January 20, 2008
(Second Sunday after the Epiphany)
Here is the Lamb of God
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Isaiah 49:1-7 • Psalm 40:1-12
• 1 Corinthians 1:1-9 •
John 1:29-42
(From
The Lectionary Page)
“Here is the Lamb of God,” John the Baptist says to his followers, not once, but twice in our gospel passage this morning. We’re in the season of Epiphany, where Christ the Son of God is revealed to the world, so it’s no particular surprise that hear a portion of Scripture in which Christ is revealed to those around him. What’s curious is what John reveals, and what the Church has made of that revelation over the centuries. John the Baptist had prophesied about the coming of the Messiah. But in the passage which we just heard, John the Baptist moves away from the Messianic language he had used less than 20 verses earlier, and identifies Jesus not as the Messiah, but as the Lamb of God.
It’s an interesting distinction. The Messiah, as understood throughout Jewish history, was God’s anointed, the one who would usher in the reign of God for the people of God. The Messiah was seen in nationalistic, military terms – a charismatic leader who would break the centuries of foreign oppression under which Israel & Judah had lived, and restore the people to political and religious autonomy. The Messiah was to be another King David.
The Lamb of God, on the other hand, was not and is not quite so clear cut an image. Well we might wonder why the same thorny prophet who, in other gospels, speaks without equivocation uses such an equivocal metaphor. What is this lamb of which he speaks? Was he drawing a comparison of Jesus to the lamb that was sacrificed daily in the Temple, as found in Exodus? Or the guilt offering detailed in Leviticus? Was he borrowing the image from Isaiah 53 of the suffering servant being like the lamb that is led to the slaughter? We’re not sure what either John the Baptist or John the Evangelist meant. But we do know that in linking Jesus to a sacrificial animal, and identifying Jesus as the one who takes away the sins of the world, the Church began to teach, some 800 years ago, a theology of atonement that is not necessarily helpful.
It’s called substitutionary atonement, and it goes like this: we humans sin. In order for full atonement to be made, blood must be shed. According to this theology, God had Jesus suffer for the sins he did not commit so that God can forgive the sins we do commit. To my way of thinking, it’s not particularly helpful because it not only puts limitations on God’s grace, it puts divine imprimatur on violence. This viewpoint suggests that the ultimate point of the Incarnation was to produce a suitable victim for sacrifice; that God had planned this all along. It’s a convenient theology insofar as it assumes that bloodshed and forgiveness are somehow linked together in the mind of God. That in order for chaos to end and order to be restored, blood must be shed. This troublesome theology of redemptive violence enables us to project on to God all that more properly lies within the darkness of our human hearts.
There is, of course, another image of a sacrificial lamb in Hebrew Scripture that biblical scholars believe fits better with John the Baptist’s proclamation: the Passover lamb whose blood was smeared on the doorposts and lintels of the Hebrew’s homes in Egypt, the very houses that the angel of death passed over. This is the lamb in sacred scripture that saves the people from death, the lamb that will enable them to leave slavery in a foreign land and return to the land that God had promised their forbearers. Their separation from God, their alienation from their birthright, their journey back toward right relationship began with the Passover lamb.
Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, John the Baptist said. Here is the one who will forgive and restore and reconcile you to God from the alien country of sin in which you live. Not because God demands a payment of blood for offenses committed by his people, but because God longs for creation to be set free from the tyranny and oppression of sin.
The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is the Christ in whom the hungry will be fed, the lame will walk, the blind will see, and the outsiders will be brought into fellowship because God’s will for creation is always health and wholeness. And he will carry this paradigm to the cross. Abused, he will refuse to respond in kind. Humiliated and rejected, he will not retaliate. He will not call forth divine destruction from the cross. He will not spare himself the agony of death nor will he inflict it on those who inflicted it on him. He will undergo a horrifying human death and in so doing will visit the place of greatest fear within the human heart so that nothing, nothing is beyond the experience of God himself. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, who takes away eternal separation from God.
By submitting to human violence and by dying, Jesus exposed once and for all the utter falsity and futility of our insane belief in the power of redemptive violence. And he did something more. He led us to a different way: a way of unconditional, self-emptying love. God does not redeem through violence. It has never been part of God’s plan and never will be. God redeems through resurrection, in bringing wholeness from brokenness, restoration from dispossession, new life from death.
