LAMB OF GOD

As Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber often says, preaching is a spoken act and so much of the meaning comes in the hearing of it. If you would like to hear/watch this piece, here is the link: https://www.christchurchgp.org/media/347pgvz/sermon-1-18-26

I come from a long line of serious treasure hunters – my family loves to thrift shop and many years ago I stumbled across one of those big aqua blue picture bibles that they used to have in doctor’s offices…some of you might remember them from the 70’s. They had very colorful and intricate illustrations, and so for nostalgia I bought it for my daughter who was about 3 or 4 years old at the time.

On the drive home, she was sitting happily in her car seat, flipping through the pages when suddenly she gasped and said “Ooooh mama, this book is not for kids….”

I had a series of panicky flashes of all the terrible things that could be stuck between the pages…     God only knows who donated it….so I pulled over and asked her to show me what she was looking at…and she held up a graphic illustration of the crucifixion.

And she was right… I had handed a book to my toddler featuring pictures of a violent murder.

Sometimes I think the striking image of the cross no longer hits us full force. We’ve become desensitized.

The crucifix has been tamed into a flimsy fashion statement. Isn’t it startling that the primary symbol of our faith is an instrument of torture?

So when John the Baptist declares “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” what are we really being asked to behold?

Many Christians still believe the disturbing theory that God was angry with humanity, needed satisfaction, so Jesus was sent as a lightning rod to pay our debt and absorb all the divine wrath over our sin.

But sacrificing victims to satisfy a hungry god is an ancient pagan concept.

The Jewish priestly rite that John the Baptist grew up with—that his own father Zechariah performed in the temple—was already light years beyond this primitive understanding.

When John identified Jesus as the Lamb of God, his Jewish audience would have immediately thought of Passover when their ancestors smeared lamb’s blood across their doorways to protect them and mark them as God’s own, liberating them from slavery.

They knew this sacred story inside and out.

They would also recall when Moses took the blood of sacrifice and sprinkled it on the people, saying “Let this be a sign of the covenant that the Lord has made with you…I will be your God and you will be my people.’

So, at this point in history, the act of sacrifice in the temple was not understood as offering up animals to placate a hungry god, but rather the direction is opposite…it is God coming down to renew creation and repair our relationship…it’s a form of communion…a partnership in restoration.

John the Baptist—son of a priest, steeped in temple theology—knew this. When he calls Jesus “the Lamb of God,” he’s is giving witness to God’s movement towards us, God’s initiative to restore and heal all that is broken in our world, to mark us as God’s beloved.

If we cling to the pagan idea that God will not forgive us until his son has been tortured to death, then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes.

We believe that in the life and death of Jesus Christ, God communicates God’s very self to us…Jesus is God’s ultimate revelation…God incarnate….                 A demonstration of the power of suffering love; the only power able to bring about real and lasting change.

“The mission of Jesus from the Father is NOT the mission to be crucified; what the Father wished is that Jesus should be a loving human being.” (Francis McCabe God Matters, commentary on St. Thomas Aquinas)

Jesus was sent to guide us back to the path of life, to absorb our brutality and forgive us, so as to show the folly of our violence, to proclaim once and for all that God desires mercy, not sacrifice.

John could call out sin, but he could not bear it away. (John Shea) That’s the difference between his baptism of repentance and Jesus’ baptism in transformation.

Anyone who has tried to overcome an addiction knows—clear vision and strong resolution is the first step, but where do we find the strength to actually change? Grace and community provide what willpower alone cannot. (Ron Rolheiser)

This is what Jesus brings that John cannot: not just the diagnosis, but the cure. Not just the vision of what should be, but the power of the Holy Spirit to get us there.

Jesus gathers people. He invites them to “come and see.” Andrew runs to find Simon. Philip runs to find Nathanael. This is the beginning of a movement, a new Spirit-led way of being human together.

When Jesus asks those first disciples “What are you looking for?” and they respond “Where are you staying?”—they’re asking the deepest question: Where does God dwell?

And Jesus answers: “Come and see.” Come witness where God abides—follow me in gathering unlikely people into a community of tenderness and radical belonging.

Co-create with me a culture of kindness that provides a soft place for hard conversations, rewiring humanity to be peacemakers, to restore relational wholeness and unity.

Yet our world still operates on the deception that peace can be achieved through force. This week shows that we have not progressed much beyond the Romans who lined the roads leading into Jerusalem with crosses, to keep the peace when the city swelled from 40,000 people to over 200,000 during Passover.

Crucifixion was death by public helplessness, a symbol of complete control and domination to anyone who would challenge the empire.

But Jesus shows us the ‘still more excellent way’ (St. Paul) oflove that absorbs violence without passing it on, breaking the cycle rather than perpetuating it.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.’

The story of Jesus is what the life of God, the life of love itself, looks like when projected onto the screen of sinful human history.

Jesus’ life was so colorful and tragic because the cross reveals the world WE have fashioned—one in which it is dangerous and sometimes even fatal to be a compassionate, courageous, and loving human being. (McCabe)

Violence isolates. It makes us turn on each other and feeds on keeping us afraid and separate.

But Jesus is like a water filter, taking in violence, shame, and alienation and putting out love, nonviolence, and boundless acceptance. He was sent to teach US how to create a community of kinship such that God might recognize it. To help us realize our oneness…that there is no us and them, just us.(Boyle)

Fr. Greg Boyle says “The strategy of Jesus is not centered in taking the right stand on issues, but rather in standing in the right place—with the outcast and those in need, with the powerless and the voiceless, with those whose dignity has been denied and those whose burdens are more than they can bear.”

This is the dream Jesus came to share, the kingdom, it is the metanarrative our children need, that WE need to keep hope alive.

Behold, the Lamb of God. Look. See. God is among us…bidding us to come and see. Amen.