It’s such a little word. But once you get hold of it, it’s life-changing, soul-saving. The oldest and most brutal form of human cruelty is not murder; there is actually something worse. Everybody knows about the “scapegoat,” its uses for unifying and energizing groups of all sizes, families and tribes, races and nations, even just little cliques of students or members of clubs, political parties, religious congregations. From the beginning, throughout history, the oldest form of punishment has been ostracism.

French philosopher Rene Girard was converted to Christianity by studying the anthropological basis of scapegoating; many—probably thousands—have followed him into the faith by reading his conclusions on mimicry.

Outside “repent and believe”, our Lord’s most frequently recurring message in the Gospel was one that condemned ostracism. Not only did he consort with lepers and sinners, eat and drink with tax collectors and prostitutes, he even proclaimed that such ostracized persons would enter the kingdom of heaven before the scribes and Pharisees, the socially accepted—the “righteous.”

For that, he was condemned, taken outside the city and crucified, the ultimate ostracism. Murder kills the body, but only ostracism can kill the spirit as well as the body.

We can hear, if we listen closely enough: Who, then, Lord, are we to condemn—if not sinners? How often do we have to forgive? Shouldn’t he who stayed on the job, stayed at home, obeyed—shouldn’t he at least get more than he who did not obey, did not remain at home, did not stay on the job? How confusing it must have been—to imagine a world without condemnation, without ostracism. It would be chaos to forgive everybody for everything; without the law of punishment, without the threat of ostracism, social order would fall apart. Better—far better—that the one should be sacrificed for the sake of the many, far better to drive that scapegoat from among us.

And so they did. And continue to do. Us-vs-them, in any context, is anti-Gospel, is crucifixion. But people get hurt by other people, and they want to punish them for it. They want vengeance. And then there are people, too, without mirrors. They see sexual licentiousness, avarice—even poor table manners!—only outside themselves. They have no mirrors. Projection isn’t just a psycho-social phenomenon; it’s a deadly weapon, the missile with which the nuclear warhead of ostracism is delivered. The most dangerous, intolerant people in the world are those who condemn intolerance and create laws to punish it—oxymoronic, irrational, yet completely invisible to those without mirrors.

What if. Just what if we learned the full power of the word We. What if we learned that the childhood taunt of “It takes one to know one” is really true? The kingdom of heaven arrives when the scapegoat is welcomed home. But maybe that’s something only sinners can understand.