[This sermon was delivered at the preaching workshop for the Aquinas House midyear meeting of the Anglican Order of Preachers (Dominican) at St. James Parish, Dalhart TX, on March 13, 2020. Photo is from the Chapel of St. Zeno in the Church of Santa Prassede in Rome. As we ponder the mystery explored below, let us all offer prayers for our Italian brothers and sisters as well as those all over, and at home, affected by Covid-19.]
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
“Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”[1]
How many of you here have seen a lamb up close? A real live lamb, not one on a spit or a plate? Now, how many of you have seen lamb on the plate (you didn’t have to eat it…)? Now, how many of you had butter lamb moulds on the table at Easter (please don’t tell me if you were the one to take off its head…)?
Even those of us who really have not seen where our food or clothing comes from know a little about lambs. My great aunt and uncle’s farm next door had sheep as well as dairy and every spring we could see the lambs engage in their admittedly cute frolicking. For all their cuteness, however, lambs have real economic value. Not only are they a source of current food (lamb) or future food (mutton) or clothing (wool, fleece), at that particular age they can cheer the heart (and win Facebook likes). In an ancient pastoral or agricultural society, however, their value was immense. A family’s whole livelihood depended on whether lambing season was a boom or bust. Therefore, when it came time to offer sacrifice, a lamb was considered a most worthy victim as it entailed a significant expenditure for the owner.
Not just any lamb would do, however. Like any sacrificial victim, the lamb must be without spot or blemish,[2]a perfect lamb, if you will. This meant not only was a possession of some value to be given up, but considerable effort had to be made to find the right one, the most valuable one, the most desirable one. This would have been the lamb that would have fetched the highest price at market, that would have been first choice for breeding stock, or would have been the show-piece of the operation. Only this would have been worthy for sacrifice.
Like many of the cultures of that time and area, the Hebrew people of Israel esteemed the value of such a lamb and used that lamb for very specific sacrificial purposes. In Jewish expositiosn on qorbanot (the sacrificial code, which can be drawn from careful reading of Leviticus), sacrifices involving lamb included four specific types:
· Asham: Guilt offering (doubt about sin, breach of trust)
· Olah: Burnt offering (submission to God’s will)
· Chatat: Sin offering (atonement)
· Pesach: Passover offering
Each of these sacrifices are intensely personal. None of these are offered for the whole community, they are offered for the individual or the household. All of them involve a restoration of relationship with God. The Guilt offering assuages that uncertainty that is poisonous to a relationship, the erosion of trust that must be rectified in order to restore faith between two parties. The Sin offering mitigates actual wrongdoing, a real rupture of trust in a relationship, where there has been no erosion but a violent break. The Burnt offering is the full submission in a relationship, symbolizing the full trust that the individual has in the other. Then the offering is most profound of all…it is a cry for rescue and for deliverance from enemies; as God delivered Israel once from Egypt and spared them in the last plague that broke the Egyptians’ will, subsequent Passover sacrifices plea for God to do the same again for His people, to spare them from looming disaster and to deliver them from the current enemy.
So, going back to the very beginning of the discussion, when St. John the Forerunner makes his proclamation at the Jordan, quite a few Jewish ears would have perked up. Why would the Baptist call this random guy a lamb? Particularly God’s lamb? I’m sure not a few were filled with some sort of latent dread or foreboding, perhaps even recalling from their cultural legacy Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac on Mt. Moriah.[3] Perhaps some of them remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah when he stated that “the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,”[4]the man upon whom, “The LORD hs laid…the iniquity of us all,”[5]would be, “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.”[6]
“Behold the Lamb of God.” This Jesus as the Forerunner foretold indeed was the sacrifice that effected our deliverance and reconciliation. St Paul wrote, “For Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.”[7] Note in Greek the verb is in the aorist…many first year students of Greek are taught this is a simple past, and indeed in English it is best rendered in the simple past or present, but it is weightier than that; it is a narrative tense, an aspect, really, where the word is divorced from specific time for the sake of the story, conveying a beginning, a result, or the eternal, and here it is eternal. Going back to St. Peter, he calls Him our ransom from our sin, a “lamb without blemish or spot,”[8]and for that I call to mind our earlier discussion on Jewish sacrificial principles.
For St. Paul, Jesus is the Passover sacrifice, and because He is the Passover sacrifice we must in turn clean out the leaven of our old lives from our inner homes, the traits of malice and evil,[9]the leaven of the Pharisees,[10]just as Israel purged all leavening agents from their homes prior to the sacrifice, foreshadowing this cleansing. For if Jesus is the Passover, then it is also implied that we are by His blood being spared from a Destroyer and being delivered from an Oppressor. Careful reading will tell us this is none other than Death and Sin, the real enemies of humanity.
For St. Peter, Jesus is both Sin and Guilt offering, the price to buy us back. But from what are we ransomed? He refers to, “The futile ways inherited from [our] fathers,”[11]“The passions of our former ignorance.”[12] This is none other than the way of Sin and Death. And like the foreshadowing sacrifices of the old Mosaic system, a sacrifice was required that was without spot or blemish, that is, one like us in every way, except without the spot or blemish of sin.[13]
This is no passive redemption, however. Scattered throughout the Epistle to the Hebrews we see reference not only to Jesus being the Victim, but also the Priest, making the offering willingly, not just in perfect obedience to the will of the Father but through His own will as well. This also is an eternal sacrifice shown in this Epistle, one that makes do for all time because it encompasses all time, performed by Him who owns time. [14]Let us also call to mind that in the Book of Revelation we see that the “lamb standing as though it was slain”[15]is hardly weak and passive, but its aspect both terrible and awful, a sacrifice returned to life to effect the judgement of God on the cosmos. In both what we see in Hebrews and in Revelation is a sacrifice that is both self-induced and that self is endowed with the Spirit of God (hence the seven eyes), the sacrifice that was, “Destined before the foundation of the world.”[16]
So.
Abraham must sacrifice his son as a demonstration of his trust and devotion in his relationship with his God, but God stays his hand and says He will provide a substitute. Through Moses God has each Israelite provide a lamb in order to reconcile themselves with God and to demonstrate they are serious about healing and maintaining a relationship with God. Finally God raises an Israelite of David’s line, but not just any one, but God Himself incarnate to effect the final reconciliation and deliverance, the perfect meeting of God and Human in order to repair the relationship between us mortals and the Divine. And it is this sacrifice that has made this Son of David, this Son of God, the Word made flesh, the only one worthy to open the scroll of God’s judgement and usher in the new heaven and earth. This Jesus is indeed, as the Forerunner stated so long ago, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the World, the Lamb of God that Christians invoke in the Divine Liturgy, either in the West by chanting the Agnus Dei as we ready ourselves to partake in the Lord’s Sacrifice or in the East by calling the very bread the Lamb. So as the Lamb is sacrificed for us, as we partake tonight in His Body and Blood, let us indeed ready ourselves for the Passover by cleaning the leaven from our lives.
Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Saviour, save us.
[1] St. John 1.29b
[2] Ex. 12.5, Lev. throughout
[3] Gen. 22.1-14
[4] Is. 53.3
[5] Is. 53.6
[6] Is. 53.7
[7] 1 Cor. 5.7b. καὶ γὰρ τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν ἐτύθη Χριστός·.
[8] 1 Pet. 1.19
[9] 1 Cor. 5.8
[10] Mt. 16.6, Mk. 8.15, Lk. 12.1
[11] 1 Pet. 1.18
[12] 1 Pet. 1.14
[13] Heb. 4.15
[14] The entire epistle to the Hebrews, particularly chapters 2-5
[15] Rev. 5.6
[16] 1 Pet. 1.20
