John 1:29-42
January 15, 2017
I.
One of the many things bothering me right now is the apparent collapse of a consensus in our country and in the world generally about what is true. One of the words that has become current lately is “fake news.” It originally referred to sensationalistic and entirely invented news stories, usually appearing on Facebook. But the term has already devolved to mean “any news I don’t like.” In many debates these days we don’t even agree on the raw facts and data.
Too often even science is bought by industry. Many of us simply don’t know whom to trust. For instance, in an area close to my own heart as a honey addict, I find apparently reputable sources that claim that the bee population is in existential crisis, mainly due to pesticides, and others that say everything’s fine, bee populations are actually increasing. One has to sift through the statistical fine print and the technical definitions, and the methodology and funders and ideological commitments of the various studies, just to get a guess at which might be closer to being accurate. Who has time for that? There’s a reason why our reflexive cultural response to everything is, “Whatever….”
Not that the previous consensus was good at all, mind you! The elites enforced a version of “truth” that justified and rationalized their own privilege, wealth, and power. Going back to the 1950’s is not in any sense getting back to truth, or Jesus or God. The whole reason we have no consensus now is that the old consensus didn’t work. It was a superstructure of self-serving lies. It collapsed of the weight of its own falsehood and evil.
When Jesus appears before Pontius Pilate, at one point in their conversation he says, “For this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate, the cynical, jaded politician then scoffs, “What is truth?” In his understanding the truth belongs to whomever has the loudest voice and the most brutal army. And that is the way it is in “the world” we have thought up.
We Christians know that the Truth is standing there in front of him in Jesus Christ, who is “the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” But what does that mean beyond a vague religious confession? For Pilate’s question is in all of our hearts right now, as the very foundations of our civilization — what we hold in common as truth, goodness, and beauty — is being shaken. What is truth? How is Jesus Christ our truth? How do we base our lives on him? How does he become the framework that orders and gives meaning to our world? How do we frame our common life according to him?
II.
In today’s reading, John the Baptizer recognizes Jesus and points him out to others as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” He knows this because he saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove and land on him. God had told him that this would be the indication that the person is God’s Son. So John, when he sees this, is excited to go around telling people, “This is the guy!”
“The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” is how John first describes Jesus. In using this title he is conflating two passages from the Hebrew Scriptures. The first is that of the Passover Lamb, whose blood rescues the Israelites from the angel of death in Exodus 12. The second is the scapegoat in Leviticus 16, who has the people’s sins placed upon him, and who then takes those sins away into the desert, to the demon from whom they came.
Christ’s function in this world is to take away its sin. That is, he removes from the world its chronic disability by which it invariably misses the mark. He takes away the world’s error, falsehood, untruth, illusion, blindness, and paralysis. He takes away the separation, the distorting veil, between the-world-as-we-know-it and the truth. To take away sin is to reconcile God and the world.
Christ is the supreme witness to the truth. He IS the truth. He shows us in his own life what is real and good. Whether we are in a time when someone has the power to enforce a consensus about what is supposedly true, or in a time like ours when that consensus is collapsing before our eyes, it doesn’t matter. He and he alone demonstrates for us what the truth is about the world.
And he does this by taking on himself the role of the lamb, the scapegoat, the sacrificial animal, in these stories and rituals from his own Jewish tradition. He becomes the victim, the servant, the one who gives up his own life and freedom for others. He empties himself; he becomes God’s outpouring of love for the world.
So to a world that has believed since the 1600’s that truth is whatever we can measure and predict with our reason and senses, and that truth is obtained by dissection and analysis — that is, by killing things — and that truth is whatever makes money… Jesus says no. Truth, he says, is not found by turning things and people into objects that we use according to our desires. Truth is in fact letting go of our desires and even our separateness — which is our sin, by the way, the illusion that we are disconnected from everything else — and losing ourselves in love, communion, participation, integration, mutuality.
So, as an example: In order to know that global warming is happening I do not have to measure the temperature of the atmosphere. I just have to read the Scriptures and notice what happens to every civilization that falls into idolatry, greed, violence, selfishness, and injustice, what happens to every empire that overextends itself in its own hubris and self-righteousness. They fall. Every culture that lives by domination rather than cooperation, falls. Every nation that oppresses and marginalizes the poor, the weak, the sick, the workers, women, strangers, and minorities, falls. Every government that looks, thinks, and acts like Pilate and not like Jesus, falls. This is just our version of it.
III.
John’s disciples are not put off by the description of the Messiah, the Son of God as a “Lamb who takes away sin.” They know what that means. The usual manner in which animals symbolically take away sin in the Hebrew Scriptures is by having their throats cut. They are not attracted to Jesus in spite of this; they are attracted to him because of it. Not that they want their own throats cut, but because they know that the way of life is that the old existence has to die so the new life can be born.
In Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship there is a statement that thrilled me when I read it as a 17 year-old: “When Christ calls someone, he bids them come and die.” Not that I was a suicidal, pre-goth kid. But something inside me was looking for something to give my life to. I wanted to be a part of something worth living and even dying for. That’s what these disciples of John are looking for too. They’ve done the whole get-dunked-in-the-water thing, camped out in the wilderness with John. Now what?
Remember that all this is happening in the context of John’s baptismal ministry. We fill the baptismal font every Sunday to remember our baptism. Remembering our baptism is a way we talk about reminding ourselves that we have symbolically died to sin and been reborn to eternal life. Our separateness, our ego-centricity, our selfishness has been washed away. That person — who didn’t really exist, but was just a projection of rage and fear of a limited mortal — has died. A new person, who is really our true, original, deepest self, has been allowed to emerge.
We can now continue to exist in the lie, or we can live in the truth. We can follow Pilate, or we can follow Jesus. We can live the counterfeit existence of domination and control, or we can let that go and rise into the life of love, peace, and justice.
The “now what?” appears to John’s disciples in Jesus, the Lamb of God, the One who is on a mission to take away the world’s sin, and give his life for the life of the world. He is our “now what?” Our job is to follow him, find out where he lives, that is, discover his truth, his way, his life, his principles, values, practices, habits, language, and story, and stay with him. It is to find and remain within his world.
This is the life of repentance, of gaining a new way of thinking and acting that is in accordance with Jesus Christ. It explicitly means rejecting the ways of falsehood, injustice, idolatry, and evil. Which means it is about dying to our old self, giving up all our possessions, losing our life, and taking up our cross in discipleship. One thing I have learned in my life is that the right decision is almost always the hardest, because the right decision in any situation is the one that goes against the deep grain of my old, self-righteous, ego-centric self. Whatever we least want to do, whatever is most difficult and costly, that is most likely the way that Jesus is calling us to go.
IV.
Jesus Christ is the truth, and we know and share in the truth when we live in obedience to him, expressing his humility, his gentleness, his simplicity, his generosity, his forgiveness, his peace, and his love, in all we do, with everything and everyone. This is what Jesus will proceed to teach in the rest of this gospel. This is what he is calling his disciples to do and how he wants them to act.
For in the end it doesn’t matter that so many things we took to be true in 1960 have been deflated as false. Our job is not to separate true from false; it is to be true, to be good, to be real, and to be faithful disciples of Jesus Christ sharing in his mission, becoming by grace what he is by nature, and showing how he takes away the sin of the world.
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