I am a city
boy, and I when the Bible talks in agricultural images I am pretty much at a
loss. So in this evening’s Gospel, when
John the Baptist looks at Jesus and says, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world!”—my first association with lambs is, of course, the recalcitrant
sheep in the movie Babe. Who can ever forget “Baa, ram, ewe. To your
fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe?”
Aggressive
sheep and sheepherding pigs aside, John’s identification of Jesus as the Lamb
of God feels, in this context, pretty startling. In the version of Jesus’s baptism from
Matthew’s gospel we heard in church this morning, John the Baptist confines his
opinions to a simple expression of his own unworthiness when compared with
Jesus: "I need to be baptized by
you, and do you come to me?" [Matthew 3:14] But in tonight’s account from the Fourth
Gospel, John calls Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.
For city folk like you and me, what can that statement possibly mean?
In the
religion of Israel, as in many world religions, animals were used as
sacrificial victims. Especially if I
wanted to atone for a wrong I had committed, I would bring the best animal I
could find (and afford) to the Temple and sacrifice it in the belief that my
own guilt would be transferred to the animal.
Poor people sacrificed pigeons.
The more affluent sacrificed higher quality victims. A perfect lamb was considered the best
possible offering.
So when
John sees Jesus and calls him “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world” he is referring to a whole tradition which the people who followed him
would understand. Even at this opening
moment of his ministry, Jesus is identified as someone whose death will have
consequences for the human community. He
is more than a teacher and a healer. He
is more than a prophet. He is “the Lamb
of God who takes away the sin of the world”.
I have
always been interested in the way Christian symbols have developed over
time. In the earliest days, of course,
the Christian symbol was the ikthus,
the fish. Christianity was an
underground movement, and the Greek word ikthus
served as an acronym for the Greek words “Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior.” The fish symbol was like a secret handshake,
a way of identifying yourself as a Christian in a hidden, subversive way.
A bit later on, as the
Christian community emerged into public life, its primary symbol became the
lamb. If you think about lambs, you
realize that they are not only spotless and pure. They are also innocent. They are not a threat. As the church emerged into a suspicious Roman
world, it wanted to show how peace loving and non-threatening it could be. “We may not worship Caesar as a god, but
we’re not going to overthrow the established order either.” What better symbol than “the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world”? When you look at early Christian
archaeological sites, you see symbolic lambs all over the place.
But in the fourth century,
after the Emperor Constantine made Christianity not only legal but the official
religion of the Roman Empire, the church rather quickly moved to a new symbol
by which to represent itself. Being a
dedicated viewer of the series Mad Men,
I can imagine the decision-making process as a Madison Avenue-style exercise in
marketing. The fish? Too mysterious. The lamb?
Too wimpy. We’re not skulking
around the catacombs anymore! We’re the
official religion of the civilized world! We need an image that subtly projects
power and influence. How about using the cross?
That version of imperial
Christianity’s marketing strategy may sound a bit sarcastic, but I actually
believe that the disappearance of the Lamb of God and the emergence of the
cross signaled the church’s transition from a movement to an institution. A world historical religion couldn’t possibly
use an innocent victim to symbolize itself.
It needed a visual representation of an instrument of state power to
show who was really now in charge.
The great Lenny Bruce once
observed, “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children
would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”
As snarky as that observation sounds, it reminds us that Jesus died at the
hands of state power, and it suggests that we Christians should always approach
power—the power of the state, the power of business, power of our own--with a
huge dose of skepticism.
In coming to John the Baptist
and submitting to John’s baptism, Jesus was saying a couple of things that we
his followers need to hear today. The
first is that he submitted himself to someone else. Jesus’s first public act is not an exertion
of power but an act of submission. Religious
people like to talk about God using the language of power and authority: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord, God of power and
might.” But this first moment of Jesus’s ministry suggests that Jesus
understands God rather differently than you and I do. Just as Jesus submits to John, so the God we
know in Jesus is manifested more in weakness than in power. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world!” Jesus demonstrates his credibility not by a miraculous
demonstration but by an act of submission. We who follow Jesus are called to a
similar kind of humility. Before it was the cross, our symbol was the lamb.
That’s the first thing we
need to hear. And here is the
second: Jesus begins his ministry the
way you and I begin ours, by being baptized.
It is not an accident that Jesus goes through the same act of initiation
that you and I experience as his followers.
One of the ways we talk about the church is to call it the “Body of
Christ”, and what we mean is that in baptism you and I become one with each
other and with Jesus. Baptism is an act
of commissioning, and it’s also an act of solidarity. You and I, together, are Christ in the here
and now. On my own I am not Christ, and
on your own you are not Christ. But
together, we are. In submitting to John’s baptism Jesus not only demonstrated
God’s powerless humility. In submitting
to John’s baptism Jesus showed himself to be one of us, our brother in the
struggle.
“Here is the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world!” On
this, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, Jesus comes to John for
baptism. In submitting himself to that
washing, Jesus has both humbled himself and dignified us. If he is the Lamb of God who takes away the
sin of the world, by virtue of our baptism you and I are, too. You and I,
together, are Christ in the world. You
and I, together, are the ones called to empty ourselves in love for the service
of those who hunger, who suffer, who mourn.
You and I together, are the ones who will bear forth God’s transforming
love to the world.
Jesus’s baptism is our baptism. His ministry is now ours. The best image for that ministry is neither
the secret fish nor the tortuous cross.
As John the Baptist saw when he said it, the best image for our shared
ministry is the lamb. “Here is the Lamb
of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Jesus was baptized and so are
we. So:
“Baa, ram, ewe. To your fleece be true. Baa, ram, ewe!”
Let us, together, live the
baptized life taken on by Jesus, so that all humanity and all creation may be
transformed into the image of the heavenly city toward which we are walking with
the Lamb of God. Amen.
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