20 “And when he has made an end of atoning for the Holy Place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall present the live goat. 21 And Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins. And he shall put them on the head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness by the hand of a man who is in readiness. 22 The goat shall bear all their iniquities on itself to a remote area, and he shall let the goat go free in the wilderness.
In the tradition of ancient Judaism on the Day of Atonement the priests would lay the iniquity of all the people onto a single goat and then the goat would be led out into the wilderness to "Azazel". Azazel was a demon or, alternatively, a place where the demonic resided. The idea was that all the iniquity of the people would be cast into this one goat and then driven back to the place from which it came. We are told in the Mishna, an important 1st and second century Jewish oral tradition commentary, that sometimes the scapegoat would not only be led into the wilderness, but in fact driven off of a cliff in order that it would not return bearing the sins of the people along with it.
The goat is now commonly known as the "scapegoat", a term which came from William Tyndale who was the first to translate the Hebrew Bible into English. The word "scape" comes from English "escape" which comes from the Medieval Latin "ex-cappa", which meant "out of the cloak". The purpose of the scapegoat is to cast off the sin of the people as one might cast off a cloak.
It is sometimes said that guilt is the knowledge that we have sinned and the willingness to take responsibility for it. Shame, on the other hand, is the psychological sense that we are at one in our very being with our sins; it is the heavy and burdensome cloak -- too burdensome to bear. To bear the weight of this cloak is to die a spiritual death.
At center of this idea of the scapegoat is the deeply spiritual need we have to be set free from the heavy and burdenous cloak of our sins and its sentence of death. The cloak is indeed too weighty and too much for us to bear. And the profoundly good news is that we can escape from it -- that we can be set free, that our iniquity is not forever a part of us but can in fact be cast off and cast out.
This is the purpose of atonement -- the sense that we can live again in "at-one-ment" or at peace within ourselves, with each other, and with God. This is the gift of forgiveness -- the gift of being spiritually alive and free.
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