Good Friday, 2022
There is nothing new here. Not in its happening, not as we hear the sacred storytellers’ words nearly 2000 years later. A truth becomes clear, this is evil’s slyest face. So everpresent and every day that we cease to fight it. The slyest face, the nothing new here, is called mimetic theory. To incredibly oversimplify, it is a theory with two parts. First, is the part about the mob mentality. our hardwired tendency to copy, to mimic, the actions of those around us. The second part of the theory is about how we respond to the chaos caused by this lemming-ness. The way in which we try to restore a sense of order through the elimination of a scapegoat. Not just anything will do. Only something or someone we have some care for, the scapegoat must be both insider and outsider. Us, yet just different enough, despised, rejected, sacrificed. And we feel better, but nothing is actually better. It is a process that wears a dozen costumes, but there is nothing new here. The haircut after a breakup the friend who ghosted you..same instinct on a smaller scale.
Scapegoating is a thing we do because it does offer momentary calm. We may be a focal point of the wonders of God’s created universe, but it can be such a consistently tragic focal point. Humanity at large cannot hide its face from the reality that it is not as smart or dutiful as I might hope. Nearly every person in this story, named and unnamed, was Jewish. And ink meeting parchment at least 60 years later – the text is laced with decades of inter-family anger that was accelerating in the sacred storyteller’s era. Scripture is scripture because we continue to find ourselves in it, and we do find ourselves here. Yet, I wonder if he would have shared things differently if he had foreseen the massacres it would inspire. Century after century following the merger of church and empire, Holy Week in particular, has led to violent mob acts of antisemitism. Contrary to the mercy, steadfast love, and compassion of God known in the texts we share; contrary to anything Jesus said or did. Again and again, we don’t see that we are the Judeans, the Pharisees, the crowd of people who love or fangirl and then slay. We who are caught in chaos under the vile thumb of the powerful we are the Judeans, we scapegoat that nice and generous, if a bit unusual, neighbor.
No complication I have had to make my way through as a Christian pastor even comes close to what synagogues deal with every week. Not just in other places, but in this nation, this beacon of pluralism. Jewish congregations have to pay for armed guards and steel window shades, Rabbi’s go through hostage and mass shooter training regularly. I have thought about the latter but never followed as if our lives depend on it. The official position of the Episcopal church has been and is that our Jewish neighbors are our siblings and they must be loved as we are loved. We, Christians, must do all that we can to interrupt the lies and the stupid and the mob mind and violence that continues to threaten Jesus’ own.
In a world of passionate transgression and viral cruelty, the love of God living, teaching, and serving, will not blend in with the crowd. For the nauseating chaos to be interrupted, Jesus’ life is given up, struck down, snuffed out. The explanation of why Jesus died for our salvation, it isn’t something that I necessarily comprehend in an articulate way. Yet it is also something I trust, wholeheartedly. The passion, it is a mystery, and it has been done for our sake and for our salvation. Jesus endured the worst of the world we have made and became a revolution against what we have made of ourselves. He is the way and truth and life. He is Chaos interrupting, scapegoat mechanism collapsing, death defeating Love.