In Matthew 9:11, the Pharisees ask Jesus’ disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” The Pharisees would make good disciples of the modern identity politics movement, which sees people only in terms of their group’s identity, like their culture, race, or religion. Jesus is not a group identity kind of guy. In the Gospels, we see that Jesus only engages with individuals.

When Jesus sees Zacchaeus up in the tree in the Gospel of Luke, he does not say, “Come on down! For I must be the featured after-dinner speaker at this week’s meeting of ‘Tax Collectors ‘R’ Us’”. No! He says, "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today." In the Church we are baptized as an individual, receive the Eucharist as an individual, and confess our own sins and receive absolution as an individual.

If we are seen only as a member of some group, our individuality is dissolved, and we become just a faceless symbol of the group, potentially reduced to only its unsavoury characteristics. We become susceptible to ‘scapegoating’. In ancient times, the sins of the tribe were written on cloth strips and laid on a goat. That goat then bore the sins of the people. It was chased into the wilderness to suffer and die, and with its death, its cargo of sins was deemed to have died. The value of the goat lay in its passivity, by meekly allowing itself to be loaded up with offences and sent off to its death.

Scapegoating is having a bit of a modern revival. Some of today’s popular thinking tells people that they are guilty for things they didn’t do. Willingly bearing the perceived past and present sins of your group and meekly allowing yourself to suffer and die economically, culturally, or literally is being marketed as the in thing to do. Ultimately, it’s not the job of individuals to atone for the world’s sins, because Jesus already did that.

In Christianity, one side effect of our individual sins is to awaken in us our personal desire for absolution, and this desire can live in us in a place that is too deep for words. It is our spiritual Achilles heel. The group identity shepherds can capitalize on this vulnerability and use it to lead us not into the promised land, but into the valley of death.

We need to heed Jesus’ advice in Matthew 10:16: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves. Therefore, be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.”