Most likely you’ve heard the word scapegoat? Right?
It comes from this ancient ritual where people would literally put their sins — like, symbolically — onto a goat, and then send it off into the wilderness. “There it goes! Look at that little guy carry off all our junk!”
It sounds bizarre. Until you realize… we still do it. All the time.
We find someone else to carry what we can’t bear to hold ourselves.
And if I’m being honest, Good Friday always brings this question to the surface for me:
Who am I trying to protect… and who am I quietly putting on the cross to make myself more comfortable?
Because we all do it.
We all find ways to offload our stuff onto other people.
Sometimes it’s obvious — the snarky comment, the passive-aggressive blame game, the gossip that makes sure we still look like the good guy.
But most of the time? It’s sneakier than that.
It shows up in how quickly we judge people who remind us of something we don’t like in ourselves.
It’s how we create these mental categories of “us” and “them.”
We draw lines: they’re too dramatic… he’s too needy… she’s too much…
And in doing so, we quietly build a cross.
We make someone else the problem, so we don’t have to face what’s unresolved in us.
But Jesus?
He doesn’t play that game.
He steps into that space.
Not because He had to, but because He chose to.
He walks right into the scapegoat space — the spot nobody wants to be in — and stays there.
Fully exposed.
Fully blamed.
Fully innocent.
And still, fully loving.
He doesn’t pass the pain down the line.
He absorbs it.
He transforms it.
He forgives it.
I mean… that causes me to take pause.
Because that space — the space where we feel weak, humiliated, not in control — it’s the space we spend our whole lives avoiding. We scroll past it. We distract from it. We numb it. Or we shove someone else into it so we don’t have to sit there ourselves.
But Jesus?
He climbs right in and says, “I’m not leaving. Not from this. Not from you.”
That’s not guilt-tripping.
That’s plain, simple, yet radical – Love.
Real Love.
Unflinching, undistracted, undeserved Love.
And it doesn’t just forgive us from far away.
It meets us in the exact place where we think we’re unlovable — and stays.
So maybe today, instead of trying to skip ahead to resurrection — we pause and ask:
Where am I offloading my pain onto someone else?
What parts of myself have I exiled because I don’t want to face them?
Who have I turned into my scapegoat?
And instead of shaming ourselves for it — because that just starts the whole cycle over again —
we just notice. With compassion.
Because Jesus doesn’t flinch at our mess.
He’s already standing in it, saying, “Let’s do this differently. Let’s be new.”
And honestly? That’s what makes today good.
Grace and Peace,
Andrea