Best, weary heart!
The penalty is borne, the ransom paid,
For all thy sins full satisfaction made !
Strive not to do thyself what Christ has done. Claim the free gift, and make the joy thine own;
No more by pangs of guilt and fear distrest, Best ! calmly rest !
IV.
Sacrifice and Sepakation.
Once a year the sins of the people were thus solemnly atoned for, and the nation's lost holiness was restored (verse 30, " to cleanse you : from all your sins shall ye be clean before Jehovah "). The slain goat made atonement for the people's sins, and restored their peace and fellowship with God ; the goat over which the people's sins were confessed, and which was afterwards sent away to Azazel in the wilderness, symbolized visibly their complete re- moval from the nation's midst (Ps. ciii. 12 ; Mic. vii. 19) : a life was given up for the altar, and yet a living being survived to carry away all sin and imcleanness : the entire ceremonial thus symbolized as completely as possible both the atonement for sin and the entire removal of the cause of God's alienation.
1. Sacrifice. — No specific mention is made of this rite in the subsequent books of the Bible, but it probably coloured the language of the prophet as he portrayed the Suffering Servant of Jehovah, who was despised and rejected, and from whom men hid their faces. The iniquity of the erring flock laid by a Divine hand upon His sacred person suggests the picture of the high priest transferring the common sin to the scape-victim by words of confession and the laying on of his hands. When the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews asserts that it is not possible for "the blood of bulls and of goats to take away sin," he perhaps has ' H. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 71.
362 THE SCAPEGOAT
in view at the moment the offerings of the great Day of Atone- ment. This rite of course is included without express mention in the statement that the meaning of all sacrifice is consummated and fulfilled in the death of Jesus Christ. Our Lord gathers up into His ministry and death the peculiar lines of thought indicated in this ceremony. In setting Himself to deal with the problem of suffering by first of all attacking the problem of sin, Jesus was bringing home to the multitude the fundamental lesson of this ancient ritual.
2. Separation. — We can almost see the figure of the scape- NQctim, looming through the shadows of the night, as Matthew describes the great healer casting out devils when the sick were brought to His feet in the Sabbath twilight. The evangelist seems to see the sicknesses He healed transferred to His weary form, and weighting His sympathetic soul, and sums up the picture in the memorable words of the prophet, "Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses." In Jesus Christ the rite comes back into some kind of external likeness to the primitive form, but with an unutterable difference, a difference consisting in an overwhelming contrast rather than a comparison. The scape-victim is the Man of Sorrows, chosen not by lot, but by the decree of the Most High, proclaimed through signs and wonders which God did by Him in the midst of the people. He is selected, if we may use the contrast without irreverence, not like the victim of primitive societies, who was singled out for the office by a degra- dation which seemed openly to challenge the wrath of the gods, but because of His transcendent dignity and holiness. It is no slave or war-captive who is dragged to this pathetic and igno- minious ministry, but the Lord of heaven and the Prince of the kings of the earth, drawn by His own free compassions for the guilty and burdened race, made a curse to redeem us from the curse which cleaves to all offenders against God.
^ " Unto a solitary land." The solitude of the Sin-bearer is something altogether distinct from the solitude of the Holy One. In His human life, our blessed Lord was, in a certain sense, solitary for this simple reason that He moved on a higher plat- form than others. He did not find Himself able to educate His own most intimate followers into sympathy with His own real aspirations, or to bring them under the law of life, under which
LEVITICUS XVI. 22 363
He moved and acted. They remained of the earth, earthy, while He was above it, breathing a purer atmosphere, and living by a higher law. This solitude of holiness separated Him from sinners : but that very separation which, from time to time, made Him lead, in His humanity, a strange lonesome life, yet brought Him into such full contact with all the glorious beings and the realities of the spirit-world, that such a solitude could hardly be looked upon with any considerable regret, or be the source of any actual pain. But it was otherwise now. We are speaking, not of the solitude of the Representative of holiness and purity, but of the solitude of the Sin-bearer, because He was the sin-bearer.^
% It was a weary journey that the scapegoat took. It left the fertile fields, and the babbling brooks of Israel, far behind : the distant heights of Carmel disappeared on the far-off horizon ; before it, there opened up a boundless waste of desert sand, while the " fit man " trudged on relentlessly, farther, and farther, many a weary mile, and still the scapegoat followed him, bearing the sins of the people. The grassy plains have disappeared; the last palm tree is lost in the distance; the sound of running waters has long since died upon the ear ; and all around there is the barren waste of desert sand ; and still the man trudges on, and still the scapegoat follows him. All alone in the desolate wilds, all alone in a blighted land, and not inhabited. And then the fit man disappears. He had led the goat into the solitude, and lo, it is left alone — all alone. Wistfully it gazes round on the dreary scene. Oh, for one blade of grass ! oh, for one drop of water ! Its eyes are strained, its nostrils dilated, if by chance it may catch a breath of something like fertility borne in the gale from the distance : but no. In solitude and weariness it still goes wandering on, and every step it takes, brings it farther, and farther still, into the silent desolate desert: the scapegoat is all alone. The weary day drags out its long hours : the dark and mournful night closes in ; the morning sun rises up with blistering heat ; its lips are parched, its limbs are trembling : it sinks amidst the desert sand, and dies. For it must be remembered that it was a late custom that threw it over the rock; at the first it was simply left to die.