mediator Dei that ‘the eucharistic species under which He is present symbolize the actual separation of His body and blood. Thus, the commemorative representation of His death, which actually took place on Calvary, is repeated in every sacrifice of the altar, seeing that Jesus Christ is symbolically shown by separate symbols to be in a state of victimhood’ (70, in Carlen 1990, p. 131). Furthermore, William Durand (2013, 4.30.17, p. 252) notes that, during the eucharistic prayer, ‘only the deacon and not the priest—who designates Christ—holds the chalice, to note that in the immolation of Christ, His Blood was separated from His Body’. The focal image for the shedding of Christ’s blood at his crucifixion is found in John 19.34: on seeing that Jesus is dead upon the cross, a soldier, rather than breaking his legs, pierced his side and blood and water immediately flowed out. This was miraculous: within a dead body, blood would not normally be circulating and would not be under sufficient pressure to stream out, hence the emphatic assurance of the truth of the testimony in the following verse and of its status as an eyewitness account (Nassis 2014).

Although many have become eucharistically habituated into viewing the ontological status of Christ’s blood as equivalent to that of his body—in whatever fashion this may be regarded—such correspondence is by no means self-evident. Fluids require containment, hence the references in two of the biblical Last Supper accounts not directly to wine or blood but elliptically to the ‘cup’ (poterion) (Lk. 22.20; 1 Cor. 11.25). In the Eucharist, Christ’s poured out blood, no longer within his body, is held within another receptacle, which becomes its metonymic referent. This opens the possibility of different theological interpretations of its contents. Aquinas’s discussion of whether Christ becomes wholly and equally present in both the bread and the wine might now seem laboured but reflects contemporary debates (Aquinas 1964–1981, Summa theologiae IIIa, q. 78, aa. 1–3, vol. 58, pp. 162–83). The dominant, Dominican position that Aquinas represents was that, at the death of Christ, his blood continued to be united with his divinity. Yet a contrary tradition of medieval Franciscan interpretation taught that, at Christ’s death, the blood that he had shed upon the earth remained separated from his body. In many such accounts, this separation persisted at the resurrection (Bynum 2007, pp. 112–30). The importance of this debate is indicated in the entry on the blood of Christ by the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu (1939) in the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, of which it comprises the bulk. The controversy, which ran for well over a century, reached its head in 1462–64, when Pope Pius II ruled that, regarding the period between Christ’s death and resurrection, either the Dominican or the Franciscan position could be held, while contentiously suggesting that the Franciscans had conceded that reassimilation occurred at Christ’s resurrection.

Bishop Nicholas of Cusa, who was then exiled in Rome, provides extensive commentary on the theological points at stake, insisting that, at Christ’s death, all of his blood was reunited with his human body, which was united with his divinity. Nicholas had been forced to leave his diocese following controversy resulting from his attempted ban on pilgrimages to Wilsnack to venerate its famed bleeding hosts, and was staunchly opposed to the Franciscan endorsements of such piety. Its significance is highlighted by Durand (2013, 4.42.7, p. 363), who regards the existence of relics of Christ’s blood as contradicting the notion that ‘Christ restored the Blood that he shed on the cross, after rising from the dead’. Among much else, Bishop Nicholas confirms the connection with eucharistic theology: what is contained by the chalice is Christ’s blood, which is glorified due to being united to his divinity at his resurrection (Haubst 1956, pp. 320–28, and the discussion at pp. 295–304). Caroline Walker Bynum (2007, pp. 126–27) justly underscores Nicholas’s determination to ‘keep Christ ontologically whole’ for fear that ‘division—breakage—enters into God’ and eucharistic theology is thus, in his eyes, undermined. She continues: ‘More clearly than all, he is obsessed with the idea that any separation of blood from humanity, or of humanity from divinity, undercuts . . . salvation’.

An approach similar to that of the medieval Franciscans is adopted by Sergei Bulgakov. In Western medieval epics of the holy grail, the blood shed by Christ upon the cross is collected and preserved in a holy cup. Rejecting such romanticization, the Russian émigré priest and theologian instead strikingly presents the entire world as the holy receptacle of Christ’s blood. Through the blood flow out of his body on the cross, Bulgakov contends, Christ’s single humanity is divided into unbroken flesh and animated corporeality (Bulgakov 1997, pp. 27–28; discussed in Louth 2023, pp. 115–18). The latter is, literally, expressed, and so the division abides. Bulgakov writes of Christ: ‘His humanity was resurrected, transfigured, and ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father in the indivisibility of Christ’s hypostasis, but His humanity has also remained in the world, on earth, in the form of the blood and water that came out of His side’ (p. 41). This is consistent with the wounds traumatically borne in Christ’s resurrection body—which John depicts as not healed and narrates as being shown (sic) to Thomas—as well as with the description of this body as appearing like that of a slain lamb (Jn 20.24-9; Rev. 5.6). Even following Christ’s ascension, part of his humanity continues to abide on earth, sanctifying, in its division, humanity that is separated from God as a consequence of sin. Bulgakov suggests that this humanity may become visible, to those who are worthy, as holiness, the power of life and the fire of transfiguration, and is thus united with our humanity (pp. 33–34, 50). Christ’s humanity, it might be supposed, is not completely assimilated into his resurrection body until the general resurrection, with not even Christ’s own resurrection constituting an exception to the principle that resurrection is ultimately collective (1 Cor. 15.51-4; de Lubac 1988, pp. 222–26).

The Dominican and Cusan concerns with unity, wholeness and rapid reassimilation, which are grounded in the assumed ontological identity of Christ’s flesh and blood, belie a discomfort about dwelling with his status as victim. It is easy, even in traditional liturgical settings, to interpret the Eucharist so as to avoid contemplating suffering and death. In her analysis of the Latin language form of the Roman Rite, Catherine Pickstock (1998, p. 257) contemplates the separated elements of bread and wine, and the words of consecration that are pronounced in turn over each of them, and draws the opposite conclusion from Pope Pius XII, averring that these ‘invite us to question the distinction between . . . death and life’. This inference is consistent with her project’s larger trajectory, which transitions away from the ‘polity of death’, which she regards as characteristic of secular modernity, into the ‘sacred polis’. The Eucharist is here viewed principally through the lenses of the incarnation, of which it is an ‘essential repetition’, and of the resurrection, which is described as the ‘process at work in non-identical repetition by which that which is repeated is not unmediably different, but analogously the same’ (pp. 265–66). There is little space here for narratives of loss or lack: it follows from the previous definition that ‘every story is by definition a resurrection story’. Moreover, in the eucharistic body there is a ‘ceaseless movement of ecstatic expectation which is constantly realized’.

This cataphatic ascent through analogical knowing and being is presented in direct opposition to Derridean différance, which posits meaning as generated by the ongoing interplay of signs rather than as due to the creation and preservation of things by God. However, by viewing eucharistic presence through the lens of the victim, we are drawn into the complex, oppositional substitutions of la hostie, le hôte and l’otage that Derrida, who was an Algerian of Jewish heritage, unfolds. The bread or host (la hostie) provides the place or space in which Christ becomes present. Classic understandings of this presence variously entail transmutation, coexistence or displacement: the doctrine of transubstantiation is that the substance of bread is changed into the substance of Christ’s body; consubstantiation posits that the substance of Christ’s body becomes present with the substance of bread; and, according to the theory of impanation, the substance of bread is replaced by the substance of Christ’s body. In any case, in Derrida’s interpretation, Christ himself becomes the host (le hôte), as at the wedding in Cana, the Last Supper and Emmaus, offering his flesh to those who draw near. Christ is received in the host (la hostie) as host (le hôte). This is not a comfortable situation but one of acute threat. Derrida, when reflecting on the death and burial of his Theban migrant hero in the foreign land of sanctuary of his host Theseus, writes: ‘The host thus becomes a retained hostage (otage), a detained addressee, responsible for and victim of the gift that Oedipus, a bit like Christ, makes of his dying person . . . this is my body, keep it in memory of me’ (Derrida 2000, p. 107; and generally idem Derrida 1999, pp. 41–58). By means of the oath that gifts the body—that only Theseus and his heirs may know the burial location—the host becomes hostage. Derrida justly recognizes the paradoxes inherent in offering and receiving hospitality, with which anyone who either has offered hospitality, or is experienced in pastoral visiting, will be able to identify. The host, like Theseus, may become hostage in their own home. Yet, on crossing the threshold, the guest becomes subject to the sovereign power of the host and thus in some sense a hostage, which may include exposure to potential or actual exploitation, although, at the same time, may liberate the host from self-referential subjectivity (Derrida 2000, pp. 123, 125; discussed in Naas 2024, pp. 31–38). Such recognition of ambiguities and working through them, we shall see, lies at the heart of liturgical responses to real-life victims.

4. Encountering Christ, the Priestly Victim, in the Eucharist

In the words of W. Chatterdon Dix, Christ is ‘on earth both Priest and Victim / In the Eucharistic Feast’ (The New English Hymnal 1994, p. 455). In the Gospels, Christ, who has performed the priestly acts of interceding for others and presiding at the Last Supper, is handed over and becomes the passive object of the disavowal, contempt, accusation and violence of others. In Hebrews, these dual statuses are related to the priestly and sacrificial systems of ancient Israel: Christ, as high priest, entered into the holy place through the more perfect tent (skene) not by the blood of bulls and calves but by means of his own sacrificial blood, obtaining eternal redemption (Heb. 9.11-12; cf. Lev. 4.16-18). For many centuries, this fact was explicitly recognized in the Roman Canon, in which Christ was identified in the consecrated host as ‘hostiam puram, hostiam sanctam, hostiam immaculatam’. In the English translations of the first and second editions of the Roman Missal, this designation was reduced to ‘this holy and perfect sacrifice’, but, in the current third edition translation, the emphatic repetition is regained, with Eucharistic Prayer I invoking ‘this pure victim, this holy victim, this spotless victim’. Moreover, in Eucharistic Prayer III, Christ is described as ‘Hostiam, cuius voluisti immolatione placari’, which is, again, most strikingly rendered in the third edition translation as ‘the sacrificial Victim by whose death you willed to reconcile us to yourself’ (The Roman Missal 2010, pp. 675, 687).

The act of sacrifice may be understood as the offering up, and destruction of, an individual that reconciles a community. This conception has been shaped, in large part, by the middle Girard and his theorization of scapegoating as a single-victim sacrificial mechanism (Cowdell 2018, pp. 26–41). Significantly, Girard argues that Christ’s sacrifice abolished the social and political institutions that the scapegoating mechanisms of the ancient world produced and sustained. It accomplished this, he contends, through its narration in the Gospel accounts, which laid bare the operation of those mechanisms and institutions, drawing them out of the historical unconscious for exposure and critique. Girard shows how the gospel texts call profoundly into question the belief that the victim is culpable, and describes how several groups, each with distinct motivations and agendas—the occupying Roman army, the Jewish religious leaders, the Herodian monarchy, the general populace, and even Jesus’s own followers—spoke and acted in ways that contributed to his death. He writes that the ‘control exercised by persecutors and their accounts of persecution over the whole of humanity are at stake in the Passion’ (Girard 1986, p. 102). Recognizing the power of the unconscious in human history, Girard sets great store by the reason given by Jesus, in a verse from Luke’s gospel that is probably a late addition, for forgiving those who crucified him: they did not know (eidomai)—that is, they did not perceive—what they were doing (Lk. 23.34).

Girard’s account of how Christ interrupts Classical sacrificial logics will ground the final part of this article, as the transformative possibilities available to Christian victims are considered. For now, some further explication of the theological significance of the term ‘victim’ in its wider application is required. According to the original and essential meaning, a victima is an animal sacrificed to God. In many modern European languages, the same term is used to designate a human victim, such as of crime, and a sacrificed animal: for example, das Opfer (the sacrifice) in German; Brottsoffer (the sacrifice of the crime) in Swedish; Foernarlamb (the sacrificial lamb) in Icelandic; and slachtoffer (the butchered offering) in Dutch (Van Dijk 2008). Closely linked is the common expectation that a victim must be perfect. In the Old Testament, this underlies the repeatedly stated prohibition against sacrificing animals that have been castrated or tail docked. The term ‘victim’ entered the English language via early biblical translations and hagiographical and spiritual texts. In these, it was first used to refer to sacrificial animals, and then, by extension, to Christ (The Oxford English Dictionary 1989, vol. 19, p. 607). In an early example from a widely read text, Bishop Joseph Butler refers to Christ ‘described beforehand, in the Old Testament, under the same Characters of a Priest, and an expiatory Victim’ (Butler [1736] 2022, 5.VI (12), p. 129, citing Is. 53; Dan. 9.24; and Ps. 110.4). From this application to Christ, the term ‘victim’ came to be applied to other suffering persons in an increasingly wide range of sacred and secular contexts. Victimhood is therefore, in its origins, a profoundly theological concept.

Christ, being sinless, did not deserve his victimhood, even though he accepted it voluntarily. I argue that, similarly, others who become victims are not responsible or blameable for their victimhood, which is the result either of the sins, decisions and acts of others, or of natural events. There may have been a single major act or event, or a sequence that has conditioned the victim to view their situation as routine, with traumatizing acts, and trauma itself, being cumulative (McFadyen 2020). This is the case even if, by acting differently, the victim could have reduced the probability that they would acquire this status. A further similarity between Christ and other traumatized victims is that each is present at the Eucharist. Yet many Christian theologians writing on trauma eschew the Eucharist, because it is grounded in the traumatizing event of Jesus’s passion and death, which included the sexualized violence of stripping, scouring and crucifying (Tombs 2022). For instance, close to the end of her programmatic theological engagement with trauma, Serene Jones, who ministers in both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ, has recourse to what she terms her ‘liturgies of the flesh’: acupuncture, tea, massage and yoga (Jones 2009, p. 158). The Eucharist is glaringly absent from her list. The Nazarene theologian Bryan Stone recognizes the same problem. Towards the end of a chapter that mostly addresses ‘reality’ television, he writes that the Eucharist may enact an ‘ongoing participation in the brokenness of Christ’s body that does not merely perpetuate more broken bodies (and psyches) but that gestures toward a love that remains and heals by helping sufferers imagine a life ahead’ (Stone 2016, p. 53). However, Stone’s path towards this future avoids the core theological and eucharistic foci that this article has presented. Stone opts instead to interpret the Eucharist as the believer’s current relationship with Christ and the reception of Christ’s presence as grace, through the sharing of an ordinary meal of bread and wine.

In the present day, eucharistic participation certainly has the potential to retraumatize victims. Through their positive valuations of sacrifice and suffering, Christian theology, physical artefacts, hymnody and preaching may perpetuate, or even initiate, a subjective sense of victimhood and its associated trauma (Muers 2003). Yet this distorts both Christian doctrine and eucharistic theology, because any perpetuation of victimhood—whether of Christ, or of others—through the Eucharist implies that Christ’s own sacrifice was insufficient to take away sin. Here the Reformers’ invective against those who, according to their interpretation, regard the Mass as the new, or ongoing daily, sacrifice of Christ himself was well founded (Calvin 1961, 2.15.6, vol. 1, pp. 501–3; Luther 1970, p. 171). Their contrary preoccupation is laboured in The Book of Common Prayer ([1662] 1968, p. 255) communion service, which describes Christ’s ‘one oblation of himself once offered’ as a ‘full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction’. This emphasis is in telling contrast with the Roman Rite in its Latin language form as interpreted by Pickstock (1998, pp. 222–23), in which, she suggests, because of ‘transgressions of mundane chronologies and properties of time’ the blood of Christ ‘has yet to be shed’ and participants ‘occupy the sacrificial moment before the Passion’. This differs from the classic Anglican and Reformed position that Christ’s sacrifice of himself as victim has already objectively taken place, has been completed, and does not require repetition, which is preferable on both doctrinal and pastoral grounds.

Having in this section presented Christ as a victim, indeed as the paradigmatic victim, I shall now examine how other victims may enter into his victimhood and thus experience transformation. For the purpose of this argument, I take no view on the theological significance of the pain that Christ experienced during his crucifixion, nor on the question of whether his experience of this pain was intrinsic to the efficacy of the atonement. Satisfaction, moral governmental and penal substitutionary atonement theories each entail Christ’s suffering, in so far as this, as well as his death, was required to satisfy divine justice—whether this be understood as exemplary punishment, the payment of a debt, or punishment in place of others that fully satisfies divine wrath (Hamilton 2014, pp. 46–67). Moreover, Christ’s experience of pain was not deadened by the physical and emotional insensitivity with which, as a consequence of sin, other humans are afflicted. While recognizing the doctrinal significance of such points, I ground Christ’s victimhood wholly in the objective separation of his blood from his body and in the eucharistic representation of this separation.

5. Facing Personal Trauma Through the Eucharist

The debate about whether Christ’s shed blood was reassimilated into his body following his death is significant because the blood of Christ’s humanity separated from his divinity testifies to an enduring diremption, which may be associated with trauma. Bulgakov and the Franciscans suggest that this blood was not translated into resurrection glory, but that it signified sacrifice and the price for salvation paid in highly tangible forms: humiliation, violence and death. Bulgakov’s (1997, pp. 54–56) own concern was to understand how Christ dwelt within, and suffered with, the Russian nation under the hideous yoke of communism. This identifies his theological and liturgical ideas as elements of a eucharistic response to collective trauma. My focus in this article is trauma experienced by individuals, rather than communities that have suffered collective trauma. For liturgical and pastoral responses to the latter, see Warner et al. (2020, pt. 5).

Some victims of male violence may well feel repulsed by the close proximity of the male Christ, given that his eucharistic presence entails the transgression of normal spatial constraints and even of the ultimate limitation of death. This is a man who cannot be avoided, nor, once encountered, evaded. Bulgakov may provide a constructive response to such discomfort. Addressing the neglected question of why Mary the mother of Jesus was absent from the Last Supper, he responds that she could not partake in the communion of her son’s body and blood because this was also her own body and blood. Bulgakov writes that ‘the Mother of God could receive communion neither at the Last Supper nor after it, because She Herself is that which is received, or more precisely, co-received, from Her most pure blood’ (Bulgakov 2021, p. 81). In the Eucharist is received, indirectly yet significantly, the female flesh and blood of Mary as well as the male flesh and blood of Christ. This liturgically exemplifies a truth that O’Donnell (2024, p. 42) pithily expresses, that the body is ‘designed to hold within it the history of women’.

If Churches are to fulfil their evangelistic and pastoral missions, they and their liturgies need to be hospitable to traumatized victims. As William Cavanaugh writes: ‘The true body of Christ is the suffering body, the destitute body, the body which is tortured and sacrificed. The church is the body of Christ because it performs an anamnesis of Christ’s sacrifice, suffering in its own flesh the afflictions taken on by Christ’ (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 267). The body that is described, although existing in eucharistic solidarity, is fragmented and suffering. The suffering to which Cavanaugh, writing in the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship of 1970s and 1980s Chile, refers, is neither sought nor caused by the Church—not even Jesus willed his own suffering (Mt. 26.39; Mk 14.36; Lk. 22.42; Jn 6.38). Rather, in the case of victims of human acts, suffering is the corollary of sin, while, for victims of natural events, it is part of human vulnerability. How, in the Eucharist, may this suffering be reflected on, remembered, and perhaps moved beyond? Writing in the primary context of disability theology, Armand Léon van Ommen (2022) has rightly called for ‘liturgies that limp’ in preference to the ‘eulogistic evasion’ of vulnerability and brokenness. Eucharistic liturgy needs to offer narratives with which trauma suffers may positively connect, silences in which they may consider and contemplate, and spaces that they may inhabit. It needs to offer an eschatological horizon of transformation that, over time, traumatized victims may move towards, into, and through. If this is to happen, rather than being left at the church door, suffering and death must be admitted. These thereby become associated with what Dirk Lange (2009, p. 125), drawing on Martin Luther, describes as the ‘radical singularity’ of the eucharistic event, by which the Eucharist is a ‘place where the iterated return of the Christ event continually disrupts subject and context through a continual conformity/unconformity to that traumatic event’.

Although, in After Writing, Pickstock appears to collapse the eschatological into the liturgical, in later work she describes how liturgical worship may provide a setting for progressive reconciliation over time, convincingly arguing that ‘sacramental signs have a heuristic function; they are not just illustrative or metaphorical. They prompt us to new thought and guide us into deeper modes of meditation because they contain a surplus that thought can never fully fathom’ (Pickstock 2010, p. 721). Eucharistic participation is, Pickstock suggests, itself redemptive. In worship, Christians subjectively appropriate—cognitively, emotionally and physically—the redemption that Christ has objectively won for them. This appropriation has individual and collective aspects. Each participant in a Eucharist, including each victim, responds uniquely to the combination of visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory mediations of Christian narrative, theology, ethics and eschatology that it presents. Yet every Eucharist is, at the same time, a communal act grounded in the truth that human nature, and therefore human salvation, are collective. As Douglas Hedley insists, the Eucharist is not a ‘ritualistic mechanism’ but entails encounter, which alone opens the possibility of the conscious imitation of Christ in both his death and his rising again. Hedley (2011, pp. 198–99) justly avows that ‘participation in the Divine is not an automatic or mechanical process’ but requires the recognition of the relational setting of eucharistic participation and the transformation of the soul.

For such a transformation to occur, it is essential that, in the Eucharist, traumatized victims feel able to enter into the reality of their suffering. Due to the incommunicability of pain, victims typically experience isolation (Cavanaugh 1998, p. 277). The pastoral response to this should not be premature attempts at full community integration. If those planning and leading eucharistic worship, encouraged by the imagery of the Church as one body, view the gathered worshippers as unified, whole and deployable, the likelihood that traumatized victims will feel included is probably reduced. The eucharistic body, Shoop and Fulkerson (2013, p. 153) remind us, is fundamentally wounded and incomplete, with traumatic memory that, being repetitive, resists easy processual transformation, buried deep within it. In the eucharistic liturgy, such memory may begin to be refashioned into transformative memory when truths are recognized and narrated by means of approaches that are flexible, imaginative and connective. Yet trauma and its accompanying pain are associated with silence, inexpressibility, incommunicability and inarticulacy (O’Donnell 2018, pp. 161, 163). Shoop and Fulkerson (2013, p. 154) offer the important warning that transformation ‘is not achieved by securing a correct or complete narrative, but by making space for sporadic comprehension of the incomprehensible’.

The experience of trauma is profoundly embodied. Shelly Rambo (2010, p. 28) writes: ‘When someone experiences trauma, the body draws all of its resources together to respond to the threat. Basic functioning processes in the body are unable to sustain the level of impact, and a person’s ability to regulate his body in response to the physical world is severely impaired’. Aspects of the experience of trauma ‘escape cognitive functioning and awareness’ due to the trauma impairing elements of brain function. Because the memories associated with trauma are somatic rather than semantic, they are more likely to be accessed by bodily practice than by words (O’Donnell 2020, p. 184). The Eucharist, O’Donnell suggests, is the ‘kind of bodily practice that complements the talking therapies recommended for post-traumatic remaking’ (p. 188). Liturgy, including the Eucharist, may be thought of as providing an extended mental and physical environment, or cognitive scaffold, beyond the mind and body of an individual, which supports cognitive processes. This scaffold might include physical locomotion, bodily posture, manual acts, images, symbols, hymnody, received or presented objects and items that are smelt or tasted (Tanton 2023, pp. 136–43; and, for some of the environmental elements, pp. 153–61, 221–32). It has the potential to be particularly valuable where individual cognition is at risk of overload, due to acute emotion, physical pain or moral dilemmas.

6. Priestly Victims

As was shown in Section 3, Christ demonstrates that it is possible to be both a priest and a victim. How, and in what kind of community, might it be possible for a person who identifies as a victim, by means of a converse transition, to become also, in theological terms, a priest, not only gaining a measure of healing but becoming an agent of reconciliation for others and thereby taking their place in the kingdom of priests? (Rev. 1.6, 5.10) This question is more widely applicable than might initially be supposed, given that so many people, in some period of their lives, have suffered victimization and have experienced, or still experience, the trauma associated with this. The potentially ongoing effects of this on the body, cognition and emotion may, or may not, have been fully acknowledged and resolved.

I do not wish to suggest that spiritual and liturgical elements are all that a traumatized victim is likely to require for healing, if indeed this is possible, but rather that, for such a victim who identifies with Christian faith and worship, these will be important dimensions of healing alongside appropriate professional support. In this article, victimhood has so far been grounded in the status of Christ as victim as objectively presented in the eucharistic separation of his blood from his body. From an empirical perspective, in contrast, the victim may be viewed as a socially constructed character type. Character is not chosen by an individual with no social reference. Rather, by means of media, music, visual art and literature, character types are formed, recognized and available for subjective appropriation in social settings (MacIntyre 2007, pp. 27–31). Individuals who have been affected by a wide range of acts and events may choose to self-identify as victims.

In gender terms, particularly in ecclesial settings, the most striking feature of victimization is the profile not of victims but of perpetrators: most are men. So far as the profile of adult victims is concerned, there are more women than men. One reason this is significant is, as Sarah Coakley (2024, pp. 216–38) points out, that women possess the capacity to bring repetitive patriarchal sacrificial cycles to an end. In her reading of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his second son on Mount Moriah, Coakley interrogates two contrasting sacrificial models that ground victimhood. In contrast with many modern exegetes, who follow in the footprints of Kierkegaard, Coakley focuses not on Abraham but on Isaac. Strikingly, she contends that Isaac, although male, may nevertheless be viewed as a female ‘type of the one who triumphs over human powerlessness not by a false, compensatory, will-to-power and further patriarchal violence, but in and through the subtler power of a transformative, divine interruption’ (p. 170). Coakley presents two alternative sacrificial models, of which ‘the one, sacrifice-for-God, brings freedom, union and peace; the other, sacrifice-for-the-world, re-establishes the law of patriarchal violence, possessiveness and abuse’ (p. 191). It is obviously the first model that she commends. With sacrifice for God, personal desire converges with divine desire to bring new life, even in the face of the ongoing possibility of idolatry. However, despite the potential for its transformative interruption, I do not wish to present victimhood—which is the state of a human who either sacrifices themselves or is sacrificed by another—as a desirable condition, still less one that should be intentionally sought for the sake of ministerial or social ends. Rather, there are people who are victims and who, as a result, have suffered trauma, who may experience personal transformation and, being socially situated, may bring transformation to other people and situations. In so doing, they may reach a point at which the traumatizing events experienced, and the physical, cognitive and emotional responses to them, no longer determine current living.

Neither do I wish to endorse the exaltation by the later Levinas of victimhood and its associated trauma as postulates of ethical consciousness. For Levinas (1998, pp. 109–29), the self is constructed—or, strictly, recurs—through its seemingly unlimited responsibility for others, rather than in subjective ethical intentionality, with the result that the self is universally accused by the other, substituted for the other and thus held hostage by the other. The innocent hostage is thus responsible for her persecutor. The passivity of the hostage, which is unrepresentable and ruptures consciousness, is identified by Levinas with trauma, which is prior even to the relationship of the self with itself. For Levinas, trauma is a condition of duration: through the intersubjectivity upon which trauma rests, and its ongoing character, trauma conditions time, not least because it is, for him, resistant to narratival disruption or closure (Coe 2018, pp. 19–37, 50–57; Bacon 2022). Yet in contrast with the Levinasian elevation of diachronic alterity stands eucharistic representation, memorialization, narration and thematization, through which the traumatized victim may enter into solidarity with Christ. The difference is located in conflicting understandings of expiation. Levinas views trauma as the corollary of a relational network in which individuals are hostage to each other. Yet from a Christian theological viewpoint, as has already been stated, expiation is not an everlasting human task but was the work of Christ, which brought about divine propitiation, and is now complete. It does not require, nor can it legitimately be used to excuse, ongoing victimization and traumatization.

Returning to the question of this section, how may a person who identifies as a victim become also, in theological terms, a priest? Such priesthood may be exercised within a church community, at the margins of a church community or in the secular world. First, a priestly victim of human acts quite literally bears the sins of others who have caused them harm and hurt, thus exemplifying what Martin Luther (1970, p. 309) describes: I take upon myself the sins of my neighbour ‘and so labour and serve in them as if they were my very own’. These sins may be borne in different ways: physically and visibly; physically but not visibly; or psychologically, through cognitive and emotional effects. Bearing the sins, evils and suffering of the world—which, in biblical perspective, are difficult to separate from each other—is fundamentally what Jesus does in the course of his ministry, passion and death, and what, following his death, is done by his followers in their own witness and suffering.

A priestly victim of either acts or events may display woundedness and thus vividly show to others ‘cruciform communion’ and ‘cruciform witness’ (Levering 2005, pp. 193–202; Rambo 2010, pp. 73–76). As Rambo (2017) argues, in order to remain true to Christ’s resurrection, wounds should not be erased but, in accordance with the setting, may be discovered, surfaced or touched. An example of a person who displays woundedness is Mary, who is told by Simeon that a ‘sword will pierce your own soul too’ (Lk. 2.35). Bulgakov (2021, pp. 84–85) writes: ‘If the sacrificial offering of Christ contains all of his earthly life, with a perfecting zenith in the crucifixion, then His Mother too, in the silence and secrecy of Her service, walks along his entire path toward the Cross with Him and behind Him, and in the silent standing at the Cross co-offers His sacrifice along with Him, wholly giving up Herself for the salvation of the human race’. In this way, Mary spiritually participates in the crucifixion of her own flesh and blood, supporting the apostles, disciples, other women and family members in the aftermath of this trauma (Acts 1.12-14).

A priestly victim may reconstruct narrative and thereby become an agent of post-traumatic remaking. This is a socially essential task, given that, in ongoing cycles of victimization, people who have been victimized may, in turn, become perpetrators who produce new victims in both ecclesial and other settings (Panuntun et al. 2024). By means of narratival reconstruction, however, a sense of the unity, goodness and ultimate given purpose of a life may be regained, with events that have occurred within that life rendered intelligible as parts of a whole (MacIntyre 2007, pp. 204–25). Importantly, narrative interprets experience, with personal agency extended when an imposed or otherwise accepted narrative is rejected in favour of a narrative that is genuinely one’s own (Stone 2025). Through narrative that engages with memories, personal identity may be confirmed. A supportive church community will provide an environment in which the telling of the kind of transformative story that may shape narratives in wider society is possible. Purposeful solidarity within a just institution thus sustains narrative identity (Ricoeur 1992, pp. 169–202).

A priestly victim may instruct and bless. Before priestly status became defined by Levitical descent, the teaching of God’s statutes and the blessing of people were identified as key priestly functions and are later recalled as such (O’Collins and Jones 2010, pp. 2–3; for anointing, Exod. 28.41, 29.7, 29.21, 29.29, 30.30, 40.15; Is. 61.1; Lev. 4.16, 8.10, 8.12, 8.30, 16.32, 21.10; Num. 3.3; Ps. 133.2; for teaching, Deut. 10.8; Jer. 18.18; Mal. 2.7; Sir. 45.17). These functions remained even following the return from exile, when Temple service became the primary locus of priestly activity, although they are suggested to have been neglected. Being similarly distinguished by their experience, the priestly victim may, through their presence, as well as by particular words and actions, anoint and salve the wounds of others. They may thereby contribute to what has been termed a ‘trauma-informed peace theology’ (Roberts 2021).

A priestly victim of human acts may choose to forgive. A central element of the modern understanding of ordained ministry has been the liturgical pronouncement of God’s forgiveness of sin and of the reconciliation that follows from this. However, in the case of victims, most of whom are not ordained or comparably commissioned, unilateral forgiveness by a single individual may, for a variety of reasons, not be possible or appropriate. No victim should be pressured into granting unconditional forgiveness, such as on therapeutic grounds (Mayo 2015). A perpetrator may well have other victims, who can only offer forgiveness themselves. Serious acts of abuse may affect many people in different places and across multiple generations. In criminal matters, justice requires satisfaction, public protection and deterrence. Forgiveness may endanger a victim or others, or a victim may simply be unable to forgive. A victim who has granted forgiveness may later regret having done so, experiencing this as an ongoing burden (McIntosh 2020). For reasons such as these, John Milbank (2003, pp. 50–51, 61–62) argues that only the incarnate Christ, whom he terms the ‘sovereign victim’, may truly forgive. Christ is uniquely able to speak on behalf of humanity, as well as alone being able to offer pure forgiveness. Yet, in solidarity with Christ, a victim may be able to participate in this forgiveness that Christ alone offers. Such forgiveness may be related to the contrition of a perpetrator or perpetrators, who, in the words of Christ, ‘will look on me whom they pierced’ and shall mourn as for an only, or firstborn, child (Zech. 12.10, with the first part quoted in Jn 19.37).

7. Conclusions

In this article, I have presented the theological, liturgical and pastoral grounds for viewing the Eucharist as the principal site for Christian identification with victimhood and its associated trauma. Through its presentation of flesh—principally that of Christ but, by extension, human and sentient flesh generally—the Eucharist elevates the sensing, emotion and deep cognition that are fundamental to trauma transformation. The separation of Christ’s blood from his body through being shed, in which eucharistic presence and representation are grounded, brings the humanity of Christ into solidarity with ordinary human life. Although traumatized victims may find aspects of the Eucharist difficult, in it, Christ the paradigmatic priest and victim recasts received images and logics of victimhood, opening the possibility that victims may also be priests, with transformation brought to themselves and their societies. Some level of participation in the church community will often be important to traumatized victims, and may bring healing, although such victims may opt to live out their priesthood at the margins of the church or in secular society.