John the Baptist sometimes comes across as a rather operatic sort of chap. As in this morning’s gospel – he is standing around with a couple of friends – suddenly he sees Jesus walking towards him and like an heroic tenor he instantly declaims – ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!’ – words, which if set by Handel, would rapidly lead into a triumphant chorus.
St John’s gospel, unlike the other gospels, does not actually record the baptism of Jesus; what it does provide is this the most detailed of all the speeches made by John, pointing out the true nature and identity of Jesus. Jesus is the Lamb of God, the one on whom the Spirit descends, the one who baptises with the Holy Spirit, the Son of God. It is the first of these titles that most concerns us this morning – the Lamb of God – the one about whom the choir sings in the Agnus Dei every Sunday as we prepare to receive communion. Why is Jesus called the Lamb of God?
As always to answer that question we have to delve back into the prophecy and Temple worship of the Old Testament but before we do so we might for a moment think why it’s worth unpacking this seemingly obscure symbolism. Where’s it leading us? And the answer must be that it leads us to a better understanding of our salvation, a better experience of that daily conversion which brings us as individuals and as a community closer to God. When John says, ‘Behold the Lamb of God, ‘ he is in effect saying there is the one who will save you. And the disciples respond by following Jesus and wanting to know where he is staying so they can be with him.
So again why is Jesus called the Lamb of God? The phrase echoes three different images in the Old Testament. The first pictures a conquering lamb destroying all evil in the world and crushing it underfoot – the kind of activity we least associate with lambs. And that perhaps is the point – the fact that evil is defeated by a lamb rather than by something more powerful and aggressive, something more like evil itself. The lightness, fragility, and seeming playfulness of the lamb doesn’t lead us to take evil lightly – far from it – but it may lead us to question our usual aggressive reactions to evil and create room for the wholly other ways of defeating evil which occupy the mind of God.
The second picture of the lamb comes from Isaiah’s portrayal of the suffering servant; ‘He opened not his mouth like a sheep that is led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearers.’ Clearly for the early Christians this text reminded them of Jesus’ behaviour when he was put on trial and mocked and scourged by his own people and by the Romans. He remained silent; he did not seek to explain or vindicate himself or condemn those who were persecuting him. In that silence we begin to see the wholly other way of defeating evil beginning to work.
The third picture is of the Passover lamb. When the Jews fled from slavery in Egypt they killed a lamb and smeared its blood on the doorposts of the house so that the angel of death would pass over them. So in John’s account of the last week of Jesus’ life, Jesus is condemned to death just as the lambs are about to be slaughtered in the Temple in preparation for the Passover commemoration. Jesus is the lamb who is sacrificed for us, the sacrifice that takes our sins away, that saves us from the annihilation of death. Jesus replaces all other such sacrfices.
So much then for the pictures and the ideas that lie behind John’s naming Jesus as the Lamb of God. They all say something about the nature of Jesus’ character and ministry, the divine strategy of his life, and they say something about the meaning of his death – and all for our salvation. But how? How can this image effect or play a part in our lives – what consequences can it have for us?
That may be too big a question to answer towards the end of a sermon but one clue lies perhaps in the curious accusation made of the early Christians by the gentile world – Christians must be atheists. Why did they say that? They said it because Christians made no sacrifices. Sacrifice – the killing of something or someone to make things better – stems from fear. The fear is supposed to be cured by getting rid of something – a sacrifice onto which our fears are loaded – a scapegoat. Typically we fear something in ourselves so we project it outwards and blame someone else – some cause outside ourselves. We fear something in society so we blame a particular group of people and try to exclude them or do them down. And it is that process to which the Lamb of God seeks to put an end. Jesus becomes the hate figure, the one to blame and exclude, and so he dies not as a sacrifice himself but to expose the cycle of fear and blame and victimization and put an end to it. And in so doing he exposes the fears behind our sin. To take away our sins the Lamb must first take away our fears. Look at what you most fear; bring your fears into the place of the Lamb. Fear is what prevents us from doing right, fear keeps us from common action, fear curtails our capacity for love and service, fear causes us to turn our back, to get angry and fight back. But if we face our fears in the place of the Lamb then God takes away our fear and fills us with the riches of his grace.
When John addresses Jesus as the Lamb of God, he does so at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – this is the man who takes away the world’s sins in his life, his death and his resurrection – and the disciples sense something of that when they ask, ‘Rabbi where are you staying?’ – using the word more often translated as abiding – the word which Jesus uses when he talks later about his abiding in the Father and the Father in him. Whether they are aware of it or not the disciples can therefore be interpreted as asking a profound question of Jesus – where are you at home, in what are you rooted, what is the focus of your existence – to which Jesus replies with equal profundity, ‘Come and see’ Come and spend your lives being a part of this journey, a part of my life that I may come to abide in you and you in me. They are to spend their lives in the presence of the Lamb, lives in which their fears will be taken away, for (as John says in his first epistle) perfect love casts out fear; there is no fear in the presence of love. Amen.