"Looking for a Scapegoat"

Yom Kippur, Israel’s Day of Atonement, was a day steeped in ritual, but it was a day also drenched in blood. In a sequence of divinely ordered steps, the high priest would carefully bathe, dress, and prepare himself and the people to receive blood-bought forgiveness of their sins.

The Lord commanded that three animals be part of Yom Kippur. The high priest would sacrifice a bull, offering its blood and life for his own sins and the sins of his household. Next, a goat was sacrificed as a sin offering for the people of Israel. Finally, the high priest placed his hands on the remaining goat, confessing and conferring Israel’s sins upon it before a specially chosen man led it out into the wilderness.

This poor abandoned creature came to be called the "scapegoat" and still stands as a symbol of one who is blamed for the sins and crimes of another. In today’s Gospel, we meet the true Scapegoat as we discover that while sinners look to blame others, the Father put the blame on Christ, and we now look to the One who took the blame upon himself.

It’s amazing to me how people look to blame others, to shift responsibility and hopefully consequences away from themselves. I guess we can’t help it. It must be in our genetic makeup. We see in out Old Testament lesson where Adam tells God, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate." Then Eve turns right around and says, "The serpent deceived me and I ate."

When we were kids, we blamed brothers and sisters, other kids around us for getting us into trouble. We blame our spouses for making us do the things we do. We blame them for our financial problems, our infidelity, our drinking, or whatever. In our daily lives, our co-workers, or bosses, or the people that work under us get blamed for the project no being done on time, for cost overruns, for our failure to get that fat government contract, or for the equipment that has been damaged or destroyed.

People even blame God when they can’t find fault anywhere else. Even Adam blamed God for giving him Eve in the first place – almost like if He hadn’t done that, this whole sin thing would never have happened.

Back when I was still working as a game warden, rare was the person, who when caught for some kind of violation, just threw up their hands and admitted "Yep, you got me. I’m in the wrong." Violations were blamed on everything from their kids who sometimes weren’t even there to the fact that they had only borrowed the fishing pole or shotgun they were using. It got to the point that I almost hated to write the person a ticket who immediately admitted they were wrong, because they were so few and far between.

Ultimately, however, we are responsible for our own woes and can offer God no excuses. We can’t pass our sins and their consequences off on other people. But if during this penitential season of Lent, we fix our eyes on ourselves, we will see nothing but the disobedience produced in us by the sin of Adam. But on the other hand, if we fix our eyes on Jesus, we will see the perfect obedience of him who took the blame upon himself, a burden he carried all the way to the cross.

The Father put the blame on Christ, making him responsible for the sins of the world. In Jesus’ Baptism, God placed the worlds sins and blame for them on His Son, just like the high priest would place the sins of the people on the scapegoat. Like the Old Testament scapegoat, Jesus carried that sin away from the people and into the wilderness.

The Hebrew phrase "forty days and forty nights" appears in several other places in Scripture. We hear those words in conjunction with Noah and the flood, with Moses on Sinai receiving the Law, and with Elijah’s travels after being fed by the angel. When you look at those instances, the number forty is normally involved as a measure of testing, probation, judgment, and separation, as well as conveying a sense of fullness or completion.

Fasting for long periods of time meant that certain choice morsels of food were given up, but eating and drinking were done at least on a subsistence level. Luke says that during this time, Jesus ate nothing. Matthew seems to imply this with his words, saying Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights, pointing out hat for Jesus, there was no evening snack. Matthew finishes up his thought with maybe one of the greatest three word understatements in Scripture. He says that after forty days and nights, "he was hungry."

Like the scapegoat was abandoned to meet its doom, Christ was left alone to face satan. Rather than blaming others, he shouldered full responsibility for keeping Gods Law. While Jesus was a willing participant in procuring our

He goes to the wilderness, a dry, lonely place of sharp thorns and wild animals. The purpose is clear: the Spirit is placing the Son in harms way, leading him to be tempted. While we think of being tempted as being led into sin, the dimension of testing or proving genuine certainly fits the context.

The Greek calls the devil "the tempting one", and he is God’s chosen instrument to proof-test the claim that Jesus is the Father’s beloved Son. The tempter comes to tear, crush, and devour the One who was sent into the wild bearing the sins of humanity.

The first test was to see if Jesus would reject the path of suffering that would culminate in the cross by breaking his fast before the Father ended it. The answer to that test, of course, was that true sustenance is not found in physical eating and drinking. It’s found in holding fast to every thing that God says.

Failing to use Jesus’ stomach against him, the devil takes up Christ’s own weapon, challenging him with quotes from Scripture. If Jesus would jump, the angels would certainly do what both satan and the Scriptures say they will. But Jesus doesn’t jump. He knows better than to put God the Father to the test. He continues to follow the way of the cross, not the path of self-glorification. Jesus could have chosen other passages to rebuke the devil. Maybe he chose this one to emphasize how completely his will is subject to the will of his Father.

The one whom Jesus would later describe as "the ruler of this world" exercises that reign in a third test, offering to trade Jesus the entire world in exchange for just one tiny little act of worship. Jesus again turns to Scripture, and makes it plain that he will continue to worship and serve only His Father, the One true God.

Finally, the devil leaves Jesus alone, and to show his pleasure with his dear Son, the Father concretely demonstrates his appreciation by sending angels to minister to Jesus.

Unlike the Old Testament scapegoat, Christ returns alive from his wilderness exile. But later he would be led outside Jerusalem to die on a cross. Obviously, the scapegoat would be killed by exposure or wild animals. Jesus was certainly killed by evil men, and the guilt that we’d like to shift to someone else was willingly taken from us.

This Lenten season, we fix our eyes on the One who took our blame upon himself. Knowing that we should have carried our own sins until we met hells destruction, we celebrate, knowing that God laid all our sins on Christ, our Scapegoat. We are empowered to repent of weighing others down with the blame and shame due us, and instead, we can ask for the strength to bear one another’s burdens.

Today, God reminds us that not only through blood sacrifice and death did his Son save us, but also through Jesus’ entire life, carrying the full weight of humanity’s sins upon himself, Jesus fulfilled Isaiah’s prophecy: "Surely He has born our grief’s and carried our sorrows….the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all."

Now, when our Scapegoat approaches in Word and Sacrament, we don’t run away from him, terrified that he might bring our sins back and accuse us. We can be confident that no sins, no shame, and no blame remain. God has blotted all that stuff out and remembers it no more. Christ comes instead, to take us to himself, to take us to our eternal dwelling place, where we will live in bliss forever.

During the troubling days of WWI, many songwriters did their best to raise the morale of the troops at war and the folks back home. One of the most popular efforts belonged to Felix Powell, who penned a ditty for those who felt themselves drowning in worries about the war, their loved ones, and their own lives. Rather than dwelling on problems, Powell encouraged the fearful person to put their troubles behind them and smile.

Through the war and for many years following, hundreds of thousands of British, American, and Canadian citizens listened, sang, and attempted in one way or another to do just that. However, packing up our problems is but a temporary and superficial solution.

The true cause of all out troubles is sin. Whether inflicted by giving in to the devil’s temptations ourselves - or by the evil of others - or as the consequences of living in a fallen world, we are unable to pack up and put away our own troubles.

Only Christ can permanently banish our problems. No pasted on grin will chase away the devil, but when Christ smiles on us, we know the old evil foe is vanquished and our joy is made complete. Amen.