Fwd: Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation: Jesus and the End of Scapegoating: Weekly Summary
Gabrielle Dean
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A thorough and sobering assessment of what it is to be us.
Subject: Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation: Jesus and the End of Scapegoating: Weekly Summary
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Week Thirteen Summary
Jesus and the End of Scapegoating
Saturday, April 4, 2026
Holy Saturday
Sunday
The human delusion seems to be this: We think someone else is always the problem, not ourselves. Human nature always wants either to play the victim or to create victims—and both for the purposes of control.
—Richard RohrMonday
Jesus became the scapegoat to reveal the universal lie of scapegoating. He became the sinned-against one to reveal the hidden nature of scapegoating, so that we would see how wrong even thoughtful and well-meaning people can be.
—Richard RohrTuesday
We must call for and participate in the same kind of reversal that Jesus did. We must lift up the poor, the oppressed, and the outcasts and bring down the people, powers, and systems that create poverty, that marginalize the weak, and that scapegoat the outsiders.
—Jennifer Garcia BashawWednesday
When we open ourselves up to friendships with immigrants and take intentional steps to know and be known in mutuality, we widen the circle of our affections. Suddenly, immigrants are no longer a burden or a drain on our economy, but a Ruth, a Hagar, or a Joseph to be loved.
—Karen GonzálezThursday
There is fullness of life when you show up, fully present, when people are suffering and where people are bearing the burdens of their own crosses. The rhetorical question “Were you there?” signifies the real pressing question about whether you will be present for lost and hurting generations.
—Yolanda PierceFriday
Picture yourself before the crucified Jesus; recognize that he became what you fear: nakedness, exposure, vulnerability, and failure. He became the crucified so we would stop crucifying.
—Richard Rohr
Week Thirteen Practice
The Dark Before Dawn
Author Stephanie Duncan Smith finds consolation in Holy Saturday, which affirms that the time between loss and new life is holy:
The Paschal story holds the death of Good Friday and the silence of Holy Saturday before it breaks into the resurrection joy of Easter Sunday. This is the pattern into which we have been baptized, and there is no telling of the liturgical story that does not include this day of the brutal-in-between….
The human heart knows Holy Saturday, because the human heart knows vigilance—the keeping watch that happens when the body cannot choose between hope and fear. We know what it is to wait on edge for the relationship to repair, the addition to break, the body to heal, the clarity to come, the kids to get home safe. We know what it is to want in our waiting, and like the disciples, we wonder where God has gone.
Vigilance is holding in tension two dramatically different outcomes—one of life and one of death—knowing there is nothing you can do to control which way the story tilts….
Morning will break. The alleluias will be returned to us, but make no mistake: The here and now can be a hellscape, strewn over with the shrapnel of broken alleluias. But perhaps this is the strange gift of Holy Saturday: This longest night might become the place where our shattered hopes, how-could-you cries, and spiral-out fears find an honest home. And for all our high vigilance and wounded waiting, we might take to heart to know God is with us even in the hellscape....
The sequence of the story matters: Before the light breaks, before the impossible joy that Jesus lives again, Holy Saturday proclaims that we are seen in our darkest night. Just as Easter proclaims we are never stranded there.
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References
Stephanie Duncan Smith, Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway (Convergent Books, 2024), 98, 99–100.
Image credit and inspiration: Vaishak Pilai, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, India, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. The crude cross etched into the wall becomes the mark of our human impulse to name a scapegoat, revealing how easily we point toward another what we cannot bear in ourselves.
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