Scapegoats No Longer
March 19, 2024 | By Stephen McNulty PM ‘25
image description: Hebrew writing from the Torah
Today’s lectionary reading is perhaps the most famous passage in the Holy Scriptures, and certainly one of the first lessons about Christianity taught to young Sunday School pupils. With this attention, however, comes risk—nowadays, my eyes tend to gloss over the words, trusting that I’ve already internalized their implications. Yeah, yeah. Don’t judge. Be forgiving. Don’t cast the first stone.
This is a grave mistake. There is a reason this passage comes first—if we have not really, truly taken the time to understand it, everything else falls apart. I’ve placed the Gospel passage, from John, here. Read it again—slowly, word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence. Refuse the easy habit of gliding over the words. Do not allow yourself the easy way out:
Early in the morning Jesus came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, sir.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.” [1]
The entirety of history, in some way or another, is the story of scapegoats. If we are to live together in peace, they need to be locked up. If we are to be the church, they must be outside of it. If we are to be a nation, they must be kept out. If you start looking for scapegoating, you will never stop noticing it. The act of line-drawing—of condemning adulterers, if you will—is not only a bad habit that some of us lapse into occasionally. It is the foundation of human society from time immemorial.
The real significance of the Christ event is that Jesus exposes this line drawing for what it is: a sham. The crowd accusing this “adulterer” is in truth not all that different from her, and is in no place to cast a stone itself. In some ways, the crowd draws its sense of identity from what it isn’t, rather than what it is. So often, we do this too. We cling so desperately to our scapegoats in part because, without them, we’re not sure who we are.
Jesus has an answer. We are children of God, part of a universal human community, with its arms stretched out towards everyone. Even our worst enemies. We are freed from the cycle of defining ourselves by our scapegoats—freed to begin forging a world beyond violent othering.
Now here, an obvious problem emerges. If the scapegoat mechanism is a scam, why is it seemingly commanded in the Mosaic Law? Here, I think, putting the Hebrew scriptures in their broader context is helpful. Anthropologist René Girard, a key scapegoat theorist, suggests that among ancient religious traditions, the Jewish faith was unique for its inversion of mythical power structures. Instead of valorizing the scapegoaters, the Hebrew scriptures frequently focused on the scapegoated—Exodus, after all, is the story of a people escaping slavery under an empire. The Outcasted Other is not peripheral; they are at the center.
The most striking example of this inversion in the Hebrew scriptures is the story of Cain and Abel. Ever the anthropologist, Girard reminds us that this archetype—a founding fratricide myth—is far from unique in the ancient world. For instance, it’s eerily similar to the tale of Romulus and Remus in the Roman myths. Unlike Romulus, however, Cain is not praised or valorized for his murder; he is cursed. Already, Girard argues, the trajectory of the Pentateuch is the collapse of ancient scapegoating myths and the slow unraveling of the violence that binds together human society. [2]
In this sense, Girard sees Jesus as the ultimate culmination of a radical tradition. He too is a scapegoated victim, left on the cross to preserve the social cohesion of an overextended empire. And just the tradition preceding him, he calls out our need to find someone lesser, someone at whom we can throw our stones. The very foundation of our human societies—this violent act of othering—is a lie, and Jesus will not let us live in lies any longer.
Once we see the scapegoating for what it is, we begin a new, and undoubtedly harder, project of envisioning a world without scapegoats, one we can only apprehend fully in Heaven. Even so, we can start now—and what better way to spend Lent? Pay attention to your scapegoats: who do you outcast in your daily life? Who do you find yourself judging? Slow down. Stop yourself.
There is another way.
That is the heart of the Christian story, and we can never afford to gloss over it. Allow yourself to be troubled, and begin the work of imagining what lies on the other side.
References:
[1] John 8: 1–11
[2] René Girard. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Published 1999.