Lamb of God.

John 1:19-34.  (January 11, 2015)

I.

            We have already met this man named John.  He is the witness, testifying to the light of God, who is coming into the world.  We heard about him last week when we read the Prologue to this gospel.  He’s very important.  But his importance is not so much about who he is, as it is about the One to whom he points. 

            Leaders of the Judeans send some priests to ask him who he is.  They want to stick him in a category.  I guess we always want to categorize people.  We want to place them in a defined box because it is much easier to deal with a box than with an actual human being.

            We still do this all the time.  We look at the titles, the associations, the education, the race, the looks and language, the background of people.  Then we can dismiss them as part of a category.  If we can argue with them about their faithfulness to the category, then we don’t have to deal with them as people.  So this delegation from the leaders wants to know who John is.

            They come with a convenient list of categories he can choose from, and they go down this list.  “Are you the Messiah?”  To that question, John says, “No.”  And the gospel here makes a point of reiterating John’s denial of this particular title.  “Are you Elijah?” they ask.  I mean, after all, he is baptizing in the same wilderness where Elijah had lived, and where Elijah had been taken up into heaven by God, accompanied by a fiery chariot.  In the other gospels they make a point of saying how John even dressed like Elijah.  But “No,” says John, “I am not Elijah.”  “Are you ‘the prophet’ from Deuteronomy 18:15?”  “Nah.” he replies. “I’m not that guy either.”  “Then who are you?” they ask.

            And then John recites some verses from the beginning of the 40^th chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, about how he is this voice crying in the wilderness, “Make the Lord’s path straight.”  We looked at that passage a few weeks ago, you may recall.  It is where the great prophet of the exile is proclaiming the homecoming of God’s people by talking figuratively about God blasting a highway across the desert from Babylon to Jerusalem.  It was the miraculous deliverance of the people.  And by referencing those verses, John is saying that he too is about announcing and preparing for a spectacular act of deliverance by God that is coming in the immediate future.

            Only here, it is not so much that the people will hit the road and process back home to Jerusalem.  It’s more like building a highway on which God is going to come tooling down to us.  The people have already been home for 500 or so years since the exile.  John’s point is that it’s not that the people are going anywhere, but now God is entering our world and our life in a new and very direct way.  The light, and life, and Word of God, is coming into the world.

II.

            The inquisitors from Jerusalem still really want to catch John on something because he is a distraction and is even perceived as a possible threat by the establishment back in Jerusalem.  They have to concoct some kind of rationale why they should warn people about him and advise them not to make the trip down to the river to get involved with him.

            “So,” they say, “if you’re not the Messiah, or Elijah, or the prophet, why are you ritually immersing people in the Jordan River?  Why are you baptizing?”

            John replies that immersing people in the Jordan will somehow reveal to Israel the presence of the One who is coming after him, who was also before him.  In other words, this is about being able to see the Son of God, the light and life of God, when he comes.

            In a sense, he’s kind of bringing people through this ritual of new birth, or washing, and the effect is to clear their vision so they can see what God is about to do.  Baptism is to wash away our shortsightedness and dissolve the obstructing cataracts, so we can see that “the true light the shines on all people was coming into the world.”  We can see the true Source of our life, which is the Word of God, God’s speaking the universe into being.  We come to see, in truth, that everything is filled with God’s Word and Spirit.

            I think John is trying to wake people up!  He is doing something unusual and extraordinary to them, hoping that this action will spark in them some profound sense of self-awareness, the end of which is that they discover that their true Father is God.  That is, their beginning, their origin, their truest identity, comes from the God who creates the whole universe by speaking the Word.

            Baptism brings people from one life, under the power of the flesh, the ego, the personality, and the imperial authorities ruling the world, to another life in which we know the Word, and light and life of God in the world.  It startles and jars us out of our complacency.  It is intended to shock people awake, and to open their eyes and so they can see the One who is coming into the world, who is already in the world.  Then people will begin to realize who they truly are, and whose creation this truly is.

            Baptism is a kind of second birth.  In our first birth, we came physically into the world, but we quickly fell into the bondage to the flesh, our ego-centric fears and desires, and the personality and political structures generated by this ignorance.  In our second birth, we awaken to a larger, deeper, higher presence of God in the world as our Father, our origin, our beginning, our Source.

            After we are baptized, even when it happens to us as infants, the idea is that we will be nurtured and loved into seeing our world from the perspective of children of God.  Therefore, we come to see that the world is a safe and well-stocked place designed for our joy and blessing.  We see the world as the place where God emerges to us in the goodness of everything. 

III.

            John admits that, at first, even he didn’t know who Jesus was.  He did not immediately see Jesus as the light, the Word, the Son of God.  I think that is a remarkable confession on John’s part.  It means that God’s light and life is still not readily identifiable.  Something else has to happen for us to see who Jesus really is.

            John says he was instructed by God to be open and awake and aware and actively looking for the signs of his arrival, everywhere.  It’s that character of openness and expectation, in which we know that God is here and we’re just waiting to see and welcome God into our lives, that has to be our attitude as well.  That’s what baptism is supposed to enable us to see.

            If we were blind and ignorant before, lost in the darkness of our ego-centric, personality-driven fears and desires, the shock of baptism is supposed to open us to new possibilities.  We are to have this attitude of looking for and expecting to find wonderful and good things in our world.  Instead of being dead “resources,” objects and commodities for our exploitation, creation comes alive again as a way to experience the Creator. 

            So the next day, John sees Jesus walking toward him.  And John does recognize him now.  Something remarkable happened in the meantime.  Jesus comes to John for baptism.  And when he emerges out of the water, a dove flies out of the sky and lands right on Jesus! John decides that this is the sign of the Holy Spirit that he had been told to wait for.  God tells John to wait for a sign of the Spirit; and the sign of the Spirit comes from creation itself, in the form of a bird.  A creature verifies and identifies the presence of the Word through whom all things were made.   The creation testifies to the presence of the Creator.  That’s what we have to look for.  That’s why our eyes have been opened in baptism.  That’s where we will see the Spirit: in creation.

            So now, when John sees Jesus, he declares to whomever happens to be there listening, “Look!  The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”  

            When John says that Jesus takes away sin, he means that Jesus removes the blindness, and ignorance on the part of people that result in selfish attitudes like greed, gluttony, lust, envy, anger, and the other sins, that, in turn, produce destructive and violent actions.  When we engage in these kinds of actions, we miss the mark, we err, we go astray. 

            Jesus removes the world’s sin by coming into the world as the light of God that illumines all things.  In him we see clearly so we don’t keep missing the mark, which is what sin literally means.  He becomes the mediator, the lens, the window, through whom we perceive accurately who God is.      

IV.

            When John calls Jesus “the Lamb of God,” he is drawing our attention to the three main passages from the Hebrew Scriptures by which Jesus’ disciples came to understand who he is and what he does.  The most obvious one is the Passover Lamb from Exodus, whose blood preserves the people from death.  Then there are the two goats of the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus: the blood of one is used to sanctify the Temple, and the other literally “takes away the sin” of the people when it is sent out into the wilderness to the demon Azazel.  And finally, there is the Servant of God in Isaiah, who endures violence on the people’s behalf.  “Lamb of God” means all this and more.

            Jesus Christ fulfills all these ways in which God saves, liberates, redeems, forgives, and delivers the people.  He comes to embody and enact and accomplish in himself, in the life of God extended into the life of the creation and people, the salvation of the world.

            The Lamb of God takes away sin by being himself the connection, the interface, the membrane, the open door between the Creator and the creation, between God and the world, between Spirit and humanity.  The Lamb reveals the Creator to be all about life and renewal and liberation.  And the Lamb does this by showing that the Source of life in the creation is the continual and constant self-emptying, self-giving, sacrificial offering of the Creator.

            This self-emptying begins when God speaks the Word through whom all things are made.  It continues when God sends the Word even into the dark heart of human ego-centricity and selfishness, even into the flesh, challenging it with his selflessness and sacrifice. 

            And it continues still when people wake up to the goodness of creation under the Fatherhood of our common Creator, and follow the Lamb themselves by giving of their own lives for the good of all.  Then we become the lambs and he becomes our Good Shepherd.  This is the way we love one another as God in Christ has loved us, when we give our lives for our friends, an act which makes everyone in the whole world our friend.

            Today we learn that we follow Jesus, not because he is so successful and powerful, and not because of his wealth and popularity.  But we follow Jesus because he is the One in whom we the true Spirit of the Creator is  revealed.  He is the One to whom the creation itself testifies, as seen in the dove.  He is the One who reveals that God’s love and goodness are being continually poured out and offered up, as we see in the Lamb.

            The Son of God is the Word of God, always coming into the world, always giving his life for the world, always giving his life to the world.  And we have that life, the very life of God, when we follow him by becoming lambs ourselves, and letting God’s life flow as well through us.

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