Stories have a deep power. They inspire, connect, and expand our imaginations, help us understand who we are, and carry our history. Our stories are sacred parts of our lives and our communities.
Stories, however, can be weaponized as well. They can be used to divide us and harm one another. Our world is filled with narratives that diminish humans and incite anger. These narratives can grab hold of us and become a prison for our minds, keeping us from seeing the dignity and worth in one another.
When this happens, how do we escape?
What good news is there for us once a story has grabbed hold of us?
Can we exchange an old story for a new one?
The Narrative About Paul
Let’s step into the Biblical story for a minute….
The Apostle Paul has been traveling for years, back and forth across the Mediterranean, planting churches, training leaders, and encouraging Christians who find themselves living on the margins of the Roman Empire. He has a distinctive strategy for this work. He enters a town, seeks out the Jewish community, worships with them in the synagogue, and teaches the community that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s covenant with Israel. The responses to this testimony are mixed. In some communities, there is interest, dialogue, and welcome. In others, violent repulsion.
Paul also explores the communities in which he finds himself, builds relationships with Gentiles, and invites them to discover the God who created them. Sometimes, the response to Paul’s testimony is so extreme that he stays for only a short period of time. He is attacked multiple times, he is hauled outside the city and stoned, and sometimes he escapes in the dark of night. Thankfully, in some cities, he finds an unexpected and joyous welcome, and a new community, a mixture of Jew and Gentile, slave and free, from an array of religious backgrounds, is formed. In the best circumstances, he can stay for years, training leaders and cultivating a new community where unlikely neighbors find themselves in deep relationships.
Paul’s presence is disruptive. He starts as many riots as he does churches. The story he shares about Jesus is often met with deep anger. Paul’s calling to include the Gentiles as a branch grafted onto the family tree of God’s people is offensive to many. This inclusion and the ways in which it changes the community are scary for the people of God.
Terrified, angry, and determined, evangelists begin to go out from these threatened communities to warn others about the virus being spread. They seek to protect others from this dangerous work and tell a story of a false prophet and a blasphemer who threatens everything that these religious communities hold dear. Paul is everything they fear, despise, and hate. His very presence defiles them, making their worship and communities unclean.
This story about Paul, the defiler, is a powerful and compelling narrative.
By the time Paul returns to Jerusalem, in Acts 21-22, all his friends are telling him to turn around. They know what awaits him in Jerusalem, the city where prophets go to die. Here in the center of their religious world, where power structures dominate and protecting the purity of the people is a mandate, those who offer critique and ask the wrong questions all meet similar fates. The narrative of Paul as a troublemaker, rebel, and religious radical has made its way to Jerusalem. There are deep assumptions about him before he returns.
Those Christians living in Jerusalem have worked to build peace with religious and political authorities, and they are careful to keep up all appearances of purity and holiness. They live in tension with the religious authorities, a fragile peace at best. Paul’s arrival threatens that peace. So, they advise Paul to enter Jerusalem with humility. They have him undergo a series of purity rituals that other converts to Judaism are undergoing. Paul shows great humility in doing this; after all, he is renowned for having lived as a faithful and fervent adherent to Judaism. But, he takes these actions, hoping that this will legitimize him and give him a chance to offer a testimony of God at work to the crowds at the temple.
The narrative, however, is too strong. Rumors swirl that Paul, the lover of Gentiles, has brought them into the temple and defiled the space. No one is quite sure what Paul has done, but the gossipers are grumbling, the mob is gathering, and there is no way for Paul to overcome the narrative around him.
Once the story takes hold, no amount of work to conform to the expectations of those in power will be enough. He is a threat, and he must be dealt with.
The scene plays out with violence, the intervention of the Roman military, and Paul being arrested. With the crowd's reaction, the Roman authority asks if Paul is the violent insurrectionist from Egypt. What other explanation could there be for such a reaction? This is the power of narrative and how it can be weaponized to grab hold of our empathy.
Once narrative has taken hold of our empathy, can we escape it?
Scapegoats and the Mob Narrative
In Leviticus 16, we find the Biblical origin of the scapegoat. The term scapegoat is based on the practice where Aaron, the high priest, is ordered to bring two goats as an offering. One is offered to the Lord, and the other is sent into the wilderness as a sin offering. It carries the people's guilt, cleansing the community. There is evidence that this practice also occurred in other communities within the Ancient Near East. The scapegoat came to symbolize a sacrifice offered for the cleansing of the sins of the people.
René Girard, a remarkable French philosopher, historian, and literary critic, offered a theory for human society focused on the role of the scapegoat. In his classic examination of mythology and literature, Oedipus Unbound, he expounds on the role of the scapegoat as a foundation for societies.1 The scapegoat, an innocent victim, becomes the object of the collective fear, anxiety, anger, violence, and rivalry of the community.2 This person or group that is singled out for being different, for being a rival for a desired object or status, becomes the locus of the group’s sin and anger. They unite against this scapegoat, heaping their sin and anger on them in mimetic desire, which becomes the basis of belonging to the group.
When this group tension gets high enough, the scapegoat becomes the focus of violence and rejection. Even those who would normally defend or speak up on behalf of this person or people are trapped in silence, not wanting to draw the attention or ire of the group. They do nothing to protect the rejected, letting the mob have its way, for fear that they will receive the same treatment. This system of identifying, isolating, exiling, and sacrificing the scapegoat is powerfully effective for unifying the group and throwing off their collective sin onto the sacrifice before them.3
The irony, or one of the ironies, of this scapegoating is that the group making the accusation is often guilty of the taboo crime they accuse the scapegoat of committing. This is what we see in the scene in Acts 21-22. Paul is clearly the scapegoat, but the accusations against him are neither accurate nor clear. Did he bring Gentiles into the temple? No. Was he ritually unclean when he entered? No. Was he there to destroy the temple? No.
But none of that mattered, and his efforts to appease his haters never mattered because the narrative had already taken hold. He was the enemy, the threat to their lives, their faith, their power, and their community. The mob that day united in the story being told to them by these evangelists of Paul’s evil, had no capacity to learn or to make room for the truth of what was happening. Their only capacity was for anger and violence. In committing this act of violence and hatred, however, they were desecrating their sacred space. They were bearing false witness, failing to show compassion, and violating the sanctity they claimed to be upholding.
This is part of what Jonathan Haidt is discussing in The Righteous Mind as he writes, “Once people join a political team, they get ensnared in a moral matrix. They see confirmation of their grand narrative everywhere, and it's difficult - perhaps impossible- to convince them they are wrong if you argue with them from outside the matrix.”4
That is the power of narrative. It can grab hold of our empathy and shut off our ability to learn, discern, and grow. Empathy can make us hypocrites. It can be weaponized to unite us against a common enemy, justifying the scapegoating of the other. We feel what the crowd feels, putting ourselves in the shoes of the mob and embody the disgust and anger at the taboo violation of the scapegoat. For Christians, called to love our enemy, to pray for our enemy, and to love our neighbor as ourselves, our empathy can become a barrier to faithfulness rather than a tool to help us live faithfully.
How do we escape this trap?
What is the good news for a world filled with mobs and scapegoats?
Making Room For Scapegoat Stories
Girard points out a remarkable characteristic of the Bible: it captures and shares the stories of scapegoats.5 God’s people have often found themselves as the outsiders and the villains in the narrative of the crowd. We have the story of Joseph, scapegoated by his brothers and sacrificed for their sin of pride and envy. We have the Israelites enslaved in Egypt out of fear and jealousy. We have the faithfully captured stories of God’s people scapegoating others, such as Abram and Sarai’s treatment of Hagar, and King Saul with David. We see the unjust suffering of those in exile such as Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Over and over again the Bible tells the stories of those who are the objects of scorn and violence. And remarkably, beautifully, God arrives in their stories to offer deliverance and healing. As Hagar says, God is El Roi- the God who sees me. God sees those who are the object of the mob’s violence, those betrayed by inescapable narratives of their uncleanliness. Scripture invites us into those stories so that we might escape the narratives that hold our imaginations captive and put us on the side of the mob rather than the victim. The honesty and faithfulness of these stories call us to humility, repentance, and a life of communal reflection so that we might free ourselves from the shackles of living with enemies rather than neighbors.
Ultimately, the good news is that God came and lived among us, and was made the scapegoat. Jesus lived among and built community with the exiles, the unclean, and the hated. Ultimately, it was his inclusion of these people into the community of God that threatened those in power and led to his unjust trial and murder. As many prophets before him and as Paul would experience, he went to Jerusalem knowing that he would absorb the hatred and violence that that narrative around him demanded. God brought salvation and healing by ending this cycle of violence and through the grace and compassion of God, ending the need to have scapegoats.
In scripture, we find a path forward in a world of mob narratives. By hearing and valuing the stories of scapegoats, of the marginalized and suffering, and by making space for them in our communities, we engage with the healing work of Christ. We take on the humility of Christ, searching for our own participation in this cycle of rejection and violence, and open space for God to liberate us from the shackles of manipulation. When our empathy is rooted in Christ, and communities of mutuality, we are able to discern more easily how others are trying to manipulate us and unites us against a perceived enemy.
It is this life established in the love of God that gives us the wisdom to learn how to love those who would treat us as an enemy and to pray for their blessing, opting out of the cycle of violence and hatred that continues to create enemies.
Rene Girard, Oedipus Unbound, p.110
Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, p. 100-102
Burgis, Wanting, p.109
Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, p.367
Emily Swan, Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance, Kindle Loc. 2641