‘Renounce the sin of scapegoating’
During times of crisis, we can easily fall prey to the human compulsion to scapegoat and blame innocent victims. As an Episcopal priest, I am painfully aware of the wider Christian church’s failure to resist this temptation throughout history, especially when it comes to our Jewish siblings. As we move together through the COVID-19 crisis, I urge my fellow Christians to renounce the sin of scapegoating and to deepen our understanding of Christ’s mission and message. Tragically, Christians have misused the Gospel of Jesus Christ to justify violence and vitriol towards the Jewish people throughout history and even today.
The heartbreaking irony is that the Gospel is, in fact, the story of a Jewish prophet who worked to dismantle all systems of scapegoating and violence by revealing God as one who sympathizes with all victims. Thus, the Gospel message of Jesus is characterized as anti-scapegoating and therefore anti-anti-Jewish. Whenever we Christians use the Gospel as a weapon for scapegoating others (as we have tragically done and still do, whether intentionally or not), then we are, in fact, engaging in anti-Christian behavior. Indeed, we are engaging in the very behavior that Jesus Christ sought to dismantle.
Although the four Gospels, especially the Gospel of John, appear to vilify a group of characters known as “the Jews,” it is crucial to remember that Jesus and all of his initial followers were Jewish. Most reputable historians agree that Jesus was a Jewish mystic; and Christianity began as a form of Jewish mysticism called “the Way,” which evolved into something quite different over the centuries as non-Jews became the dominant adherents. Jesus did not attempt to launch a new religion, but rather a movement within the wide umbrella of Second Temple Judaism; a Jewish movement rooted in dismantling systems of political and religious violence.
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Most Rev. Michael Curry, refers to our church as “The Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement” and, although we often fall short in our fidelity to that movement, we recently passed a resolution that captures the essence of Jesus’s prophetic message. In the resolution titled “Deploring the Sin of Scapegoating,” we resolved that “group scapegoating is abhorrent to the heart of Christ” (General Convention 2018 – A230). By scapegoating the very people whom the Christian Scriptures describe as “chosen by God” (Romans 9:4; 11:1-2) and the people whom Jesus described as the source of salvation (John 4:22), we are not only breaking God’s heart, we are actively working against the One who died and rose again in order to liberate us from our bondage to sin, hatred, and blame.
To learn more about the Jewish origins of Christianity, see “When Christians Were Jews” by Paula Fredriksen and “The Misunderstood Jew” by Amy-Jill Levine. To learn more about the antianti-Jewish message of Jesus Christ, I recommend my own book: “Theodicy and Spirituality in the Fourth Gospel” by the Rev. Daniel DeForest London, Ph.D.