Here's the thing about Coronavirus racism

With the rise of the coronavirus, there has been a predictable rise in racism against people of Chinese, or even just Asian descent.

In North America and the UK, there have been reports of Chinese children being bullied at school. In France, a front-page newspaper headline warned of the “Yellow Peril.”

Polite racism. It’s like racism but without the white hoods.

In New Zealand (where there are NO confirmed coronavirus cases), a Singaporean woman was harassed with racial slurs in a shopping mall.

Vietnamese American Youtuber, Michelle Phan reports a stream of racist comments such as,"Why do you Asians eat creatures left right and centre???? Dead or alive... all body parts!!!!! That's why your starting all sorts of diseases!!!!"

Our capacity for sin as human beings is never-ending, but let’s recognize this for what it is:

Scapegoating.

And this brand of everyday hatred is actually as old as human society itself.

A few decades ago a Roman Catholic scholar named René Girard named this evil, when he described the way groups of people typically deal with their internal group conflicts - by projecting their violence onto a scapegoat.

You've probably seen it or experienced it a bunch of times yourself. A group of people - prone to bickering or infighting - suddenly develops a sense of new-found unity around their blame of some poor sucker that is different in some way.

Think of it as Mean Girls for the rest of us.

On Wednesdays we wear our pink face masks Craig

The frenzied crowd will not rest until that person or group is expelled (or in extreme cases destroyed).

And then everyone can breathe easy, because a temporary sense of relief and calm has been restored.

The funny thing is, it's pretty easy to see that other people’s scapegoats are innocent victims, falsely accused of wrongdoing. But our own scapegoats seem to us like terrible people - BAD-guys who deserve our hatred and blame.

We see the innocence of other people’s scapegoats but never our own.

As an outsider here in Asia, it's easy to see that many Cambodians have made scapegoats of the Vietnamese in their midst. Vietnamese are regularly rounded up and deported. Their businesses targeted. Their children picked on. Even by Christians...

It's easy to see how the Rohingya people in Myanmar are unfairly maligned and mistreated by the Burmese government and wider society. They have been hounded out of Myanmar, onto rickety boats as refugees and asylum seekers along the coasts of South-East Asia.

Political leaders throughout history have cunningly played on our fears and rallied us around their cause by focusing our hatred onto the designated scapegoats. Think Trump and his dangerous scapegoating of various religious groups, immigrants and “shithole countries”.

In this flu season, those scapegoats happen to be people with Asian facial features.

Hulk Hogan - occasional racist and handlebar moustache afficionado

In the past those scapegoats have been Jews, Japanese, Blacks, Communists, Catholics, or people with handlebar moustaches...

In fact, almost every marginalized group has found themselves with that unwanted spotlight on them at one time or another.

But, here's where this theory gets SUPER interesting for followers of Jesus…

Does the term "scapegoat" strike you as vaguely Biblical?

I'm guessing it does. Because it originally comes from Leviticus 16:8 - where a particularly unlucky goat was designated as the sacrifice that would take on the sins of the community and be cast out into the desert (not as unlucky as the other goat which was designated to be butchered though). Most ancient societies had similar practices.

As Christians, we recognize that Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat. The scapegoat to end all scapegoats. The one who came to put an end to our violence and racism and sin, by willingly taking upon himself all that crap, once and for all.

"Christ was offered ONCE to bear the sins of many..." (Hebrews 9:28)

Girard describes it like this, "Christ, the son of God, is the ultimate “scapegoat” - precisely because He is the son of God, and since he is innocent, he exposes all the myths of scapegoating and shows that the victims were innocent and the communities guilty."

The work of Jesus on the cross puts an end to our racism and scapegoating.

Coronavirus panic, refugee hysteria, Muslim fear. It all ends on the cross.

Jesus was not sacrificed to appease an angry deity. Instead, Jesus, God himself, entered our society and became the scapegoat, and in doing so, eliminated the need for any future scapegoats or sacrifices. It is a mystery worthy of the God of the universe.

To address our scapegoating is to begin to dismantle the violence in our hearts.

The Gospel of Jesus invites you and me to lay our need to scapegoat at Jesus' feet.

The Gospel of Jesus takes our racism, and exchanges those things for love and the radical welcome of Christ.

The Gospel of Jesus means that scapegoating is no longer needed.

In the words of Jesus, "It is over."