I went to seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to a divinity school affiliated with Harvard. In my second year I took a course at Harvard taught by G.H. Williams, the Hollis Professor of Divinity. Williams was an eminent church historian, and with his flowing white hair was the perfect image of a distinguished Ivy League professor. I remember once going to meet him in his office in the bowels of Widener Library to read him my term paper and doing so under the terrifying gaze of a stuffed owl.
Professor Williams amazed the class one day when he got to talking about the historical Jesus and his family. Jesus had a younger brother, James, who became the leader of the Jerusalem church in its early days. “You know,” he said, “one of the reasons I’m a Christian is because Jesus’s own brother believed it. I have a brother, and it would take an awful lot to make me believe him to be the Son of God.”
Something like that—the idea of brothers and credibility—is going on in today’s gospel [John 1: 29-42. Two of John the Baptist’s followers see Jesus, and one of them (Andrew) goes to tell his brother, Simon, “We have found the Messiah.” Simon, who will become Peter, goes to see Jesus and ends up being one of his principal followers, and all because his brother told him to.
I’m an only child, so I have no sibling memories to compare, but something about this story rings true to me. We end up following God because people we trust believe. In this ongoing season of Epiphany, God’s glory is made manifest through the people we know, love, and trust.
The other thing going on in today’s gospel is John the Baptist pointing to Jesus and saying, “Look, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” In those days, Jews used lambs for sacrifice, and so John points toward Jesus as the one who, through his life, death, and resurrection will take away the sin of the world. It’s important to note that John uses the singular word sin, not the plural sins, here. In our individualistic culture we tend to think of sins as particular personal acts like breaking one of the Ten Commandments. When John calls Jesus the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he is speaking of sin in its more general sense. Jesus has come to challenge the chaos and evil at work in the world. His life and death will upend the order of things and free us from the cosmic and social forces that oppress and confuse us.
If this season is about the manifesting of God’s glory throughout all creation, then this morning’s gospel asks us to focus on the good news that spreads through the world as God continues to set things right. God is doing something big and good, and you and I are being called into it. In this regard, our Old Testament reading helps us understand what God is up to in all of this. In the words of Isaiah [Isaiah 49: 1-7] God declares:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to restore the survivors of Israel;
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
God is not only Israel’s God. God is the world’s God.
Jesus continues the God’s onslaught on sin that Israel’s prophets announced earlier in the Bible. The role of Israel (and then the church) will be not only to save itself, but to be “a light to the nations” so that God’s salvation “may reach to the end of the earth.”
Over the course of human history we have seen countless examples of women and men who have been God’s agents in the conflict with sin, people who stood for love and justice in a time when the chaos of sin ran rampant. Tomorrow, you know, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and the point of this holiday (at least to me) is to hold up and remember one who stood for God’s liberating justice in a time and culture of racial chaos and oppression. We remember King not only because he had a dream but because he organized his life and witness around the idea of human freedom. All of us dream. Only a few of us live our lives in such a way that we, too, become a light to the nations, instruments in God’s ongoing work to bless and change the world. As followers of Jesus, we too seek to be a light to the nations so that God’s salvation may reach to the end of the earth.
Which brings us back to the Lamb of God. In Christianity’s earliest days, the lamb was the visual symbol of Christ and the church. If you look at the remains of very early Christian churches, you see far more lambs than crosses. Christians adopted the lamb symbol because of John’s words in today’s gospel. They saw Jesus not only as the sacrificial victim who takes away the sin of the world. They saw him as the one who leads God’s onslaught against sin in the struggle for healing and justice here and now. And he does it as a lamb would do it: peaceably, lovingly, and gently.
Every time I read today’s gospel and hear John describe Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, I wonder about posing an alternative. What if for the past two thousand years Jesus’s followers had been wearing lambs rather than crosses around their necks? What if we had projected an image of gentleness and peace as we go about our loving, reconciling business? Would we have engaged each other and the world differently? Would our visual declaration of standing with those who suffer made us more credible as we sought to bring peace and wholeness to the world? I wonder: how can you and I be agents of God’s quest to take away the sin of the world, to end the personal, social, and moral chaos that are loose even now around us? Seeing Jesus and ourselves as lambs not led to the slaughter but leading the charge against it may be the best way forward for all of us in a time of chaos and rage.
Tomorrow as a nation we celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who challenged the reign of sin in Jesus’s name and pushed the chaos and hatred back for a little while. God’s glory is being made manifest in the many ways faithful people take their place in the work begun in the life and ministry of Jesus. We are all here lovingly to help God in challenging sin in all its forms, even and especially as we see its evidence in ourselves. As John the Baptist said, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” As Andrew said, “We have found the Messiah.” This messianic lamb is also our shepherd, and he will lead and accompany us as we join the fellowship of all those who seek simply to make the world, our community, our household a better place. Jesus’s own brother believed it. That’s good enough for me. Amen.
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