An Elliptical Glory: Lamb of God (Epiphany 2A)

Mosaic "Lamb of God," Ravenna, 5th century

Lamb of God
Homily delivered the Second Sunday after Epiphany (Epiphany 2A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
19 January 2014; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Parish Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
Readings: Isaiah 49:1-7; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9; John 1:29-42; Psalm 40:1-12

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Several years ago, I had a conversation with one of my Hebrew teachers, an Israeli Jew, about faith. He explained that he experienced the holy through identity, being a Jew living in the land his tradition tells him God promised to his people, and through, as he put it, “going through the motions” of being a Jew, saying the prayers, going to Synagogue, keeping, “within reason” as he said, the distinctive practices of his people.

I told him that the heart of my faith was experiencing a sense of forgiveness of my sins and failings because of what Jesus did for me, suffering and dying on the cross. Trying to link my faith to something more familiar, perhaps, for him, I said that my sense of relief of having Jesus’ sufferings substitute for the punishment I thought I deserved was like the story of Abraham binding Isaac in Genesis 22. There, Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son, and at the last minute an angel stops Abraham’s knife by saying that “God himself will provide a ram for the sacrifice,” and lets Isaac off. My friend’s response stunned me: “No, no, no. You’re getting it backward, aren’t you? In Genesis, Abraham is going to sacrifice his child and God tells him not to. But you think that God moves from animal sacrifice and sacrifices his child? And this is a good thing? You Christians seem to be going in the wrong direction on this one.”

Today’s Gospel reading has John the Baptist declaring about Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

I think many of us, when we hear those words, think that John is saying that Jesus will be a sacrificial lamb, killed by God to drive away our sins.

But this understanding is wrong, whether we are talking about what the Baptist may have meant, or how the writer of the Gospel of John understood it.

To begin with, a lamb was not the first animal that would have come to mind to people of that era who wanted to refer to a sacrifice: bulls, goats, or doves were far more common as offerings. The archetypical animal for describing a victim substituted for wrong-doing was a goat, not a lamb. The scape-goat was driven into the wilderness bearing the sins of others away, rather than a lamb. The scape-goat was not a sacrifice. And when sacrifice is talked about, it is not a substituted victim. It is an offering to God, and a sharing with God. You put your hand on the sacrifice not to transfer some kind of mystical fluid of sin or guilt, but to identify the offering as yours, to set it apart as yours.

The only regular use of lamb as an image in common currency in Judaism of that time was the main dish of the Passover meal, but this was not seen so much as a sacrifice but as a joyful sharing in God’s goodness. The image of the people of God as the flock of God, the sheep of his pasture was similarly common, but again, here the idea is not one of sacrifice, but of being cared for by God and gently, graciously receiving God’s care and guidance.

Even the image of the Suffering Servant of Yahweh in Isaiah 53:7, often tied by Christians to the idea of a sacrificial lamb, is not about sacrifice. The Servant suffers injustice without opening his mouth, like a “lamb led to the slaughter, or a sheep silent before its shearers.” This is not about sacrifice. It is a metaphor to describe the suffering servant’s silence.

Besides that, both John the Baptist and Jesus seem to have been at odds with the Temple system, following the prophets’ critique of sacrificial ritual. They may well have agreed with today’s Psalms reading, “In sacrifice and offering you take no pleasure…; Burnt-offering and sin-offering you have not required” (Psalm 40:7-8).

So why would John the Baptist apply the term “Lamb of God” to Jesus? If indeed this goes back to him and is not simply put onto his lips by the writer of the Fourth Gospel, it would have been a reference to an image in the apocalyptic writings that were wildly popular during his era. In such traditions, it would refer to a figure at the end of time who comes to set the world right. But this figure’s focus is not violently punishing the evil-doer and driving away wrong, but rather quiet, peaceful example and teaching. After all, it is the Lamb of God we’re talking about here, not the Lion of God.

And what would the image have meant for the writer of the Gospel of John? Note the exact wording here: “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes way the sin of the world.” Sin singular, not sins plural. What, for the Gospel of John, is the great thing wrong with this world, its sin?

The Gospel of John focuses on one root sin: ignorance of the living and true God, especially by those who claim to know God. Jesus, as the Eternal Word of God made flesh, reveals God as God really is—love and light—and after his death sends the Spirit, the Paraclete or Advocate, to continue revealing it.

In John, the “Sin of the World” is failure to recognize the true character of Jesus, God’s Logos. In the prologue we read, “The light shines in the darkness and darkness does not overcome it. … He was in the world, … yet the world did not recognize him. He came to what was his own, but his own did not accept him” (John 1:5-11). Later in the Gospel, Jesus says, “And when [the Paraclete] comes, he will convict the world of sin … because they do not have faith in me” (John 16:8-11).

Thus, in the Gospel of John, the “Lamb of God who takes away the Sin of the World” is a graphic way of saying “the Revelation of God as gentle and peaceful, a revelation that drives away any misunderstanding we might have about God.”

Just before promising the Paraclete, Jesus says where violence does come from: the ones who reject him will reject his disciples as well. “An hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. But they will do this because they have known neither the Father nor me” (John 16:2-3).

There are several passages in the New Testament, especially in the Letter to the Hebrews, that might lead us to think that the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” is the victim of sacrificial transferred punishment.

But these texts use the sacrificial system of ancient Judaism as a metaphor or point of comparison to express the salvation they see in Jesus. Even one of the letters in the later Johannine tradition says, “But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:1-2). In light of the original meaning of the image in John, however, we must beware of understanding such language literally, as if God demands the sacrifice of Jesus.

I was raised in a tradition that taught that the reason Jesus had to die on the cross was to “pay for our sins.” God was just. We all deserved punishment and death. God the Father sent Jesus so that he could take our place and take the punishment for us. And all we have to do is have faith in Jesus, repent, and follow him. And then we won’t suffer the punishment for our sins.

But this understanding of Jesus’ sufferings as transferred punishment to satisfy God’s dignity is a relatively late doctrine in Christian history, only really showing up in the writing of St. Anselm of Canterbury.

It is, I believe, just plain wrong.

The early undivided Christian Church never defined its doctrine of the atonement. The Nicene Creed says that it was "for us and our salvation" that Christ became incarnate and “for our sake” that he was crucified. But it does not tell us how this was the case. Just 15 years after Jesus’ death, St. Paul quotes the tradition he had received from earlier Christians: “Christ died for our sins" (1 Cor 15:1-5), but again, does not tell us what this means. Paul elsewhere uses more than 15 separate images describing what God accomplished in Jesus, including two borrowed from Temple ritual. It is clear that they are all metaphors, efforts to describe in limited language an act by God that was essentially one of love and reconciliation, not of vengeance or punishment.

The myth of redemptive violence is common in our world today. In movies, we want the good guy to blow away the bad guys and make things right. In our foreign and military policies, we think that violence, applied in a smart and timely fashion, will fix things. In our criminal justice, we think that executing a murderer somehow fixes things. But violence does not fix things, make things right.

I do not believe that Jesus suffered violent punishment in our stead, to save us from getting it ourselves from an angry, vengeful Deity. This is a twisted and wrong image, seen through the narrow and distorted lens of human limitation. Jesus, the peaceful and gentle Lamb of God reveals God’s love, God’s peaceful and gentle intention, and thus drives away our sin of misunderstanding God, of thinking that God demands violence and blood.

The fact is, the “wrath of God” describes more how our relationship with God feels to us when we are alienated from God than it describes God’s heart. And it is we human beings who tend to think that violence can make things right, not God. Jesus died because we sinful people killed him. Our wrong-headed world that thinks that violence can fix things killed him.

Epiphany reminds us again and again of “God in Man made manifest.” Jesus’ resurrection shows that his non-violence in the face of horrible violence actually is the face of God. Love is the face of God. In this light, our Christian belief that Christ “died for us” on the Cross or “sacrificed himself for us” takes on deep meaning. The Cross must never become some sick description of a bipolar child-abusing Deity. When we look at Jesus on the Cross, we see God suffering right along with us, dying along with us. We are glimpsing from the inside what it looks like when God simply loves us, heals us, and forgives us.

Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the Sin of the World.

Thanks be to God, Amen.