Behold, the Lamb of God

First UMC Fort Dodge

January 20, 2008

Mark Haverland

John 1:29‑42

²⁹The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! ³⁰This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ ³¹I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” ³²And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. ³³I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ ³⁴And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” ³⁵The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, ³⁶and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”

³⁷The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. ³⁸When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” ³⁹He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o”clock in the afternoon. ⁴⁰One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. ⁴¹He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). ⁴²He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).

Imagine that Jesus is asking you: What are you looking for? It’s not an unfamiliar question. We hear it every day. We hear it from sales clerks, whenever we walk into a store. We hear it from realtors and college admissions offices. We hear it from prospective employers. We even hear it from pastors, when we are seeking a church home. What are you looking for?—in a house or a school or a job or a church? It’s an important question, and it’s usually the first question, signaling that we are serious; that we mean business. So, what are you looking for? Why have you come to church today? You are following Jesus and he turns to ask, “What are you looking for?” Are you looking for an experience? Are you looking for understanding? Are you looking for eternal life? Are you looking for help? Are you looking for love? We are all looking for something. We Christians sum up our answer to this question by saying: “We are looking for Jesus.” “Well, come and see,” says Jesus. So, we have come. What do we see?

According to the Gospel of John, what we see is the Lamb of God. I tried to find a good graphic image of the Lamb of God for the bulletin and the projected slides. Visuals always help us learn. But all the images I saw were either of some rock group called the Lamb of God or of some sweet, cuddly little lambs or sheep. Jesus is a lamb for the Gospel of John, but John had something a bit stronger in mind. Lambs in the first century were a sacrificial animal. In other words, lambs took on religious value only when they die. Those who heard John’s words in the first century knew right away that Lambs get killed so we can live. The Lamb of God is the bleeding, dying, sacrificial lamb which saves our lives by giving up his. So the image of the lamb of God which John evokes is not the benign image we might first imagine.

Charles Frazier wrote a novel a few years ago called, Cold Mountain - A Novel. It has since been made into a Hollywood movie. It’s a Civil War story of a man who deserts from the Confederacy and walks back to his home in Cold Mountain, North Carolina. Along the way good people and bad, those who help and those who harm, Good Samaritans and vigilantes, contribute to his many adventures. One particular scene stood out for me. As Inman makes his way through some remote woods, he comes upon an old woman who raises goats. The goats provide companionship and food for the woman as she lives her reclusive existence in the hills, hiding from something which is never made clear. They live with her as pets, but she also eats them and sells their milk and hides. She befriends Inman and hosts him for a few days. She even saves his life by sacrificing one of her animals for food. She calls her trusting animal over to her side and strokes it, speaking gently to it about what a special gift it is about to give a starving man, she cuts its throat and it bleeds to death while in her arms. They eat the succulent, roasted flesh and life is restored to the starving wanderer. The goat dies so that the people may live. The sweet overtones of Jesus are surely not unintentional.

That animals die for us has been long taken for granted, even though we are a bit squeamish about the details. In fact, most animals are of value only when they are dead. And so it is that when John the Baptist calls Jesus the “lamb of God,” he means that only as Jesus dies will he become the savior of us all.

The Gospel of John likes to talk about Jesus as the Lamb of God. The other gospels hardly use this image at all. Sheep used to be a lot more important animals than they are today. For much of human history, humans have known about sheep and especially about the how and why of their deaths. For us moderns, however, sheep are just another dumb, dirty animal. And their death is carefully sanitized and removed from our view, as the death of all animals we eat. The image of Jesus as a lamb, as a cuddly animal, has some appeal, but the image of Jesus as a bleeding, dying animal is confusing to us, at best. And being washed in the blood of the lamb, an image in many gospel hymns, seems barbaric and disgusting when you think about it too closely. But to the people in the time of Jesus, lambs and their death had great religious as well as nutritional significance. It was lamb’s blood that the Hebrews painted on their door frames as a way to tell the avenging angel of death to pass over their homes and take the first born only of the Egyptians. As a result, sacrificing, dismembering and splashing the blood of lambs became a sacred ritual duty of the priests. We get a little nervous when baptismal water is spilled on the carpet, imagine what it would be like if the baptismal font was filled with actual lamb’s blood, which was then splashed on the floor. What exactly are we supposed to do with the words to a hymn like There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood? I am way too squeamish to deal well with the thought of being washed clean in the blood of the lamb, another image from gospel music. Too messy for us, this was almost a literal expectation for some of John’s audience.

The notion that Jesus, like the lamb of the Passover, had to die in order to be the messiah was a hard sell, at first. Who wants a savior who dies? And the fact that Jesus died on a cross was not much help. The cross was as ignominious a death as you could imagine, sort of like being executed in the electric chair today. Imagine a religion that used the electric chair or the hangman’s noose as their symbol. We’d think they were a satanic cult. Some apparently did think this of the early Christians. But somehow John successfully used a symbol of sacrificial death to represent Jesus to the faithful Christians of his time. Perhaps the early Christians were not as uncomfortable with the messiness of death as we are today. Death of any kind gives us the creeps.

I remember taking Faith on her first fishing trip. We were on a canoeing trip in northern Maine. The area was very primitive and wild. She caught her first fish on that trip, and it was a very special fish at that: a land locked salmon. I had never caught such a fish either, so I was especially happy for her. And she was initially pretty proud of herself. But as she grasped the fish to take the hook out, the fish gave out a loud croaking sound as she squeezed its sides. This scared her a bit, but more than that, it startled her with the realization that successful fishing meant that the fish had to die. This is a problem. It’s hard to fish or hunt if you don’t like the thought of something dying. Faith wants to quit fishing if we don’t catch fish because she’s bored, and she wants to quit fishing if we catch fish because she feels sorry for the fish. She is by no means a vegetarian, but I’m convinced she roots for the fish and the pheasants when we go fishing and hunting. She is a good companion on these trips, but not sufficiently disappointed when I fail to land a fish or miss an easy shot on a bird. I can almost hear her say, “yes!” Death is a little too messy for her.

A story circulates about a minister doing a children’s sermon on the Sunday of MLK weekend; today as a matter of fact. He enjoyed telling the story of the great civil libertarian and his courageous words and deeds for freedom. When he came to the end, he asked if anyone knew what MLK did for a living. He was finally able to coax out of them that Martin Luther King was a minister of a church. As the pastor straightened his necktie and sat a bit taller and tried to look a bit more distinguished, he wondered aloud about the possibility of a holiday being named after him. Across a couple of rows of pews came an innocent whisper that must have sounded like Jesus himself, “You have to die first.”

Faith and I are fans of the mystery series on public TV. Our favorite mystery is the Cadphael series, where a medieval monk solves murders in his small twelfth century monastery and nearby village. Inevitably someone suffers an untimely death at the hands of some cruel villain and Cadphael solves the mystery usually by examining the dead body. The body of the deceased is laid out in the open on a elevated platform so that Cadphael can touch it and look into the wounds and clothing, in the hair, under the fingernails for clues to the killer’s identity. I’m always struck with the ease with which Cadphael and the other monks touch and examine and stand around the body to discuss the imagined events which led to death. I’ve stood close to dead people, but I have never had a casual conversation while doing so. It has always seemed like a highly charged experience.

How different from where we began. When God gave specifics on how to worship to the children of Israel, it became clear the Lord is not squeamish about death. “Build a temple, “ says God, “a great temple where my name shall dwell. And take animals into the temple, very small animals, like doves and great big animals like bulls, and slaughter them there. Take their blood and pour it over all the sides of the altar. “This,” God said, “is what I require of you.”

“To save yourselves from death, you must take a lamb,” God told the frightened followers of Moses as they struggled to free themselves from bondage to the Pharaoh. “Slaughter it and paint your doorposts and lintels with its blood.” Worship, it seems, has for a long time relied on the spilling of blood. It’s as if our sin is so great, our salvation so costly, that something or someone has to die to pay for it.

Going even further back in our tradition we encounter human sacrifice itself. God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son and then in a dramatic turn-around, relents, ending what must have been, until that time, a normal part of worship, the sacrificing of a human being on the altar of God. From that time on, animals replaced people as the sacrificial animal of choice. And now we don’t even allow animals in church at all, much less kill them during the offering. We’ve come a long way from those grizzly days.

We no longer sacrifice much of any thing, of course. We don’t need to. This is because Christ became the final sacrifice. John called out, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Jesus is the Passover lamb for us. His blood will be spilled once and for all so we won’t have to spill actual blood anymore each week in our worship services. Thank goodness for that. Instead, we sing about being plunged headfirst into the blood of Christ. “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!” But we don’t mean this literally.

I have to admit I am glad that I didn’t go to seminary to learn how best to bleed an animal for ritual sacrifice in a worship service. I know that animals die for our entertainment and our nourishment. However, I’m grateful that they no longer die for our spiritual nurture. I hate to think what the temple smelled like after a long day of ritual death and dismemberment. But we may have lost something if we do not remember that the blood of Christ was just as real as the blood of those sacrificial animals. Simply because it isn’t thrown against our altar every week does not mean that we can overlook its meaning. In communion, we don’t actually drink blood, we don’t even drink real wine, but we celebrate nonetheless that Christ has died for us and for our salvation. He died a real death as awful and messy as any we can imagine. What do we see when we see the Lamb of God? We see the Lamb of God who died so that we may live.

An Epiphany Prayer:

Changeless God of the changing seasons; constant God of the rolling spheres; infinite God of unending mercy; intimate God of our sighs and our tears: we thank you for gathering us in from everywhere and from nowhere, in our eagerness and in our reticence, with our faith and with our misgivings, and calling us by name to be your people.

We thank you for this Epiphany season in which we are reminded that the light of your love has entered our world through the radiant face of Jesus Christ. His face makes love more than an abstraction. His life makes faithfulness specific and real. His sacrifice redeems all suffering. His resurrection calls us to trust in the triumph of life, even in this world that can frighten us to death.

Like him we have been baptized. Like him we have been called by name. Like him we have died to ourselves, that we might be born to you. Like him we have been called to serve. Like him we have been given ministries. Like him we know temptations and trials. Like him we would pray for forgiveness. Like him we would let our lives shine to give glory to you.

By our baptism, let the spirit of Christ live in us. And let us live in him. Amen

Receive our hearts during this offering, gracious God. Receive the gifts of our tithes and offerings for the sake of your mission and as a sign of our willingness to serve. Receive our intentions of faithfulness in these prayerful moments. Receive the new commitment of our gifts and energies that they might be yoked to your work in bringing your salvation to all of creation. But mostly, receive our hearts as they have been warmed by a new awareness of your deep love for each and all of us. Because of Jesus we make this our prayer.

Amen.