Have you ever been scapegoated?
I remember a story about a man who lost his job with a company after the executives made some bad financial decisions, then blamed the man for the company's struggles. He eventually took the fall for their mistakes and got fired. He was scapegoated... "thrown under the bus," as the saying goes.
Maybe you can identify
with the picture below... are you the goat or one of the finger pointers?
Likely you have experienced both positions at different times in your
life. No one likes to be scapegoated, but we have all participated in pointing the finger at an easy target. It happens all the time on the playground with young kids. Some poor kid who doesn't fit in, doesn't look right, doesn't smell right, doesn't act right, or something like that, becomes an easy target for everyone else to gang up on. But adults do it, too, unfortunately. Sometimes it is simply the guy or gal at work that doesn't fit in, or a neighbor that everyone views with disdain.
Sometimes, however, it is much more serious.
Probably the most obvious example of scapegoating is what Jews refer to as HaShoa
—“the catastrophe,” or the Holocaust. This is such a horrific era of
history. Jews, along with several other specific people groups, were
singled out, identified as subhuman, blamed for societal problems, and
systematically rounded up and murdered. This remains as one of the most chilling
examples of evil scapegoating in our world. But it is not an uncommon thing, unfortunately. Every people group has their scapegoats.
What is a
scapegoat?
One dictionary definition says, “a person or group made to
bear the blame for others or to suffer in their place.”
And where did we get the term scapegoat? It comes from Leviticus 16:7-10, which says:
“Then
he is to take the two goats and present them before the Lord at the
entrance to the tent of meeting. He is to cast lots for the two
goats—one lot for the Lord and the other for the scapegoat. Aaron shall
bring the goat whose lot falls to the Lord and sacrifice it for a sin
offering. But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented
alive before the Lord to be used for making atonement by sending it
into the wilderness as a scapegoat.”
Once a year on the
Day of Atonement, the Israelite priests (Levites) would perform this
ritual to make atonement for the sins of Israel. There is some debate about whether "scapegoat" is the best translation for the Hebrew word Azazel,
which some scholars think is actually the name of a demon that was
believed to live in the wilderness, or the place where the scapegoat was sent. But the point is the role of the scapegoat.
The scapegoat symbolically took the
blame of the people and the consequences of that blame, as the priest
confessed the sins of the community over the scapegoat. The sins of the
people were then symbolically placed or transferred onto the scapegoat,
which was then “cast out” of the community and into the wilderness.
This
removing of the community's sins has a cleansing, “peacemaking” effect on the community for a while. It
removes their conscious guilt and anxiety, and provides "peace with
God," since the goat becomes the one who bears the burden of Israel's sins. Or as the text says, it "makes atonement" (vs. 10). The word "atonement," as many theologians have pointed out, basically means "at-one-ment," or the reconciliation of what was once separated/fractured.
But in Israel's case, it must be repeated over and over as the anxiety and guilt
keep building up because of their ongoing sin problem. Or as the author of Hebrews puts it, "It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins" (Hebrews 10:4). This all points to when Jesus is
eventually crucified and he becomes the last scapegoat, so to speak, as he bears the
blame for all of humanity's sin, and is cast outside of the city to die on a
cross.
Human cultures have always operated with a scapegoating mechanism as a way to restore peace. Variations of the ritual are widely attested to
in Ancient Near East culture. Traditionally, in cultures that practiced animal sacrifice, the scapegoat was an animal such as a goat. But some cultures also practiced human sacrifice for the same reason, to appease the gods and purify the community. Even Israel fell into this practice when they worshiped false gods, such as Molech (Leviticus 18:21, 20:1-5, 1 Kings 11:7, Jeremiah 32:35), and ended up sacrificing their own children. Scapegoating, blaming, and sacrificing a human victim seems so barbaric and primitive. We think we could never do such a thing.
But the practice is still with us, at least in principle. Strangely, however, this phenomenon of scapegoating has not always been something people are consciously aware of. It is a truth about humanity that has been just under the surface, something hidden since the foundation of the world (Matthew 13:35). Perhaps it is because we are so used to it and it is so natural to do it, that it takes the special revelation of scripture for us to see it for what it actually is.
So we can see the early scapegoat images and ritual in
Leviticus 16, but the human act of scapegoating and blaming others is revealed
from the very beginning of the scriptures as a foundational human sin pattern. And so to the beginning, we must go...
...which I will continue to discuss in the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment