Part 3: The Chosen Outsider

THE AIR WE BREATH Part Three: The Chosen Outsider

You don't need a theology textbook to understand this next dynamic. You just need to have been to school.

Most of us can remember, with uncomfortable clarity, the ‘in group’ and the one who somehow ended up outside. Whatever form their difference took, it became the thing the group organised itself around, not through any formal process, more like the way weather happens. And alongside whatever discomfort or compassion we may have felt for the outsider, we also welcomed the warmth, sense of cohesion, an almost physical relief that the group had found its edges, and we were ‘in’. The shared sense of who was not one of us created, strangely, a stronger feeling of who was.

Of course, this dynamic doesn't stop at the school gate.

The Hebrew scriptures give it a name. On the Day of Atonement, described in Leviticus 16, the high priest would lay both hands on a goat's head, confess over it all the accumulated failures of the community, and send it out into the wilderness to carry what had been loaded onto it. The ritual is ancient. But the instinct behind it is universal. Long before the Hebrew law gave it formal shape, communities had been doing this informally — finding someone to carry what they couldn't bear to hold about themselves, and then removing them. The weight felt lifted. The community breathed again. The relief was real. And real relief is a very powerful teacher.

René Girard spent his life documenting this pattern across literature, anthropology, and eventually Christian theology. His central observation was that this mechanism isn't primitive superstition left behind by modern communities. It's one of the most consistent features of human social life. And it tends to run with particular force in communities that believe themselves to be above it. Arrogance is a tricky beast.

The person who gets scapegoated isn't chosen randomly. They tend to be newer to the community, without the long relational roots that offer protection; or particularly gifted, which creates uncomfortable tension; or, most relevantly here, the person who named something true that the community wasn't ready to hear.

This last one is the position Jesus occupied. And it's worth sitting with slowly. The religious community that moved toward crucifixion wasn't primarily made up of evil people. It was people managing anxiety, protecting what they valued, keeping intact the structures that gave their lives meaning. The threat Jesus posed wasn't to their safety, it was to their self-understanding. He kept making visible what the system that had developed was doing to people. And a system tends to develop a spirit of its own that doesn't respond well to being seen.

But stunningly, the resurrection is God's refusal to allow the crowd's verdict stand. The voice of the one cast out was vindicated. The dynamic was exposed. And yet it keeps on happening. In every generation. Even in communities that sing about that cross on Sunday mornings.

From inside the group, the scapegoat dynamic doesn't feel like cruelty. It feels like discernment. Evidence seems to accumulate once the community has decided what it's looking for. Words like difficult start to circulate, then divisive. In Christian communities, spiritual language often gets recruited. And the group, moving toward this shared conclusion, experiences something that can genuinely feel like unity.

What almost never gets asked in these moments is: what was this person actually saying, before the narrative about them started to form? Because the scapegoat dynamic doesn't only remove someone difficult, it also misdirects attention. If the person who got removed was pointing at something real, their removal doesn't address what they were pointing at. It only removes the pointing finger. And before long, although the relief feels so good, the anxiety starts building again.

The good news is that there is a way through this. It begins with the kind of courage the younger son showed in the far country. He came to himself. He stopped. He looked honestly at where he was and how he'd got there. Not with dramatic self-flagellation, just with unusual clarity. And it was that clear-seeing that became the beginning of his journey home.

The great news is that God’s mercy, grace and love made the prodigal’s awareness and movement home possible, and it makes it possible for us, and our communities too. In community, it takes genuine courage in leadership to ask not only what's wrong with the person who's been marked, but what that marking of them reveals about the community itself. What was too threatening to acknowledge and to see clearly? What question was too uncomfortable to talk about out loud? These aren't easy questions. But they seem very relevant for us right now. And they are the kind of question that, if we can let ourselves listen and see more clearly, might actually lead us where we’re longing to go.