Exclusion to Embrace: Scapegoating

When humans rebel against God’s view of morality, the first thing they try to do is to hide from God, as we saw with Adam, Eve, and Cain in my last post.  Why is this?  For several reasons.  First, they fear that God will judge them.  Secondly, they feel guilt, knowing they have done something God asked them not to do.  Third, they feel shame, realizing that they are deficient in some way, lacking what it takes to allow God to be God and humans to be humans.  Before God they are naked, exposed, vulnerable, and such shame leads one to try to hide.

But sin always leaves it’s mark, even when forgiven.  Now Adam and Eve wear leaves, and Cain is marked.  That mark is meant to protect him, but it also becomes a sign of shame, for now he is constantly reminded of his sin and everyone else sees the mark as suggesting they should “stay away.”  Sadly, rather than learning from our sin and mistakes, our human tendency is to ignore our own faults and search for the "speck in the eye" of our neighbor. [Matthew 7:3-5]

The history of religion demonstrates repeatedly that humans misunderstand what God wants and project their deficiencies onto God.  Because humans, when wronged, desire revenge and “justice,” they assume God wants the same.  They assume God wants them to “sacrifice” something to atone for their sins.  The problem is, they sacrifice the wrong thing.  God wants us to sacrifice the self in service and love of others.  We, on the other hand, try to protect the self by sacrificing “the other,” whether it be a lamb in the Old Testament sacrificial system, or our modern sacrificial system, which excludes the other by practicing Scapegoating, which the dictionary defines as “a person or group made to bear the blame for others.”

By the time of Jesus scapegoating was an inherent part of Jewish life.  The religious community, rather than confront its own sins, asserted that community problems were caused by those viewed as unclean.  (Blog post of 1/30/17 "Compassion and Holiness").  When Jesus embraces these excluded, scapegoated persons, the Jewish leaders accuse him of blasphemy and vote to have him stoned to death.  The people agree: “Crucify him!”  Rome, fearing the rebellion of its subjugated peoples, scapegoats anyone like Jesus who challenges their system, and condemns Jesus to crucifixion.

The history of the world shows that whenever nations encounter challenges to their sense of safety and wellbeing, rather than looking at their own failures, they find scapegoats to blame.

For Nazi Germany it was Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals.  For Serbia it was Croatians and Bosnians.  For Bosnians it was Serbs and Croatians.  For Croatia, it was Bosnians and Serbs.  When I was teaching in Geneva in 1993 I met a Bosnian man who had come to testify before the Human Rights Division of the United Nations.  I asked him to speak to our students, and I remember clearly his first words to us, with which he moved immediately from scapegoating to confess the truth: “In a war like this, no one is innocent.”

What God wants for us is community, and when community fails us, our human tendency is to project faults on to others rather than look at our own faults.  We see this in the United States today.  However, because one of the founding principles of our nation is that of equality, with “liberty and justice for all,” and because historically we have welcomed the world’s “tired and poor,” exclusion as a general concept conflicts with our founding ideals.  And so we move on to Scapegoating. 

The danger and problem of Scapegoating, however, is that it not only unfairly targets  the innocent, but it keeps us from confronting the real root causes behind our suffering.

What are the reasons small farming is disappearing within our nation?  Why are manufacturing jobs going away (and will they ever come back?)  Why are certain people willing to kill themselves in order to sow terror among us?  Why are we making so little progress in improving our educational and healthcare systems?  Why do fewer and fewer citizens have pension plans which will allow them to retire?

There are reasons for all of these things, they can be discovered, and they can be changed.  Scapegoating only delays the search for real solutions.  Who is scapegoated varies from era to era.  Right now it is Muslims, undocumented immigrants, the poor and homeless, urban African Americans, and government regulators who are trying to combat environmental degradation, climate change, and a banking system that sent the world into a Great Recession.

God’s ultimate way of dealing with the sin that divides us, causing scapegoating and exclusion, is Christ on the Cross.  Jesus is the “sacrificial lamb” who comes to take away the sin of the world, not so we can go our own way and continue in it, but so that it may be overcome.  Jesus submits to death not as a way to give in to the system of oppression, but to expose the futility of it and to speak God's truth to the world about what is ultimately important.  As Volf writes, “the biblical texts narrate how God has necessarily used the sacrificial mechanism to remake the world into a place in which the need to sacrifice others could be eschewed—a new world of self-giving grace, a world of embrace.” [295]

Thus, if we are to move from exclusion to embrace, we begin by moving from scapegoating to confession, acknowledging our own complicity in the problems of our communities, nation and world, trying to understand and embrace those different from us, and committing ourselves to searching for truth and justice, loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Exclusion to Embrace: Our Original Sin

Cherokee Trail of Tears 1838 (Andrew Jackson's Native American removal policy)

As we attempt to try to better understand and reach out to those who  think differently from us (and in that process take Jesus’ teaching seriously by attempting to take his teachings literally: last blog post), we can learn much by considering how we as humans tend to exclude those different from us.  Once we do that we will be in a better position to then embrace those persons in a life of reconciliation that heals rather than continues to tear apart.  An extremely helpful guide in this journey is the book by Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (1996).

Before we start, a warning.  We enter here perhaps the most difficult challenge of the spiritual journey.  We move from a consideration of Jesus deeds and teachings to the “theology of the cross,” which is the messianic pattern by which God chooses to deal with both human sin and human reconciliation.  In the words of New Testament scholar, Luke Timothy Johnson, “All four Gospels . . . agree that discipleship is to follow the same messianic pattern [of Jesus].  They do not emphasize the performance of certain deeds or the learning of certain doctrines.  They insist on living according to the same pattern and death shown by Jesus.” [Quoted in Embrace, 24]

Jesus’s death on the cross is God’s embrace of all of creation, including both those who are victims of suffering and those who have caused that suffering.  We tend to think that the cross of Christ was just for faithful followers, for people who believe and trust in him.  Jesus tells us otherwise, according to John 12:32: “’And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’”  Notice that he does not say believers, or followers.  He says “all people.”  And you can see the result of this embrace of all people immediately.  A Roman soldier, standing by observing the crucifixion, hears Jesus’ forgive the perpetrators of his crucifixion (‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.") [Luke 23:34], and by the time Jesus dies recognizes God’s presence in Jesus: “Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’” [Mark 15:39]

We are quite comfortable with the first part of this embrace (victims); the latter (perpetrators), not so much; perhaps not at all. The refusal to accept the second part leads to a world without reconciliation and to a life of anger, frustration, judgment and anything but the “peace that passes all understanding.” [Paul]

So, to set the stage, I share how Miroslov Volf begins his book. He  was asked in 1993, during the height of the war in the Balkans, to reflect on the struggle in his homeland.  He was presenting his ideas on embracing one’s enemies, just as God had done in Christ, when he was asked by his mentor, Jurgen Moltmann of Germany: “But can you embrace a cetnik?”  Now a cetnik was a Serbian fighter who had gone into Croatia and raped and pillaged and burnt down churches.  Volf hesitated, and then confessed: “No, I cannot—but as a follower of Christ I think I should be able to.” [Embrace, 9]

So, first, the nature of exclusion and then, in the next blog post, the dynamic of embrace.

The birth of modernity in the western world was built on exclusion, as white Europeans conquered the Americas by subjugating the indigenous cultures, driving them off their lands, forcing Christianity on them, and beginning an endless process of breaking treaties.  In addition, slaves were purchased in Africa and brought to the “new world” to do the back-breaking work.  Having lived in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Washington DC, I have witnessed the way that back-breaking work continues to be done predominantly by the descendants of those slaves and the conquered nations of Latin America.  Their exclusion has not disappeared.  In fact, it is increasing right now for latino workers as we take their work but do not want to give them or their children the protection and benefits of citizenship.  It is nearly impossible for a day laborer to obtain citizenship. (http://archive.lirs.org/DonateServe/advocate/StandforWelcome/mythbuster.pdf)

Now, for the Christian, Jew, or Muslim, this cannot just be a matter of sociology or economics or evolution (survival of the fittest, most clever, most ruthless, etc.).  As Volf writes, “I reject exclusion because the prophets, evangelists, and apostles tell me that this is the wrong way to treat human beings, any human being, anywhere. . . . ‘exclusion’ does not express a preference; it names an objective evil.” [68]

Volf goes on to explain that “an advantage of conceiving sin as the practice of exclusion is that it names as sin what often passes as virtue, especially in religious circles.” [72]  Examples in Jesus’ day were the exclusion of lepers, women, tax collectors, and Samaritans from the religious community [see post of 1/30/17: Compassion vs. Holiness].  Jesus turned this understanding upside down, embracing these very people and labeling as “sinful” the system that cast them out.

The practice of excluding continues within many churches. Today it includes gays and lesbians, women, the poor, the undocumented, and, in many churches, anyone different in ethnicity and nationality form the predominant group.

Another way Jesus changed the strategy for fighting exclusion was by locating evil not outside of a person, in impure things or people, but inside the person, in the impure heart. [Mark 7:15]  “Sin is here the kind of purity that wants the world cleansed of the other rather than the heart cleansed of the evil that drives people out by calling those who are clean “unclean” and refusing to help make clean those who are unclean.” [74]

Volf goes on: “Consider the deadly logic of the ‘politics of purity.’  The blood must be pure: German blood alone should run through German veins, free from all non-Aryan contamination.  The territory must be pure: Serbian soil must belong to Serbs alone. . . .The origins must be pure: we must go back to the pristine purity of our linguistic, religious, or cultural past, and shake away the dirt of otherness collected on our march through history. . . .It is a dangerous program because it is a totalitarian program, governed by a logic that reduces, ejects, and segregates.” [bid]

Another aspect of this exclusion is a rejection of the variety and differentiation created by God, and forcing those different from us to “assimilate.”  As Volf describes, “You can survive, even thrive, among us, if you become like us; you can keep your life, if you give up your identity.” [75]

Now, before we move to the dynamics of embrace in the next post, the Bible from the very beginning recognizes the dangers of exclusion.

God creates a world of tremendous variety and beauty and places Adam and Eve in that “garden” world, with only one rule: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” [Genesis 1:16-17]  One way to interpret this passage is that God decides what is good and what is evil, and the task of humans is to abide by God’s vision.  However, our “original sin” is to reject and rebel against God’s way, and to take into our own hands morality, defining good and evil according to our human desires.

So God goes looking for Adam, and he tries to hide. God finds him and confronts him with his sin, and Adam does what we humans find so very easy to do: rather than taking responsibility for his sin, he blames it on someone else: Eve.  And then, when God confronts Eve, she does the same, blaming her sin on the serpent. [Genesis 3:9-13]

The Bible says repeatedly that the sins of the parents are passed  down to their children.  It doesn’t take long for this to happen.  Adam and Eve bear Cain and Abel, and Cain, like his parents, doesn’t like the world the way God created it.  He decides to “remake the world in his own image,” which is a world without Abel.  He gives in to the ultimate form of exclusion, killing, taking the life of his brother.

Again God goes looking for the perpetrator.  Again, the sinner tries to hide, refusing to acknowledge his sin. When he is confronted by God, rather than confessing, he gets scared, because he immediately realizes that if he could kill someone, someone else could kill him.

God, however, has already had enough: MORE THAN ENOUGH.  One killing is too much!  It must stop here!  Once and for all!  “And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.”  [Genesis 4:15]

Can exclusion ever be overcome?  If so, how, and by whom?  First, we humans need to quit finding impurity outside of ourselves and acknowledge the way in which it resides inside each of us.  St. Paul minces no words: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” [Romans 3:21]  Luther understood this well.  He located the dividing line between sin and righteousness not between myself and “the other,” but down the middle of my very being.  I am, as he put it, saint and sinner at the same time.  Sin continues to reside in me, but God chooses to continually forgive me.  Not, however, as Paul argues, in order that forgiveness and grace may abound, but so that we who have died to sin may quit living in it. [Romans 6:1-2]

Returning to Cain, we leave him “protected in primal history; on Good Friday we will find him redeemed.  Cain, the one who acted out the exact opposite of an embrace  . . . . .will be drawn near and embraced by the Crucified.  Will the embrace of the Crucified heal Cain of envy, hatred, and the desire to kill? . . . . the embrace of the Crucified will not heal him if he does not learn to love the one who embraced him” and to set out anew to walk in Christ’s footsteps. [I John 3:11-17] [98].