Is there anything more beneficial in our walk, than to grow in our comprehension of the price Jesus paid at Calvary. I think not. So I am excited to share two or three blogs that have been rolling around in me for some months. They do have to do with the Cross of Christ, and in particular Jesus as the world's scapegoat. I pray you will come to love Him even more so, as you see and understand Jesus, as an innocent outcast bearing all of man's angst, abuse and sin. What an amazing God we serve and what a precious gift we find in His Son.THE SCAPEGOAT
And Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness: and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness. Lev 16:21,22
He was despised and rejected by people. He was a man of sorrows, familiar with suffering. He was despised like one from whom people turn their faces, and we didn't consider him to be worth anything. Is 53:3
The veil had been rent and Jesus had played out the drama of the innocent scapegoat right before our very eyes. Here is the holiest, purest, most spotless man that ever lived. What does the world do?
Blister Him,
Blast Him,
Bruise Him.*
He was the outcast of all outcasts; this Son of God. This Jesus, who opened not His mouth, took upon Himself the role of the despised scapegoat as people kicked Him, mocked Him, reviled Him, spat upon Him and finally killed Him.
Through the ages this world has known a thousand Gods, but there is only One that came to rescue man as an innocent scapegoat. As a scapegoat, He came, to carry away all of man's abuse, all of man's angst and the whole of the burden of man's sin. For Loves sake the Creator became an outcast within His own creation. Surely, only on bended knee, might we ever even begin fathom this!
"Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin" Isa 53:10
SCAPEGOAT DEFINED
The scapegoat was a goat that was driven off into the wilderness as part of the ceremonies of the Day of Atonement, in Judaism during the times of the Temple in Jerusalem. This rite is described in Leviticus 16.
Since this goat, carrying the sins of the people placed on it, is sent away to perish, the word "scapegoat" has come to mean a person, often innocent, who is blamed and punished for the sins, crimes, or sufferings of others, generally as a way of distracting attention from the real causes.
When used as a metaphor, a scapegoat is someone selected to bear blame for a calamity. Scapegoating is the act of holding a person, group of people, or thing responsible for a multitude of problems. Related concepts include frameup, patsy, whipping boy and fall guy.**
GIRARD
René Girard (1923 - ) is a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science. His work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy. He is the author of several books.
The Christian anthropologist Girard has provided a reconstruction of the scapegoat theory. In Girard's view, it is humankind, not God, who has the problem with violence. Humans are driven by desire for that which another has or wants (mimetic desire). This causes a triangulation of desire and results in conflict between the desiring parties. This mimetic contagion increases to a point where society is at risk; it is at this point that the scapegoat mechanism is triggered. This is the point where one person is singled out as the cause of the trouble and is expelled or killed by the group. This person is the scapegoat. Social order is restored as people are contented that they have solved the cause of their problems by removing the scapegoated individual, and the cycle begins again. Girard contends that this is what happened in the case of Jesus. The difference in this case, Girard believes, is that he was resurrected from the dead and shown to be innocent; humanity is thus made aware of its violent tendencies and the cycle is broken. Satan, who is seen to be manifested in the contagion, is cast out.
All religions, he says, even the most violent ones, are aimed toward peace. Archaic societies ritually repeat the scapegoat solution to make peace.
All human societies, from families to villages to nation states, are characterized by a tensiveness that is born of the conflict of desire. You and I want the same thing or I want it because you want it and this leads to tension, rivalry, conflict.
How do communities deal with this fact? Girard says in the course of human history there has evolved the scapegoating mechanism. A group finds a person or a group and they blame them for the crisis, they blame them for the tensiveness. What happens here is a kind of peace then reigns in the community because they have managed to vent their frustrations on this person or on this group.
But here’s the thing: it’s always an unstable peace. It’s always a phoney unity because it is predicated on violence. What will inevitably happen is violence will reassert itself and then more victims have to be found. Less this sound purely abstract, I think we can find loads of examples of this Gerardian dynamic, from the simplest and most local to the most complex and global.
Consider for a second something as simple as a coffee klatch. Here is a group of people around a table engaged in what seems to be amiable conversation. But if we are perceptive and we are honest, we’ll see that more often than not this group has formed itself around the verbal violence of gossip: "Did you hear what she did?" "Yes, I did and I heard something else. Years ago she did this." Look, we all know this from our experience. This creates an enormous cohesiveness, an enormous sense of fellowship in the group. We love to join a gossiping society. But it’s predicated upon verbal violence. Someone has been chosen as a victim and the phoney community of the group is founded upon it. Don’t we know, too, even as we join in scapegoating conversations, that the minute we leave the table we might well become the next victim.***
(SCAPEGOAT to be continued)
* Ravenhill
** Wikipedia
*** Robert Barron
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