Sacral meals and post-traumatic places: Revision and coherence in the Epistle to the Hebrews

The Epistle of Hebrews is an important witness to the complex transgenerational phenomena of post-traumatic place-making in early Christianity, as well as its recapitulation of desire, the staging of the sacral meal, the imitation of the Jesus' voluntary death, and tensions among Jewish communities. Not only is trauma firmly placed within the Epistle, the community has sacralized traumatized space and time through the therapies of a cultic meal. Such repair leads to a series of revisions: violent death becomes a sacrifice; traumatized followers become a community of priests; transgenerational somatic insecurity congeals in the sharing of a sacral meal; and desolate space becomes a commemorative place. Hebrews is an important text in this complex process precisely because of its finely-ordered cosmology. Disjunction and displacement from originary social bonds are revisioned through the rubric of heirship, inheritance, imitation, and a heavenly city. Violent death becomes sacrifice. The threat of death is revised through a sentiment of felt persecution and the imitation of desire. An absent corpse is recast by the dramatic presence of Christ in heaven. Witness and martyrdom become the imitation of Christ and martyrs past as well as perfective of God's redemptive plan. The edge zones of Jesus' and his first followers' decreation-that primordial outside-is revised as the sacral site of commemoration. This is the comfort of coherence, the redemptive revision through a later reason. This is difference at work among a social body; the emergence of temporal and spatial parallax.