When a group is divided, what's the easiest, quickest and most psychologically satisfying way to reunite it?
When we feel divided within ourselves, what's an easy, cathartic way to restore "peace"?
Find someone to blame!
Yes, that's right: good old scapegoating!
The Hebrew word satan means "accuser" — the one who blames another; the one who drags you out into the middle of the lynch mob (or a more carefully orchestrated and ritually structured court of law), and cries GUILTY! while pointing unambiguously at you.
"Satan" is the "accusatory principle" — the prince — of this world. It is the mechanism by which the world bestows peace and unity upon itself.
Temporarily.
And at the expense not only of its sacrificial victims, its "scapegoats", but at the price of truth itself. Which is why it eventually fails ... and has to be repeated. Ritualized, in fact.
Every ancient society known to us has had its ritual victims. The Greeks called them pharmakoi, "drugs", and in the double sense of "medicine" and "poison".
The ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat has been going on for as long as human beings have been human in any recognizable sense of the word: since we came down out of the trees and started walking upright, and quite possibly before that.
But recently, in the last few thousand years, we've started to wake up to a rather unsettling realization, a revelation: this satanic/accusatory principle of the world and its "law and order", its "peace and justice", is a lie ... a myth ... which literally means "a cover-up" (from muo, "to shut" or "cover up", as in eyes, mouth, ears, or truth).
Or as Jesus in John's Gospel put it, the prince of this world is a liar and a murderer from the beginning.
And all the ideologies and cultures and, yes, "religions of the world", are attempts to contain, conceal and make sense of the violence that our accusatory impulse manages to control — temporarily.
During this week of prayer for Christian unity, we need to ask ourselves the honest question: What kind of "unity" is properly speaking Christian? The kind the religious and sacrificial ideologies have been attempting for countless millennia? Or the kind that exposes the lie in the world's myths, rituals and legal systems which live by the accusatory principle, the "blame game" we are all so very adept at playing?
Now, no one really likes rhetorical questions (except perhaps the one "asking" them!), so let's just say it straight: Christian unity is Christian only in so far as it both utterly rejects the "primitive" — that is to say violent — "sacred", AND embraces its only true antidote: mercy.
Now, here's the kicker: In the name of mercy, justice, and even so-called "tolerance", we are all capable of the most awful, deluded and self-righteous hypocrisy as we not only "judge" but condemn the "intolerant, unjust and the unmerciful" other. And so the accusatory principle wins again! As we blame the blamers, accuse the accusers, judge the judges, scapegoat the scapegoaters ... satan casts out satan.
And as we bestow that bogus peace and unity upon ourselves by new and ever more devious means, the gospel is cast out by the gospel: mercy cast out by a merciless condemnation of the merciless (or even just simple tolerance by an intolerance for the intolerant).
It is no accident that the one who is about to be baptized is first asked: "Do you reject Satan?" We have to be willing to divest ourselves of the accusatory principle, "the prince of this world", before we can turn to the Prince of Peace and receive the gift of unity, of communion in the Holy Spirit, which God desires to give us in order to both save us (from the prince/principle of sin and death) and sanctify, indeed divinize us ... make us one-with-God.
No small thing. No easy thing. And NOT something we could ever accomplish by our own effort. Only God could. Only God has: in and through Christ.
As we undergo a mercy that is infinitely kind, utterly free, absolutely given and inexhaustibly invigorating — in short, Divine — we find ourselves becoming, ever so slowly but surely, capable of mercy ourselves ... towards one another ... and, yes, even towards ourselves. We begin to grow from "image of God", the tap root of our existence and identity, into being "like(ness of) God", the ultimate goal of our humanity. We become, in some deeply mysterious and often paradoxical ways, our "True Self" (as Thomas Merton might say).
And as we become true, the Truth begins to set us free: free from the illusions and lies that feed our violence and the need to blame each other (or even ourselves); free from the devil ("divider"), from satan ("accuser"), from demons ("violent impulses"); free from sin (missing the mark of existence, of the point of life); and free from the power of death (the fear of letting go).
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