THE SCAPEGOAT
Question of the day: What does worshiping Jesus as the scapegoat teach us?

[Christianity] is the only religion in the world that worships the scapegoat as God.
In worshiping the scapegoat, we should gradually learn to stop scapegoating, because we also could be utterly wrong, just as “church” and state, high priest and king, Jerusalem and Rome, the highest levels of discernment were utterly wrong in the death of Jesus. He was the very one that many of us call the most perfect man who ever lived!

If power itself can be that wrong, then be careful whom you decide to hate, kill and execute. Power and authority are not good guides, if we are to judge by history. For many, if not most people, authority takes away all of their anxiety, and often their own responsibility to form a mature conscience.

from Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, p.194

My take on this:

The Devil Made Me Do It

If power itself can be that wrong, then be careful whom you decide to hate, to kill or to execute. Power and authority are not good guides, if we are to judge by history. For many, if not most people, authority takes away all of their anxiety, and often their own responsibility to form a mature conscience.

Judging by history power and authority have more often been the source of great mistakes in the best cases and tremendous evil in the worst. For most of us, authority is invested in others not because they are deserving of it but because it relieves us of the anxiety of having to make decisions for ourselves. And when things don’t go the way we want them to go in our lives, we can blame someone else and thus avoid having to take any personal responsibility.

In the end our ability to make moral judgments and to form a mature conscience suffers. In the end, in an attempt to subvert authority to ourselves without anyone noticing, we begin the game of blaming whoever makes a mistake, slips up in a speech, forgets to jot a tittle or cross a ‘t’, or fails at completing an impossible task; in the end our blind, log-filled-eyes do great harm and damage to our brother with a cinder in his and we destroy not only all of those authority figures out there, whose only power comes from that which we give them, but we destroy innocent ones who simply remind us of the best in ourselves that we have failed to achieve. And finally we destroy the best in ourselves, our true self, that is always standing in the shadow of the ego-self as a mute reminder of how far our petty, fearful, ego-self has lead us astray. In the end, by believing in the ultimate scapegoat; by believing in the Devil himself, we call upon him to save our lives, we give him all authority over them and we bow down and worship him.

Jesus never blamed the Devil for being the Devil. He simply reminded him, “You, sir, are not God. Therefore you cannot hurt me and more importantly: you cannot help me.” Why are we so insistent in believing, in being fearful over something, that is of absolutely no consequence to us? Do I believe in the Devil? No. I believe in God.

“The Devil made me do it,” (and all of its ancillaries) is perhaps possibly the most misused statement of all time. It ranks right up there with pop psychology’s advice to lay the blame for all our woes on mom and pop. Reminds me of that story about the old farmer who loses his crop to the drought and so he prays that God would help him out and bring some rain. Then a flood comes and washes away the barn and all his barnyard livestock. So he prays to God for fair weather. And then on a bright sunny day the County Mounty comes by with a Foreclosure sign to tack up on the farm house door. So the old farmer gets on his knees and beseeches God for an explanation. Whereupon he hears this rumbling, tumbling voice from heaven saying, “I don’t know Ralph. There’s just something about you that chaps my a&%.”

Ultimately in the end, try as hard as we might, we finally have to come back to the root of all our troubles – God. He made us. He plunked us down here. He threw all this manure at us – as well as, in all fairness, all the goodness that comes our way. No person, no government office, no institution, no devil, no one else can have parity with God. So it is all God’s fault! And until you come to that realization, you will never, ever come to understand the amazing potential that has been placed in your hands. Have this mind among yourselves, be like Jesus, who though he was God did not strive to usurp God’s authority but lived as an humble servant to all, giving up his divinity to sanctify all of humanity.

But we cannot get there through ignorance. The word ignorance is an interesting one.

ignorant
c.1374, from O.Fr. ignorant, from L. ignorantia, from ignorantem, prp. of ignorare from in- "not" + Old L. gnarus "aware, acquainted with," from Porot-L. suffixed form *gno-ro-, related to gnoscere "to know" (see know). Form influenced by ignotus "unknown." Cf. also see uncouth. Colloquial sense of "ill-mannered" first attested 1886. Ignorance is attested c.1225, from O.Fr. ignorance, from L. ignorantia.

To be ignorant then is to be “not acquainted with” or to be “unaware of” someone or something. Interestingly in the Greek language the word agnostic which is a direct transliteration of Greek to English, means “to not know.” The Latin equivalent is “ignorare” to be unaware. We generally think of Agnostics as being people who don’t know whether God exists of not. In Latin they would be thought of as being ignorare or ignorant. We are not really assigning blame. We are simply acknowledging a state of existence. In a very real sense, when it comes to God, we are all agnostic, ignorare, ignorant. True enough. But the New Testament says, but there is no need to make our ignorance a religion. God has made it possible for us to know what we need to know. But we so often defeat us ourselves on two points: forgetting what we already know; and believing that we know more than we really know.
That is why Intentional Discipleship is so necessary. Because apart from God and from each other, none of us can know anything.

tog (figue it out)