Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord
Scriptures: Isaiah 50:4-9a; Luke 19:28-40
Key Verse: "The Lord God helps me; therefore, I have not been disgraced." (Isaiah 50:7a)
“You! It’s you. You are bad! How could you make Sofia cry?” I said this while hitting the dining table corner and making sure my daughter saw that the table was being punished. Since she was very little, that was one of the methods that could stop her crying when she bumped her head on any furniture. As she got older, I had to teach her how to watch out and be careful of her surroundings if she didn’t want to get hurt. It was easy to scapegoat an inanimate object, but how about scapegoating someone who has feelings and deserves justice?
When did humans start scapegoating others to redeem their own feelings, dignity, life, or anything such as power and status to avoid responsibilities? And where did the concept of scapegoating come from? You may have guessed correctly that it came from the Bible. It’s first found in the books of Genesis 2-3 and Leviticus 16, and reference can be found until God decided to put it to an end through the life of Jesus Christ.
It all began with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that God planted. God warned Man about the death penalty if he violated the rule that prohibited him from eating fruit from the tree. Then Woman came into the scene and ate the fruit from the tree and shared it with Man. God noticed it and asked, “Did you eat it?” Man scapegoated God and Woman and said, “It is She whom you made gave it to me!” God said to Woman, “What have you done?” Then Woman scapegoated the Serpent. The result of not having anyone accept responsibility is everyone being punished. No one is free of charge. Later, God granted a temporary scapegoat ritual by having Hebrews confess their sins to a goat once a year and set that goat free into the wilderness.
We might naively believe that people can get away by not admitting responsibility and scapegoating others (or a goat, literally!). Scapegoating never truly solves any problems—it only diverts attention away from people who might have done wrong to people who deserve justice. In the past two years, we have seen scapegoating used by a dominant group to feel united in blaming someone else for a problem. For instance, blaming China for COVID, blaming the police for racially motivated violence, blaming the government for the endless pandemic, blaming homelessness on the housing market or vice versa.
I wonder if there are any tactics that we can apply in our daily life so that less scapegoating occurs at home, at work, in our society, or even among countries. Something I find helpful is what Luke Burgis, an author and educator, said in one of his YouTube videos: “Each of us thinks of ourselves as kind of a little god. It’s uncomfortable for us to think that our desires might not be entirely our own. There is a certain humility needed to understand that I’m the product of other people’s desires, starting with my parents. Humans tend to group people on the inside and on the outside. In order to maintain group identity and social cohesion, it is an unending process. And that can bring us into a dangerous vicious cycle. Because as humans, we have a natural tendency to transfer blame, which means scapegoats are all around us. All it takes is somebody to stand out a little bit and that starts this process of scapegoating. Once one person has identified a person or a group as problematic, it makes it a lot easier for the second and third and fourth person to believe in the guilt of the scapegoat.”
Burgis articulates more on how desire works in our life and our culture in his book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. He mentioned that as humans have evolved, people have spent less time concerning needs and more time striving for wants. He explains that after meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire which leads us to wanting more. By admitting mimetic desire is part of the human condition, he lists ways for his readers to recognize their own desire, confront it, and make more intentional choices that lead to a more satisfying life.
So, how have God’s gifts of love and forgiveness helped us deal with scapegoating? God’s love and forgiveness set us free not to enter the wilderness like a lonely goat without protection and care, but free to enter God’s kingdom where our basic needs are never lacking just as our Lord’s Prayer has been answered. The more Jesus’ disciples respond yes to God and to be the answer of that sacred prayer, the hope of having less scapegoating may become a reality, which is the foretaste of God’s kingdom for the needs of each family, any community, society, and nation in the world. Amen.
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