Why did God die?

²⁰ “When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. ²¹ He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites—all their sins—and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. ²² The scapegoat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place; and the man shall release it in the wilderness

 (Leviticus 16:20-22)

This short text from the book of Leviticus sums up, with a certain pathetic irony, something very telling about human nature. For some reason we believe that we can remove our problems by transferring them to someone or something else and then once the problems are sufficiently distanced from ourselves we can condemn them, expel them and maybe even kill them without having to do anything to transform ourselves.

Such is the road to salvation which so many of us attempt to walk far too often. The problem is not me! The problem is that person over there! If only we could sort him out then all would be well! If only she would change then my problems would be solved!

Very quickly this method of thinking leads us to a mindset or defining ourselves in terms of oppositions, we cannot really say what we are for, only what we are against. Slowly this mindset spirals us inwards, those around us become our competitors not our siblings. Humanity too quickly becomes a community of aggressive competition.

Perhaps Jesus died because he made such a radical stance against this philosophy. In Jesus we have a God and a Man whose identity is found in universality. He challenged those around him not to export their problem and to see others as their family not as their competitors.

Let's be brutally honest, this idea of universality is too much for most of us, too much of our self identity is tied up with our sense of perceived superiority, so we attempt to ignore or clarify Jesus' words, we attempt to take Jesus to have meant that we only have to love some people, or else we make this definition of love something very ephemeral and spiritual disconnected from how we live. We dis-incarnate Jesus moving him into the sky and far away from our own daily life.

But Jesus will not play along with our (or indeed anyone else’s) self justifying fantasies of superiority. Whenever we reject another there Jesus is stood with that others being rejected as well. Whoever we presume to place outside our community in that very act we are also putting Jesus outside. Whenever we try to attain salvation through assigning scapegoats we should know that Jesus is that scapegoat.

Jesus is saying "OK if you insist on having scapegoats then I will be it, if you insist on rejecting others then I will be the one who is rejected, if you insist on defining yourself in opposition to something then it will be in opposition to me."

If we can only find our identity in opposition, rejection and expulsion then we should at least know that the one we are rejecting, expelling and killing is God himself.

And if you are reading this and thinking it applies to someone else rather than you........................