Lamb of God (Epiphany 2A)

 

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

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
18 January 2026; 9:30 Sung Eucharist
Ascension Lutheran Church (ELCA), Medford (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.

  

When my second son David was about nine, he asked me a hard question: “Why did God have to kill his Son Jesus off to pay for our sins? Doesn’t that make him a very bad Father? Why couldn’t he have just been bigger-hearted and forgiven us when we’re sorry? Isn’t that what he expects from us?”

I tried to give an easy answer, something like that of the Evangelical Alpha Course:  God is just, and fairness demands that sin be punished.  We are all sinners.  It was God’s mercy and love that demanded that he send Jesus to suffer such punishment in our stead if only we have faith in him.  

 

David would have none of it: “If God is really boss of everything, he can make things any way he wants. So why did he make them so that he had to kill off his own Son?  It just isn’t fair to punish someone for someone else’s faults, and torturing your child to death certainly isn’t loving.”   

I replied that Jesus and the Father were one God, and so God himself was actually volunteering to die for us on the Cross because of his love.  No go: “Then why does Jesus in the garden pray, ‘Please don’t let this happen to me?’” 

 

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 pay for 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 an animal  victim substituted for wrong-doing was a goat, not a lamb.  The scape-goat was not killed, just driven into the wilderness. The scape-goat was not a sacrifice. 

 

And when sacrifice is talked about, it is not about punishment meted out to a substituted victim.  It is a shared meal with the deity, food and drink offering to God which in turn is offered back to the worshippers. 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. So you could share in the meal it produced.  

 

The only regular use of lamb as an image in common currency was the main dish of the Passover meal, but the kosher rules for butchering animals were in place to prevent suffering of the animals, not to cause it.  Again, the point was sharing in God’s goodness.  The meal had to be eaten completely, with no leftovers, so you were expected to invite in your neighbors to share in the meal. 

 

The image of the people of God as a flock, the sheep of his pasture was similarly common, but here it is about being gently cared for by God. 

 

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 equanimity the suffering servant shows in the face of death.

 

Besides that, both John the Baptist and Jesus seem to have had issues with the Temple system, following the prophets’ critique of sacrificial ritual, as in 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?  It is an image in the apocalyptic writings that were wildly popular during his era referring a figure at the end of time who comes to set the world right.  But this is not through 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. 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 share the sin of the world, who reject Jesus.  “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 refused to know the Father and me” (John 16:2-3). 

There are several passages in the New Testament, especially in the Letter to the Hebrews, that are often used as proof-texts for the idea Jesus was a sacrificial victim.  But these texts use the sacrificial system of ancient Judaism as a metaphor 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).  Hebrews is saying that Jesus’ death and resurrection brings us reconciliation with God, like the shalom or hattat sacrifices of the Temple. 

 

In the Alpha Course version of the atonement I tried unsuccessfully to sell my son David, Jesus had to die on the cross to “pay for our sins.”   

 

But this understanding of Jesus’ sufferings as transferred punishment to satisfy God’s offended dignity is not found as such in the Bible, but rather is a relatively late doctrine in Christian history, only really showing up in the writings of St. Anselm of Canterbury, in the twelfth century CE. 

 

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 drawns from all realms of life to describe what God accomplished in Jesus, such as reconciliation of estranged friends, acquittal of a crime, rescue on the field of battle, ransom from slavery or being a hostage, healing, a new creation, etc.  They include two borrowed from Temple ritual: purgation of ritual pollution through a sacrifice, and having sin covered over or taken away through a sacrifice.  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.  Movies 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 never fixes things, never makes things wholly 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, that demeans and cheapens what Christ did for us.  

 

No Jesus, by taking on our mortality and suffering evil--even unjust death--along with the rest of us showed us God’s solidarity with us.  In his victory over death and what killed him, sin, he gives us the chance to follow him. As Paul says in Romans, salvation through Jesus comes from his participation in our human life and death and our participation in his death by baptism and his eternal life by living in the spirit. Not one word about substitution here, just participation. 

 

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. 

 

The season of 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.