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.