Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary



C:sermons/year-a/Epiphany2-2011-The Lamb of God

January 16, 2011

Rev. Tom and Rev. Laura Truby with special thanks to Gil Baillie and Paul Neuchterlein

John 1:29-42

The Lamb of God

The day after John the Baptist baptized Jesus and the Spirit came upon him, John saw Jesus coming toward him. It is the word “toward” that caught my attention. Jesus is not moving away, he is coming toward. We see his face not his back. He is approaching us—he has not turned away! We recognize him with a flicker of excitement and anticipation. This is the One who is coming toward us!

John the Baptist cannot repress an exclamation. It is an exclamation brimming with profundity and begging to be explored. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” This is not poetic rhetoric but a deeply insightful statement of truth.

Lambs were sacrificial animals for Jewish people. If you were Jewish, when you went to the temple confessing your sin, you brought a lamb that the priest slaughtered and the blood was then sprinkled on the altar. You thought that somehow God wanted the shedding of blood as payment for your misdeeds, and it was much better that it be the lamb’s blood then your own. It was like paying your traffic fine in court and the coinage was blood.

Is this what John meant by the Lamb of God? Did John mean that God has provided humanity with a lamb in the form of his own son so that he can then sacrifices Jesus to himself, killing Jesus instead of us? Many Christians think this way. This way of looking at it is called “the sacrificial reading” of John’s Gospels.

Many Jewish people have pointed out that this take on “the lamb of God” is opposite the story of Abraham and Isaac. There Abraham is about to sacrifice his son when God says “no, stop” and provides Abraham with a lamb instead. But with this interpretation of “The Lamb of God”, God saves the lamb and instead kills his own son. This makes God a murderer and certainly not a model for us to follow. Do you feel as repulsed by this as I do? There has to be another way.

There is and it is called the “non-sacrificial reading” of John’s Gospel. Jesus, “the Lamb of God”, comes from the Father and because we do not know the Father, and are in rebellion against him, we kill Jesus, “The Lamb of God.” We sacrifice him to our violence. It is our violence that drives the killing, not God’s.

The six people killed in Tucson and the others who were hurt were not struck down by God. We human’s did it. A young man caught up in the spirit of our violent world acted it out in the parking lot of Safeway. When Jesus appeared before Pilot, who shouted, “crucify him;” who demanded that Jesus die? The crowd did.

The “Lamb of God” appears on earth as one of us and we kill him. This “Lamb of God” is not the sacrifice we bring to God but the sacrifice God brings to us! Everything is turned on its head. Through the “Lamb of God,” God sacrifices himself to our violence. Do you see the difference?

As John the Baptist observes, Jesus is moving toward us in ways bigger than we can grasp. All the offering is coming from God’s side. We are the recipients of God’s benevolent action, the beneficiaries, the undeserving sons and daughters. Like Andrew and Simon Peter, our only response is to give ourselves over to this forgiving Lamb and choose to utterly and relentlessly follow Him.

I believe the “Lamb of God” is the New Testament way of talking about the scapegoat, but with a couple of added nuances.

How many of you have been around a Billy goat? How would you describe them—smelly, belligerent, and somewhat worthless except for breeding? Billy goats don’t give milk, they don’t give birth, and their meat is tough; in other words, they are the sort of creature you want to kick out. Right? So, the “Billy Goat of God” who takes away the sins of the world doesn’t work. It is not the same.

“Lamb of God” brings out the innocence, vulnerability and value of the One sacrificed to our violence. He didn’t deserve it. He was innocent in every way. Had he deserved it, even in the smallest way, our killing him could be justified and we wouldn’t have to face the truth about ourselves.

This innocence, vulnerability and value is picked up by the English Poet, William Blake, who in the early 1800’s wrote a poem entitled, “The Lamb”. Here, he begins as a mother speaking to a small child--

Little Lamb, who make thee? Little Lamb, who made thee?

Gave thee life, and bid thee feed. By the stream and o’er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight, softest clothing, wooly, bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice, making all the vales rejoice?

Little Lamb, who made thee? Doest thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee; Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee;

He is called by thy name, for he calls himself a Lamb,

He is meek and he is mild; He became a little child.

I, a child, & thou a lamb; We are called by his name.

Little Lamb, God bless thee! Little Lamb, God bless thee!

“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” What if the sin of the world means all that spins out of envy, rivalry, jealousy, pettiness, covetousness, greed and hatred? What if the sin of the world is the mimetic entanglements we find ourselves sucked into unavoidably and that we ourselves inevitably set up?

Every time I talk to my sister, my sister whose daughter is going to medical school, I get ambushed by my own need to compete. Oh, I hate that but I do it and it corrodes my relationship with her. It is a vortex that I cannot seem to avoid, like water swirling into the drain. It almost always sucks me in and pulls me down so that I feel worse after the conversation rather than better. Much as I hate to admit it, this is the stuff of everyday life, creating the world’s we live in.

Gil Baillie describes this swirling downward action as sin.

At a certain point in the vortex, accusations arise and begin to focus. More and more people get drawn into the accusations, polarizing people against a scapegoat. People develop powerful convictions about who is the problem and “conviction” means you take a “convict”. Swirling down to the center of the vortex, something magical happens. The miracle occurs when all those sins polarize and focus on the one on whom to blame it all and at the same time, turn it all into righteous rectitude, without anyone ever feeling any moral misgiving. This is the little machine for turning sinfulness into righteousness, without anyone having to realize his or her sin.

This machine, that I have just described, is the “sin of the world.” The machine itself is the “Sin.” All the little sins we commit are the things swirling into the vortex. But the swirling vortex itself is the sin that Jesus came to take away.

What does the God who is trying to call us out of all this, do? He has a rendezvous with us at the center of that vortex, and says to the satanic powers, “O.K., try it one more time.” And we do. We try it on “the Lamb of God”, the innocent one, who has become one of us and entered our world to live before us the way of God. We do to Him what we do to each other and ourselves, all the time. And as we are doing it, he pronounces God’s forgiveness, saying we don’t know what we are doing.

This is how God enters our vortex and simultaneously reveals it and shows us the way out of it! To make our escape, all we have to do is respond to Jesus who is coming toward us by believing Him and choosing to follow “’the Lamb of God’ who takes away the sin of the world.” Amen.

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