Monday, November 20, 2017

The Scapegoat [Trinity 26; St. Matthew 25:31-46]

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO HERE.

So, Jesus speaks to us today in His Gospel and says,

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who has blessed St. Luke in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will" (Eph. 1:3-5)

That purpose we hear of today in Jesus declaring the separation of the sheep from the goats. In our sin, we don’t really want to know who the sheep are, because we think we are they, but also because we are only truly interested in who the goats are. That way we can feel better that there are others worse off than ourselves.

Goat is usually the part of language no one wants to be a part of. When something gets your goat, it is bad. When someone is a scapegoat, same thing. It is a negative meaning. This is a fairly new phenomenon, I think, for we don’t even hear of the word “scapegoat” until a bible translator coins it in 1530.

Its important to notice that goats have gotten a bad rap. All your favorite Hollywood demons have goat features, but in the Bible it is only this one instance where goats appear to be the bad guys and the reason for our poor view of them as well.

However, for most of the Old Testament, goats are placed on the same level as sheep. They are a legal substitute for sacrifice. The Paschal lamb taken and eaten for the Passover may be from the sheep or the goats. And not just at Passover, either, but throughout the year. If a sacrifice is needed, a goat works just as well as a lamb.
It was also goat skin that covered Jacob in front of Isaac, his father, in order to trick him into giving Esau’s blessing to him. It was also the blood of a goat that covered Joseph’s coat in order to trick Jacob.

The only difference, of course, comes when Moses starts talking about a scapegoat. What that word really means is, the goat that leaves. You see, on the Day of Atonement, there were two sacrifices to be made, two goats. One was picked to offer to the Lord and the other was picked to be led into the wilderness, never to return. Both are equally doomed.

One was picked to die, that one was for the Lord, and the other for exile. At least it got to live, maybe.

The point is: the only way to tell whether the goat was for sacrifice or for sin was for someone to declare which was which, just as Jesus does today. Before Jesus speaks, there is no difference between the sheep and the goats. Before Jesus separates them, they are all growing up and working the same way, just like the wheat and the tares.

And lest you tear up the wheat or scandalize the sheep, the weeds and the goats must remain. In fact, in the Song of Solomon, one of the ways the Bride finds her Bridegroom is because she feeds her goats.

This means that you do not know who is a sheep and who is a goat until Jesus says so. And that’s ok, because what you do know is Who it is that is the sacrifice for sin, both the lamb and the scapegoat: Jesus Christ.

All sacrifices commanded by God in the Old Testament point to Jesus, no matter what they may be. Jesus is, of course, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world, but He is also the scapegoat, the goat that leaves with the sin of the world. He suffers and dies, leaving this plane of existence, descending into hell and resting in the earth for 3 days.

He is exiled, forsaken by the Father for your sake. This tale of the sheep and the goats is not about us, it is about the Christ Who is Himself the sacrifice and priest; both the blessed and the accursed; the One who leaves and the One Who stays.

Only in Jesus do we have any blessing from the Father. Only in Jesus are we chosen to be holy and blameless before the Father. Only in Jesus are we predestined to be the blessed inheritors of the eternal kingdom given by the King of kings, Himself.

Thus we seek the scapegoat covering that Jacob used. We search earnestly for the goat’s blood to cover our sinful ways, as Joseph’s brothers did. We endure both the good and the bad handed out by God, not because we are strong enough, but because Jesus endures both to the end for us. The end being His suffering and death on the cross.

So where is the distinction and what does this mean for us? There are those who say that you do not become a car just because you sit in a garage, making the negative comment that you are not a Christian just because you are in a church. What this kind of argument is called is a false dichotomy: making a comparison of two things that have nothing to do with each other, but sounds good to the ears.

The problem is that you don’t usually find people in a garage, or rather, you don’t usually store people in a garage. You store cars in a garage. You expect to find cars there, not people. You build garages for the express purpose of housing cars.

Likewise, you put sheep in a sheep-pen. If you want a place for goats, you put them in a goat-pen. What you do with Christians is you put them in a Christian-pen, otherwise known as a Church.

It is true that no matter how long a person stays in a garage, that will never make them a car, but the garage is not preaching the good news of cars or handing out the holy things of cars, either.

A person does, however, have a 100% chance of becoming a Christian in a Church. Why? Because God dwells there, He stores His holy things there, and His transformative word of the Cross is preached there. Garages don’t preach. God does.

So the sheep and the goats should go to Church, because it is only there that the goats have any chance of being made into sheep. Living as often as we can among the holy things of God, makes us holy. This is why Jesus calls them holy baptism, holy communion, and the holy Gospel.

We do not get to say who are the sheep and who are the goats. We do get to say, “I am a sheep” because of Who and what we commune with. We are covered with the blood of the Lamb and the skin of the Scapegoat in order that our sin and guilt be taken away.

Now to be sure, the goats do not get a happy ending in this parable told by Jesus, but we do not cling to the labels “sheep and goats” and we laugh at anyone who asks us whether we are one or the other, because we know, in our sin, we are the goat. In Christ we are the sheep.

The Lord reveals to us the true label where we are “blessed by the Father”, that is the cross and the title, “baptized”, and the occupation, “those who commune”.

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