I did a sermon for the Order of Preachers (see here for the text) that I have reworked somewhat to be delivered today at Mass at St. Mary's Episcopal in Phoenix). I realized that it cried out for a rework, both stylistically (while St. Paul liked run-on sentences, no one else does), and thematically (some of the idea placements were clumsy). Plus there were a couple of asides that were, well, lame. I have it reworked below, and while it isn't perfect (we'll have to wait for the age to come for that), I hope it conveys the mystery of the Forerunner's proclamation more clearly. Or so I keep telling myself.
The readings for Mass today may be found here.
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. 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? What comes to your mind when you think about a lamb?
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 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. In an ancient pastoral or agricultural society, however, their value was immense. A family’s whole livelihood, even their survival, 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 had to 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, which would have been first choice for breeding stock, or would have been the showpiece 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 exposition on the sacrificial code,[3] which can be drawn from careful reading of Leviticus, sacrifices involving lamb included four specific types:
· Guilt offering (to cover doubt about sin or a breach of trust),[4]
· Burnt offering (to show submission to God’s will),[5]
· Sin offering (to make atonement for sins),[6]
· Passover offering (to purchase deliverance and liberation from oppression).[7]
Each of these sacrifices are intensely personal. None of these are offered for the whole community (the Yom Kippur sacrifice involved two goats, not a lamb), they are instead 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 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. The Passover 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 what to their observation is a random man walking by a lamb? Particularly God’s Lamb? We can surmise that quite 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.[8] Perhaps some of them remembered the words of the prophet Isaiah when he stated that “the man of sorrows, acquainted with grief,”[9] the man upon whom, “The LORD has laid…the iniquity of us all,”[10] would be, “Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.”[11] Some may just have been confused, or just wrote it off as yet another raving of another zealot in the wilderness.
The writer of this Gospel, however, has no uncertainty about the phrase, “Behold the Lamb of God.” The Evangelist clearly wants us to know that St. John the Forerunner foretold indeed was the sacrifice that effected our deliverance and reconciliation. This attestation is upheld elsewhere in the New Testament, not only in all the Gospels, but by both St. Peter and St. Paul.
St Paul wrote, “Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us.”[12] In this passage, the Greek becomes very important. In Greek, the verb is in a tense that is called 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 even a present, but it is weightier than that; it is a narrative tense, or more specifically aspect, where the word is divorced from specific time-awareness for the sake of the story. This tense can convey a beginning, a result, or an eternal constant, and in this case, it is the eternal. He is also called τὸ πάσχα, which is the Greek rendering of הַפֶּסַח, THE Passover, specifically the Passover sacrifice we mentioned earlier. What St. Paul intends here is to instruct us that Jesus is and was and evermore shall be the Passover sacrifice for humankind, for all of us, past, present, and future. St. Paul further explains elsewhere that because Jesus is the Passover sacrifice we must prepare ourselves by cleaning out the leaven of our old lives from our inner homes, the traits of malice and evil,[13] the leaven of the Pharisees,[14] just as Israel purged all leavening agents from their homes prior to the conventional Passover sacrifice, which St. Paul asserts is the 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.
Likewise, St. Peter calls Him our ransom from our sin, a “lamb without blemish or spot.”[15] If you recall me mentioning earlier, this sort of designation indicates a sacrifice of the highest order, particularly since for St. Peter, Jesus is both Sin and Guilt offering, the price to ransom us, all of us. Again, one may ask from what are we ransomed? In his first Epistle, St. Peter refers to, “The futile ways inherited from [our] fathers,”[16] and, “The passions of our former ignorance.”[17] These are none other than the way of Sin and Death. And like the foreshadowing sacrifices of the old Temple 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.[18]
This is no passive redemption, either. 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 no time limited sacrifice either, as shown in this Epistle. In fact, it is one that makes do for all time because it encompasses all time, performed by Him Who owns time and though Whom time was created. [19] Let us also call to mind that in the Book of Revelation we see that the “lamb standing as though it was slain”[20] is hardly weak and passive, 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, we see a sacrifice that is self-inflicted and perpetual, and that self is endowed with the Spirit of God; it is the sacrifice that was, “Destined before the foundation of the world.”[21]
Lamb of God. Abraham must sacrifice his son as a demonstration of his trust and devotion in his relationship with his God, yet God stays his hand and says He will provide a substitute, not just a ram on Mt. Moriah, but a Lamb for all peoples and all time. Through Moses God has each Israelite provide a lamb to reconcile themselves with God and to demonstrate they are serious about both healing and maintaining a relationship with God. Finally, God raises an Israelite of David’s line, but not just another mortal leader, but God Himself incarnate to effect the final reconciliation and deliverance, the perfect meeting of God and Human to repair completely the relationship between us mortals and the Divine. It is this sacrifice that has made this Son of David, this Son of God, the Word made flesh, to be the only one worthy to open the scroll of God’s judgement and to 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 we Christians welcome into ourselves in the Divine Liturgy, as we partake in the Lord’s Sacrifice by eating the bread that in the Eastern rites is appropriately called the Lamb. So as the Lamb is sacrificed for us, as we partake today in His Body and Blood, let us indeed ready ourselves for His Passover by cleaning the leaven from our lives.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Nicholas the Wonderworker, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] St. John 1.29b [2] Ex. 12.5, Lev. throughout [3] Known as קרבנות (qorbanot) [4] אשם (asham) [5] עלה (olah) [6] חטאת (chatat) [7]פסח (pesach) [8] Gen. 22.1-14 [9] Is. 53.3 [10] Is. 53.6 [11] Is. 53.7 [12] 1 Cor. 5.7b. καὶ γὰρ τὸ πάσχα ἡμῶν ἐτύθη Χριστός·. [13] 1 Cor. 5.8 [14] Mt. 16.6, Mk. 8.15, Lk. 12.1 [15] 1 Pet. 1.19 [16] 1 Pet. 1.18 [17] 1 Pet. 1.14 [18] Heb. 4.15 [19] The entire epistle to the Hebrews, particularly chapters 2-5 [20] Rev. 5.6, the seven eyes being a reference to the seven spirits of God. [21] 1 Pet. 1.20