March 20, 2008
(Good Friday)
Our Passover Lamb
by
The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Isaiah 52:13-53:12
• Psalm 22
• Hebrews 10:16-25 or 4:14-16;
5:7-9
• John 18:1-19:42
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Had an opportunity several weeks ago to drive from Kansas City to St. Louis. With three hours of drive time looming large before me, I thought to load up my CD player with music to sustain me for the trip. Handel’s Messiah got me most of the way there, and back again. Weeks later, one of the choruses has stayed with me. Not the one that you might expect, the one often associated with Christmas but which actually is the Easter proclamation. No, the chorus that has stayed with me Handel inserted during the crucifixion portion, even though the text chronologically occurs much earlier in the gospel accounts: Behold the Lamb of God.
Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
John the Evangelist gives us these words in the mouth of John the Baptist very early in Jesus’s earthly ministry, fully eighteen chapters before the passion account we just heard. Our lectionary appointed it for the second Sunday of Epiphany this year and in a sermon I preached on that day, I theorized that the Lamb of God, of which the Baptist speaks, perhaps finds its fullest expression when understood as the Passover lamb. We heard the account of the sacrifice of the Passover lamb in the passage from Exodus last night at our Maundy Thursday liturgy; let me share it with you again now:
The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household…Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male…you shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it…The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt…This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.
Let’s think about these details for just a moment. The blood of the slain lamb was to be smeared on the vertical doorposts and horizontal lintels of Hebrew households so that the angel of death would know to pass over their households, so that they might live and leave Egypt and return to the land that God had promised to their ancestors. The lamb was to nourish the people of God in their journey from bondage to freedom. Its blood was to be a sign of the victory of life over death, of the triumph of God over the hegemony of earthly rulers. The slaughter of the Passover lamb carried no cultic significance beyond that of nourishment and protection. It was not a sacrifice in order to expunge or atone for the sins of the community. There was nothing about the shedding of the blood of the lamb per se that satisfied a debt that the people owed to God. God’s honor was neither protected nor restored in this sacrifice. The lamb was sacrificed in order to feed God’s beloved people and to save them from the angel of death who, upon seeing the blood, would pass over their homes and not visit death upon them. This was a gift of astonishing grace to the people of God. Their separation from God, their alienation from their birthright, living lives of slavery was their reality in Egypt. Their journey back toward right relationship began with the Passover lamb.
John the Evangelist, alone of all the gospel writers, tells us that the crucifixion of Jesus was completed before twilight on the day of preparation. Twilight on the day of preparation was the time at which the Passover lambs were slaughtered in memory of that fateful night when the blood of a lamb without blemish saved the people from death. John the Evangelist is far too careful of a writer for the inclusion of that detail to be a coincidence.
Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for us. Or to put the emphasis even more clearly, Christ our Passover Lamb has been sacrificed for US. He is the Lamb of God, who forgives and restores and reconciles us to God from the alien country in which we live. His blood was shed for us not because God demands a payment of blood for offenses committed by his people, but because God longs for creation to be restored to oneness with him in everlasting life.
Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Behold the one whose death overturns the power of death to have the final say. Behold the one whose death obliterates that last chasm and restores us in oneness with the God who made us.
