The Cliff

February 2, 2025

Rev. Stephen Milton

Lawrence Park Community Church

Today’s scripture picks up where last week’s left off. Jesus is in Nazareth, his hometown. His ministry is new, just a few months old. He has been working miracles and attracting disciples. Now he is back in Nazareth, where he is attending synagogue on a Saturday. He has just revealed to the hometown neighbours that he is the Messiah they have been waiting for. Then, he does something none of them expect. He tells them that there’s no way he’s going to do any miracles for them. He reminds them of a few stories of prophets who healed strangers from other religions rather than help Israelites. His neighbours are shocked, and angry. Why wouldn’t he heal some of his own people with these new powers he possesses? 

Perhaps Jesus feels a need to break free from their expectations. He’s no longer Mary and Joseph’s boy, or the local carpenter. He wants to be a spiritual leader. So, maybe like a rebellious teenager he needs to break from by spitting in their eye. It’s unclear. 

But what is very clear is what happens next. The crowd rises up, like a mob, and tries to kill him by throwing him over a cliff. They are enraged by his refusal to help them. But this reaction seems way over the top. So, what is going on?

The key here is the kind of death they want to give Jesus. They want to throw him off a cliff. To us, that just sounds cruel and excessive. But to any Jews who heard this story, it would ring alarm bells. For many centuries, once a year, the Temple officials in Jerusalem had been throwing a goat off a cliff.[1] They did this on the holy day of  Yom Kippur, the day of Atonement. Two goats would be presented to the temple priests. Both would symbolize all the sins of the Jewish people that year. One goat would be sacrificed at the temple, and its blood sprinkled on the altar inside the Holy of Holies, where God’s spirit resided. The other goat, also soaked in the sins of the people, would be taken to a cliff in the wilderness, and thrown over. This was the goat who “escaped”, or the “scapegoat” for short. This is where we get the term “scapegoat.”[2]

So, when the crowd from Nazareth tries to throw Jesus off the cliff, they are trying to scapegoat him. They have taken all their anger, all their guilt, and projected it onto Jesus. We’re not the problem, He’s the problem. Now, Jesus doesn’t say what the people of Nazareth have done to deserve any blame. But what we do know is that as soon as they hear that Jesus can heal people and that he thinks he is the Messiah, they don’t ask, “what can we do to help?” Instead, they expect him to help them. They are selfish. And their sudden rage suggests that Jesus is right to suspect that they have some major issues. 

This scapegoating strategy has been found in cultures all over the world[3]. It is always easier for a group to blame their troubles on someone else than it is to blame themselves. The people in Nazareth don’t ask what have we done, is there something we can do to fix this? Instead, they jump straight to attacking Jesus, this boy they liked five minutes ago.

Scholars who have studied scapegoating find that it usually involves a few steps. 

Show Scapegoating slides x5

First: the group refuses to see its own faults. 

Second, they choose to blame someone who is an outsider. 

Third, the outsider is innocent. 

Last step: the group gets together to kill or harm the scapegoat. 

The shared blame for the death brings them together as a group, which eases any internal tensions they may have. They unite against a common enemy.

This is easier to see with concrete examples. One really obvious example of this was the lynching of  Black people in the American South after the end of the Civil Ear.[4] After slavery ended, white Southern society was in disarray. They were upset over losing the war, and the humiliation that came with it. They had no one but themselves to blame for losing the war, but they didn’t want to admit that they had done anything wrong. So they chose to take out their rage and guilt on Black people, who were considered outsiders in their midst. The smallest infraction, or imagined infraction, could be used to justify the lynching of a Black person. If a Black man was believed to have looked at a white woman on the street in a lustful way, that was enough.[5] The whites wanted to keep themselves pure of any racial mixing, but of course to kill someone for a look or a thought is absurd. The Blacks who were accused were innocent of any crime, but were seen as guilty. By the logic of scapegoating, the group can only project its rage onto an innocent victim. 

Lynching

So, for decades, Black men and Black women were lynched, by mobs. People took pictures of lynchings, and wrote about them. People took the day off work, kids were let out of school so they could witness these lynchings.[6] They jeered and yelled at the poor victim hanging on the tree. White rage was focused on the innocent Black victim, and law enforcement stood by, letting it happen. Black people were treated as scapegoats by Southern white society. 

There have been many scapegoating crusades. The Nazis treated Jews as scapegoats, blaming them for all their troubles[7]. In 1994 in Rwanda, the Tutsis ethnic group were blamed by the dominant Hutus for society’s troubles.[8] That led to the massacre of 800,000 people, mostly Tutsis, Black on Black, neighbour on neighbour. Scapegoating can be found among people of all races. 

The new American government is engaged in a massive program of scapegoating. This weekend, the US imposed 25% tariffs on most Canadian goods exported to America. President Trump declared this to encourage Canada to stop the flow of migrants and fentanyl into America. 

Fentanyl 1
Yet, last year, according to US customs, Canada was a negligible source of fentanyl imports to the US.

Fentanyl 2

They seized all of 19 kilograms in 2024, 

Fentanyl 3

while they seized 500 times as much from Mexico.[9]

Immigration 1
In terms of illegal immigrants coming into the US, 

Immigration 2
last year 19,000 people were caught illegally entering the US from Canada. 

Immigration 3
That may sound like a lot, but last year, 1.4 million people were caught crossing into the US from Mexico, 73 times as many.[10] 

The flow of migrants and fentanyl into the United States from Canada is minimal, yet our entire economy is under threat with 25% tariffs. Our country is being treated like a scapegoat so Trump can make his voters feel more unified. 

Trump is treating illegal migrants in the United States as scapegoats. Undocumented migrants are blamed for destroying America’s economy and endangering the country. Trump describes undocumented migrants as criminals, and has said that Latin American countries have been emptying their jails to send rapists and murders to invade America as migrants. Like lynchings, the charges are absurd.  Crime rates among undocumented migrants are lower than among American citizens.[11] No country has emptied its jail to send criminals to the US. [12] But, scapegoating works best if the attackers know they are lying, and are persecuting the innocent. This is not a bug, but a feature of scapegoating. It starts with a lie about innocent people. The shared lie is what brings the group together as it scapegoats the weak and powerless. 

In today’s scripture story, the crowd seizes Jesus, who is innocent, and decides to throw him off a cliff. But when they reach the cliff, he escapes. His hour has not yet come. Because, as we know, Jesus will become a scapegoat. He will be innocent, but will be accused of false crimes, like being the king of the Jews. He will be crucified – lynched – by an angry mob of Roman soldiers and bystanders who will make fun of him as he dies on the cross. 

But the difference between Jesus and all other scapegoats is that Jesus accepts this fate willingly. He knows from the beginning that he will be scapegoated. He accepts this, he does not try to escape being arrested, nor does he fight the charges against him. He knows that his death is part of God’s plan to save the world. Jesus takes on the sins of the entire world so that we can be free of them. His crucifixion, his scapegoating, becomes so famous that ever after, people will need to think twice about scapegoating people.[13] We say that a crowd is out to “crucify” someone. We know that crucifixion is wrong. This doesn’t mean people won’t do it – scapegoating continues. But after Christ’s death on the cross, we always know better.[14] We know that blaming the innocent for our problems is wrong. Christ makes scapegoating harder, always questionable. His willing death breaks the legitimacy of scapegoating. He provides a way for us to call out this terrible practice for what it is, to break its spell. 

Christ calls for us to see scapegoats as real people. Is that person really to blame as their enemies claim? Or is he a regular person caught up in someone else’s rage? Last week, Donald Trump called for Bishop Budde to apologize for reminding him of the humanity of the queer and the migrants he will persecute as scapegoats[15]. That’s what we do. Christ gives us the power to see through the madness of those who are seeking to blame others for all their troubles. We are called to see the victims as real people, innocent of the crime for which they are accused. Christ’s death breaks the logic of scapegoating. But often, the people who are doing the scapegoating are lost in its spell, unable to see what they are doing. We remember the words of Jesus on the cross, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” As Christians, we are called to prevent scapegoating, and help those who are lost in its mad rage to come to their senses. By talking truth to power. By objecting to false charges. By defending the innocent by challenging unjust laws in court. By reminding each other of the humanity of those who are in danger from false blame. Christ should be the world’s last scapegoat. May it be so. 

Amen. 

[1] S Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross,(Eerdmans, 2006),76-7.

[2] https://study.com/academy/lesson/scapegoat-overview-theory-bible.html#:~:text=In%20the%20Bible%2C%20the%20scapegoat,which%20became%20shortened%20to%20scapegoat.

[3] S Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross,  (Eerdmans, 2006), 15.

[4] S Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross,(Eerdmans, 2006),60.

[5] James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree,p8.

[6] James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree,p 9.

[7] S Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross,(Eerdmans, 2006),60.

[8] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13431486

[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/world/canada/canada-fentanyl-trump.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[10] https://usafacts.org/articles/what-can-the-data-tell-us-about-unauthorized-immigration/

[11] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/debunking-myth-migrant-crime-wave

[12] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/americas/trump-crime-venezuela-us.html

[13] S Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross,  (Eerdmans, 2006), xii.

[14] S Mark Heim, Saved from Sacrifice: A Theology of the Cross,(Eerdmans, 2006),115.

[15] https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5099730-donald-trump-criticizes-bishop-transgender-migrants/