An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Lamb of God

A sermon on John 1:29-42 by Nathan Nettleton
The written version of this sermon contains some additional material that was left out of the preached version in the recording.

Many of the words we say in worship each week come straight out of the Bible, and sometimes they are so familiar to us, both in their biblical context and their liturgical context, that we never stop to think about them and what they actually mean. There was a classic example in tonight’s readings. We will sing it later, straight after we share the bread and wine, but we heard it in its original context in tonight’s gospel reading. John the Baptiser saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” If those words are important enough for us to repeat them every week, then they are surely important enough for us to stop and ask what they mean to us. We’ve referred to Jesus as the “Lamb of God” so often that we can easily take it for granted without thinking. But what do we mean by calling Jesus a lamb, and specifically the “Lamb of God”, and what does that have to do with taking away the sin of the world? Does it mean anything to us personally at all?

A warning before we pursue these questions too far. It is likely that there will be several layers to the answers, even within the Bible. What John the Baptiser thought he meant when he used those words is probably not identical to what John the gospel writer meant in the way he then develops it in the story. And then what we understand by those words will have no doubt gone through the filters of the religious traditions we have been shaped by.

It is fairly clear that when John the baptiser said, “Here is the Lamb of God,” he was using a title that already existed and had meaning. He was not inventing a new idea, but identifying Jesus with a familiar and expected figure from the Israelite religious tradition. But which figure? There are several contenders, but given what we know of John’s preaching and of the kind of messiah he expected Jesus to be, it seems most likely that he understood the “Lamb of God” as a powerful conquering messianic figure. Such a figure certainly existed in their traditions, although it appears more often in some of the ancient Hebrew literature that didn’t make it into the Bible. We would be most likely to recognise this powerful lamb from his appearance in the book of Revelation (ch.5) where he is introduced as the “Lion of the tribe of Judah” but who appears as a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes. Horns were symbols of power, so a seven horned animal is a powerful and formidable creature. This lamb also appears as one that has been slaughtered, but that reflects a Christian transformation of the traditional figure in light of the death and resurrection of Jesus, so that is not likely to have been part of John the baptiser’s thinking. The fiery prophet who was anticipating a messiah who would purge the world of evil and baptise us with holy spirit and fire no doubt had in mind a fearsome seven-horned lamb who would conquer God’s enemies and establish a powerful kingdom of righteousness. Such a lamb was spoken of in several ancient Hebrew writings, sometimes appearing with the lion and sometimes, as in Revelation, being both lion and lamb, but certainly as one who conquered the other beasts and punished and purged evil. Probably, when the baptiser spoke of taking away the sin of the world, he imagined a fiery judgement where sin was taken away by the banishing or burning of those who perpetrated evil.

But the other John, John the gospel writer, introduces the idea of the “Lamb of God” by quoting the baptiser, but then he develops it in new directions throughout his gospel, and I don’t think there is any doubt that he takes it in directions that would have confused and disappointed the first John. It is John’s gospel that most clearly links Jesus to the paschal lamb that was sacrificed at the Passover festival. In this gospel we’re told that Jesus died at the same moment that that year’s Passover lamb was sacrificed. So the gospel writer is drawing on a quite different set of lamb images from the Hebrew traditions. As well as the passover lamb, there may be echoes of other lambs who are associated with suffering and salvation, such as the “lamb that is led to its slaughter” in Isaiah’s description of the suffering servant, and perhaps the ram that is substituted for Isaac when Abraham was about to sacrifice his son on the mountain top.

So the way John’s gospel develops the image of the “lamb of God”, we have one who goes through suffering and death to save us. But how, and what does that mean? There is a very widespread but probably wrong assumption made here and that is that the “Lamb of God” brings us salvation by being sacrificed in our place because God demanded that somebody be punished for sin. But even if we accepted that God wanted to see somebody suffer, and there are any number of reasons to question that; even if we accepted that, the link that the gospel writer is making is to the Passover lamb, and the Passover lamb is not sacrificed to secure the forgiveness of sins. If the gospel writer had intended portray Jesus as a sacrifice to purchase God’s forgiveness of our sins, the link would have been to the sacrifice on the Day of Atonement, not to the Passover lamb. The Passover lamb is not about forgiving sins, but helping God’s people escape from slavery. So when we hear “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”, we should not automatically assume that that means the “lamb who is sacrificed to appease some god who needs to see someone punished.” You might also note, that it is the “lamb of God”, not the “lamb sacrificed to God”. That sounds like a lamb that God offers rather than a lamb that God demands.

Now many evangelical theologians have tried to get around that with a rather weird bit of behaviour on God’s part whereby God becomes both the demander of the sacrifice and the offerer of the sacrifice. They say that God is so angry about the world’s sin that nothing other than blood will satisfy him. Someone has to pay, and to pay in blood. God wants someone killed, and will settle for nothing less. But then this murderously angry God is also loving and doesn’t want to hurt us, so he provides the sacrificial victim himself, in the person of his own son, Jesus. Thus, they say, God both demands the sacrifice and provides the lamb, so Jesus is both the lamb of God and the lamb demanded by God. And it can be quite a convenient explanation for us, because it distances us from the whole deal. We didn’t demand the sacrifice and we didn’t chose the victim. We don’t feel that we’ve got blood on our hands. It was God’s doing, and we’re just the grateful beneficiaries.

Now that might provide some sort of logical solution, but at what price? It only works if you first begin with an unquestionable assumption that God is a bloodthirsty monster, incapable of being merciful until sated with the blood of a victim. And to see whether the logic really holds up, try applying it to someone else. If someone else was terribly angry about an evil perpetrated by others, and they wanted to see the evil punished, but then they turned around and said, “you know what, I’ll just kill one of my own kids instead and you guys can go free, and I’ll feel much better,” would you regard that as right minded logic? And more importantly, would you regard it as healthy, constructive and righteous behaviour that was worthy of emulation? Or would you regard it as unmistakable evidence of a dangerously sick mind? The truth is that Jesus spent much of his time trying to overturn such violent and bloodthirsty understandings of God. “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” he quotes God as saying.

Now, it is all very well for me to stand up here and say it’s not this and it’s not that, but what then is it all about. What kind of lamb is Jesus, and how does his being such a lamb take away the sin of the world?

Let me try to explain as briefly and simply as I can. To understand salvation, the first question is what is it that we need to be saved from. Because of the strange logic I’ve just described, we are accustomed to thinking that we need to be saved from God, from God’s anger and God’s need to retaliate and make sinners pay. So being saved from sin means being saved from being receiving capital punishment for sin. But it would be a much simpler, more obvious, and ultimately more biblical answer to say that we need to be saved from the sin of the world itself. From what it will do to us. Sin turns us against each other and sets in motion cycles of violence and revenge and hatred and rage that spiral out of control and threaten to destroy us. We need to be saved from the sin of the world. We need a saviour who will take away the sin of the world before it turns this world into a flaming apocalypse that will fry us all. Hell fire is of our making, not God’s. God is the way out, not the threat.

Now there is another layer of the problem, and that is that we have never worked out any way of dealing with this threat of out-of-control violence except for more violence. You can hear it at its most crude in the American Gun lobby, who say that the only way we can be saved from violence is to give us all guns so that we can get the bad guys before the bad guys get us, and it sounds insane when you put it like that, but our national security policies and our tough-on-crime policies are essentially the same thing. If they’re breeding violent extremists in Afghanistan, we’ll send people with guns in to get them before they get us. But always the biggest threat is from within. It is when the cycles get so out of control that we begin turning on each other that we are most in danger. And what happens then, and it’s been happening since the beginning of time, is that someone points the finger and blames someone else, and then another agrees with them, and then another, and suddenly we are all agreed that we have identified the culprit and we are suddenly all wondrously united and of one accord. There is this wave of euphoria as people who were is real danger of tearing one another apart are suddenly standing shoulder to shoulder, in one heart and one voice, chanting together, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” And blood is spilled and a victim dies, but the people are saved because all that murderous hostility that was reaching boiling point has been channelled and released in a way that reunited us.

And unless you happen to be the unlucky one who was somehow chosen to be the scapegoat this time, that system works. It has worked for millennia, and it has repeatedly saved human communities from tearing themselves apart. But it is a sick solution because it is based on lies, and because the peace and salvation it brings never last. The cycles slowly crank up again, and the hostility builds up, and before long people are flying planes into skyscrapers or some such thing and we are back where we started, with the only way to recapture our strength and unity being to identify another “enemy”, and repeat the lie that this one is the cause of the present evil, and sure enough, the wondrously unifying chant goes up again, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” The sacrificial monster is fed another victim, and its bloody hunger is sated for a little while, until it all begins to build up again.

For this system of saving ourselves from our own sin by feeding the sacrificial monster to keep working, there are two huge lies that need to be maintained, and one of the reasons that the whole system is now breaking down and allowing violence to run even further out of control is that more and more people are having more and more trouble believing the two necessary lies.

The first is that the chosen victim really is the source of the evil, and the second is that the sacrificial monster is God. And those two lies are closely related because if God wants the blood of the evildoer, then we are entirely justified in doing God’s will by ridding our world of this source of evil and handing him over to God.

In Jesus, God steps in to the scene because God is so dismayed at not only the waves of violence that repeatedly threaten us, but at the blasphemous and blood-thirsty fraud that we have maintained to save ourselves. Jesus comes to save us from both the problem and our failed and violent solution. And the only way that he can do that is to unmask the two great lies, and to do that, he must become the lamb of God who offers himself to the sacrificial monster which is indeed, the sin of the world. Our sin, in our world. He unmasks the lie of the guilt of the victim by showing how, in the face of this system, perfectly innocent unbounded love and mercy will, in fact, be the first thing to cause the fingers to begin pointing and the chant to begin rising, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” And he unmasks the lie of the blood-thirsty God by, even in suffering and death, and out the other side of death, revealing God’s utterly non-retaliatory love and infinite capacity to absorb our hostility and keep on loving and forgiving and offering himself to us and for us and for all the world.

Now out of that comes two bits of bad news, and then the good news. Bad news number one: we humans have got blood all over our hands. The sacrificial monster is of our own making, and we are the ones that pick out the victims and hide ourselves amidst the chanting mob. And bad news number two: when the system is unmasked and people begin doubting the great lies that maintained it, the first thing that happens is that everything gets worse because the system that kept the violence contained at manageable levels breaks down and the brakes are off. And we in the churches have drawn it out even longer by reworking the old lies and trying to fit Jesus into the the old beliefs in an angry God demanding blood.

Now the good news. Jesus is indeed the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He has not only been the sacrificial lamb, offered by God to us, to unmask and discredit and disempower the scapegoating system, he has also opened and modelled the way out of the initial problem — the sin of the world with its constant cycles of everyone trying to get even with everyone. Though we had the blood of a thousand victims on our hands, we now find ourselves totally forgiven by the ultimate innocent victim, who embraces us with wounded hands, and paints his own blood on our doorposts to say that violence and death no longer belong here and we now free to passover into the promised land where sin and death are no more. Jesus has revealed to us the utterly gracious and non-vengeful nature of God, and shown us that surrendering ourselves to that love and modelling ourselves on that example is the way out of the land of fear and death and into the promised land that overflows with the milk and honey of life and love and freedom and the sweet sweet fragrance of never-ending forgiveness. Lamb of God, you truly take away the sin of the world! Christ our passover is sacrificed. Let us keep the feast!

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