It’s been said that we live in a time characterized by its therapeutic disposition. People tend to be most bothered and preoccupied by all manner of shame, stress, despair, anxiety, grief, and other maladies of the souls. Perhaps it bothers us as Christians wanting to give the Gospel to the lost souls of our culture that these lost souls don’t understand their own sinfulness nearly well enough. After all, if they knew, they’d surely know their sinfulness lay at the root of all these spiritual maladies. They would get right with God regarding the guilt of their sins, and these cares would pale in comparison.
There’s truth in that. There’s also a naivety about the weight of these spiritual sufferings that God is in the business of addressing in the Gospel of the risen and reigning Christ.
The True Scapegoat
Aaron [the high priest] shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, confess over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions, concerning all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and shall send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a suitable man.
Each year on the Day of Atonement in the Old Covenant, two goats were brought forward in the sight of the whole assembly of Israel, and lots were cast. One goat was for the Lord. It was slain, and its blood was sprinkled upon the Mercy Seat resting atop the Ark of the Covenant in the Most Holy Place deep within the heart of the Tabernacle. This sprinkling was out of the sight of the congregation. The other goat was for Azazel or utter removal. It was expelled alive in full view of the assembly, never to return.
All year, every year, the follies and weaknesses of the people flowed up the ceremonial system as a great accumulator of sin and unrest, gathering ultimately upon the high priest as the ceremonial head and representative of the people in the eyes of the Lord. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest pressed his hands on the goat for Azazel and confessed over it all the failings of the people, ritually heaping the holy community’s guilt upon the scapegoat. All the community’s attendant anxieties psychologically flowed with the high priest’s impartation of their guilt onto that scapegoat. The goat was then led out into the wilderness. The people were assured as they gazed upon this ritual that all their sins and fears were carried away from them into the wilderness.
Christ in himself is the fulfillment of the entirety of the Old Covenant’s ceremonial system. We see this in a number of ways. For instance, he is both the Lamb of God who is slain and the Great High Priest who offers his own blood up to God to purge our sins. Likewise, he’s the Great High Priest gathering up our sins and anxieties, and he’s the True Scapegoat, heaping frailties, failures, and attendant anguish upon himself and bearing it away from us. It’s important to understand the Good Scapegoat’s service as being more than the bearing away of judicial guilt. It’s also the expulsion of psychological anxieties.
To tweak a familiar phrase, “Behold the Scapegoat of God who takes away the anxieties of the world!”
We see this scapegoating played out unwittingly in the Gospel account. In the eyes of the religious elite, Christ was the scapegoat. He was the man clearly to be blamed for everything and who needed to die so the nation would survive as Caiaphas the high priest prophesied. He was the one on who the hardened religious rulers and the riotous mob heaped their collective anxieties, paranoia, suspicions, prejudices, projected guilt, and systemic shame. They scapegoated him. He was the problem, and he needed to die. He deserved it, so they thought. But we know better. And we know how great the ironic truth is.
The truth of this has particular and profound application for us. It matters on a daily basis throughout our lifetimes. We’re called to cast all of our cares upon him because he cares for us (1 Peter 5:7). All our anxieties, worries, distractions, despair, and much more. This is our Great High Priest’s compassionate ministry to us and his pastoral care. He is the Great Physician, the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And surely he has carried our sorrows and borne our griefs (Isaiah 53:3-4).
Victims and Perpetrators
The casting of our cares upon Christ has deeper implications than what may be just our comparatively petty concerns. Many are the victims of grievous, heinous, injurious sins committed by others. There’s a genuine traumatic burden in the soul that comes from being victimized in such a way. The ministry of Christ as the Good Scapegoat is necessary even for this in the lives of Christians. The needed justice may be served to the perpetrator, but the wounds remain in the victim. More than justice is needed.
And if it’s not the most extreme and tragic of sinful victimizations, then there is a whole spectrum of ugly and unresolvable wrongs that many endure. Less than the catastrophic but more than the petty. There is much that we can’t easily expel from our troubled minds. Much that haunts us through life. Much that we fixate upon and become withdrawn, embittered, or otherwise controlled by a sense of our own victimhood. The ministry of Christ as the Good Scapegoat exists for this as well.
None of us should dare to regard the place of Christ as our Scapegoat as optional. There’s grave danger in not bringing all our cares to Christ. Owning and embracing victimhood like an identity is much like practicing sin. It’s the poor soil from which a new perpetrator springs. Consider the forms we see this take in our present cultural climate.
Think of the individual who wears particular forms of victimhood on his or her sleeve—who owns and advertises experienced grievances (however real or imagined) and uses them as grounds for special rights and privileges. And worse a social support structure that enforces these special rights and privileges.
Or contemplate the folly of platforming the victim of a traumatic crime, establishing this individual publicly as an unimpeachable figurehead of his or her own cause. Doing such a thing with a genuine victim is a dangerous gamble. The folly is one side of a two-sided coin. The victim of a heinous crime has higher than average possibilities for two things: 1.) being an ardent effective advocate for the cause of defending and preventing future victims of the same injustice, and 2.) being the next generation of victimizers in a vicious cycle of perpetuating further injustices. And alas those aren’t mutually exclusive possibilities. An individual can enact both of them simultaneously. It’s the temptation to a life lived as a professional victim and a professional advocate for other victims. A lifetime of always finding in the circumstances of others a reenactment of one’s own remembered victimhood.
Victimizers are not bizarre monstrous aberrations of mankind, as if mankind were an otherwise benign and good-natured species. Victimizers come from somewhere. They’re the product of something. The general willful ignorance of the relationship between being victims and becoming perpetrators in our culture is an exercise in insanity.
One Way to Break the Cycle
And how dare I say “they” as if “they” isn’t all of us in the final analysis? We Christians can let no one off the hook. We very well know every last one of us is both a victim and a perpetrator of our own sin upon ourselves and others. Again, to tweak a familiar phrase, each of us is simul victima et commissor —at the same time, a victim and a perpetrator. And there’s only one way to break that cycle. As one friend put it, if you do not take your victimhood to the Cross, you will victimize someone else in your bitterness and contempt for your oppressor.
Christ is the Great and True Victim sent from on High. And he is the ultimate Scapegoat for a whole world’s worth of misdirected anxieties, shame, blame, bitterness, resentment, and so forth. All of that victimization pours out from the mass of victimized perpetrators called the offspring of Adam. So we must bring our victimhood to Christ, where it’s nailed to the cross and buried in the tomb with our Lord. And we must daily reckon ourselves to be vindicated conquerors in the one who sits enthroned at the right hand of God and is conquering all his enemies. We must seek God’s grace to find renewal and resilience. This starts with ourselves. We must submit to God and embrace the call to end the cycle in our own lives. And we must be about the business of ministering resilience in the lives of others. We call and encourage our brothers and sisters in Christ to seek renewal and resilience. And we carry this message into the world as a part of the Gospel of our Lord who calls to all men everywhere to submit their lives and find forgiveness to relinquish their grievances, finding healing.
In this, we’re called to imitate and participate with our Lord Jesus. The Church, the Body of Christ, are those who by God’s grace bear the anxieties of others. We do this in our service as we are given for the life of the world. We must come to Christ, the Head of the Body, with all our gathered anxieties. The Good Scapegoat will bear them all away into utter expulsion, and he’ll give us blessed assurance that we have peace with God and with one another.
