We have not moved beyond the ancient practices of ritual scapegoating—we have just become better at hiding them.
—Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Scapegoats
Biblical scholar Jennifer Garcia Bashaw considers ancient religious practices of scapegoating:
Scapegoats have existed since the earliest civilizations began to form. Ancient societies practiced ritual scapegoating, symbolically transferring the sin and blame of a community onto a person or animal in order to absolve themselves of guilt and to perpetuate peace among their citizens…. Israel did not use human victims … [but] in other ancient societies, humans did serve as scapegoats and these victims were exiled or killed for the good of the community. Human scapegoats tended to be people who were dispensable….
Modern societies use scapegoats as well, but where the ancient practices involved the ritual of driving out or killing scapegoats, contemporary practices of scapegoating have expanded, appearing in new and different ways. Scapegoating today manifests itself in discrimination of all sorts—social, racial and ethnic, political, and religious. [1]
The Gospels reveal how Jesus’s death on the cross was, in part, a punishment for protecting the sacred dignity of those deemed disposable.
In his life, Jesus championed women, befriended and healed the poor and the disabled, and welcomed in the outsiders…. The Jesus who changed outsiders into insiders was pushed to the very edges of humanity, ridiculed by strangers, dehumanized…. If Jesus’s life reversed the fate of victims he had met, then his death reverses the fate of future victims. He becomes the scapegoat to end all scapegoats—and exposes the truth that could end human blame and violence once and for all. [2]
From our places of comfort, we are challenged to reverse the all-too-common scapegoating that takes place in our culture:
And so, it is together that we must follow in Jesus’s footsteps, conforming our lives and our churches to the values Jesus modeled…. We must call for and participate in the same kind of reversal that Jesus did. We must lift up the poor, the oppressed, and the outcasts and bring down the people, powers, and systems that create poverty, that marginalize the weak, and that scapegoat the outsiders. We must gather together at the communion table to remember the scapegoat’s death—and what it revealed—so that we might trade the needless cycle of fear, blame, and violence for the liberating cycle of confession, inclusion, and imitation of Christ. The reversal of powers, this movement from being a community that scapegoats to a community that liberates, is how we can participate fully in the divine reign of God that is remaking the world. It is how we will finally follow Jesus, in his life and his death, toward a world without scapegoats. [3]
References:
[1] Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Scapegoats: The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims (Fortress Press, 2022), 2.
[2] Garcia Bashaw, Scapegoats, 276–277.
[3] Garcia Bashaw, Scapegoats, 280–281.
Image credit and inspiration: Vaishak Pilai, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The crude cross etched into the wall becomes the mark of our human impulse to name a scapegoat, revealing how easily we point toward another what we cannot bear in ourselves.
Story from Our Community:
I am a recovering high-control, conservative evangelical. As I read the meditation about Abraham’s call, Brian McLaren’s description of faith made me think that true faith isn’t anything until we let go of the certainty of what we think “is.” It doesn’t matter if we are right or wrong about what “is.” As long as we hold on to our certainty, there is no room for faith. The discovery that “the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty” is one of the most freeing discoveries of my life.
—Barry H.
