Sermon Archive
Scapegoats
Sermon preached by Ken Boyd at Matins on 9 May 2004
Deuteronomy 1.3-18 ; John 21.1-14
The images of torture from Iraq last week were truly appalling. If the war there was justifiable, surely it was to put an end to precisely such cruelty. Yet now we learn that American and perhaps British soldiers have been acting in ways no less deplorable than Saddam Hussein's thugs. Understandably, many ordinary British and American people want to dissociate themselves from these utterly immoral images, either by demanding that the criminal minority responsible are brought to justice, or by turning on the political leaders who have allowed our civilized sense of who we are to be so deeply damaged. Either way, we seek for scapegoats, to take these things off our conscience.
Yet it is not so easy to clear ourselves. For centuries, societies - Christian, Islamic, Confucian and many others - have struggled to establish peaceable kingdoms or republics on earth. Sometimes their civilizing efforts have begun to bear fruit. But then they have been rudely interrupted by the barbarian at the gate, or within the city walls, or in the hearts of those who thought themselves civilized. Today, still in the middle of this long story, we are at best imperfectly civilized; and the degree of order, peace and prosperity which modern societies enjoy is recurrently threatened, not just from without, but also from within, not least from within ourselves. 'I have the seed of every possible evil within me', wrote Simone Weil, a saint if ever there was one. What assurance really have we, that we would have acted differently from the torturers, had we been socially deprived, trained to kill, desensitized and perhaps afraid in a strange land among an alien and hostile people, and under pressure to extract confessions? It is too easy to seek the moral high ground by pinning the blame on such scapegoats.
Politically, of course, it may be difficult for a society like ours to extricate itself and move forward from these appalling events, unless it can find scapegoats to punish criminally or electorally. That is what commonly happens when public opinion is alienated by events which politics and the media refuse to allow to go away. And when the scapegoats are driven out, society feels that it can begin again, under new management as it were - at least until that new management itself sooner or later also ends in tears. But that can only be done at a cost - the cost of forgetting the past and not learning from history. In order to learn from such events, we need to look deeper. We need to recognise the torturer and the politician as ourselves in different circumstances. We need to realise that it is because they are so like us, that we want to distance ourselves from them. We need to live with the knowledge that each of them, is one of us.
But how can we bear to live with that knowledge, especially in the case of the torturer? For if the torturer is one of us, so too is the victim; and none of us has a right to forgive the torturer on the victim's behalf. There is no earthly answer to this. There is only the story, entrusted to us, that the victim on the end of the torturer's leash is not only one of us, but also the author of all, become torn flesh. 'Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these the least of my brethren, ye did it unto me.' This is something we can barely grasp. We can only wonder at what passes understanding: 'the death of Christ, the radiance of goodness, the sin of murdering it, and the cancellation of this sin by the consent of goodness to live again.' We can only wonder, and pray that what we wonder at is true.
And is it true? Almost all I have been saying so far suggests otherwise. Yet that is not all there is to this world. There is also, in the phrase I have just quoted, 'the radiance of goodness'. That, as well as the darkness of evil, is part of our experience. Humanity's goodness as well as its wrongdoing requires explaining; and although here and now there is no earthly answer to the question goodness raises, it also raises hope, not just for ourselves, but also for our brother victim and sister torturer.
That of course is easy enough to say. The proof is in whether we live by it, politically and personally; and we know how far short we fall. Yet the hope remains, and humanity continues to embrace it, in many diverse ways, not least those of this Easter season, when Christians testify to 'the consent of goodness to live again'. None of us can dissociate ourselves from the world's wrongdoing. But we also need to hear what one of the Church Fathers tells us in his Easter sermon:
We ought all to rejoice on this holy day. No one should separate himself from the general rejoicing because he has sins on his conscience; no one should refuse to take part in the public worship because of the burden of his misdeeds. However great a sinner he may be, on this day he should not despair of pardon, for the privileges granted by this day are great. If a thief was thought worthy of paradise, why should not a Christian be thought worthy of forgiveness?
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