“The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and
said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” St. John 1:29
I wonder if
you have chosen your seat in church for a particular reason. A few years ago, one of my parishioners told
me that she had thought a good deal about it before settling on her choice. A dear
friend, a rather holy woman, had once sat week by week in the pew in front of
her. She didn’t really hear that well,
so being nearer the pulpit was useful.
But really, she chose the pew because it had the best angle for viewing
both her favorite stained glass window and the Altar Cross. Seeing both those
things allowed her to concentrate her mind when she prayed and helped her to
feel that God was near.
I could
understand just what she meant, because I too had a favorite seat, the rector’s
stall at Saint Paul’s Church in Sharpsburg.
Because there I had a perfect view of the Lamb. There was a tiny window in the wall of the
chancel just opposite the rector’s pew, a lamb with a halo, bearing the flag of
victory. Jesus, the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world. No one
could see it but me, but I saw it constantly, as I sat and listened to the
readings, as I turned to the people to pronounce the Word of Absolution or to
approach the pulpit to preach, as I turned to the Altar to pray.
I expect the
Lamb was placed there as a reminder of that vocation sternly laid upon the
clergy by Saint Paul, to “preach not ourselves but Christ crucified.[1]” It urged me to call to mind that the Gospel I
proclaimed spoke first of Him, that the forgiveness I declared was granted
through His mercy, that the Sacraments I administered were effective through
the power of His death and resurrection.
The window reminded me that it was He that the people needed, not me,
and when they discovered true joy and hope, it would be because, at long last,
they had finally seen Him.
John the
Baptist urges his disciples to behold the Lamb.
He would go on, of course, to tell them to abide with Him, to listen to
Him. But twice he tells them to behold
Him, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.
There’s no
accident about this, for beholding Jesus is at the heart of faith throughout St.
John’s Gospel and his Epistles. “The
word was made flesh and dwelt among us,” sings the prologue, “and we beheld His
glory.[2]” The central miracle of the Gospel is the
healing of a blind man, who comes to believe when He sees Jesus[3]. Near the very end of the Gospel, St. Thomas
insists that He must see the risen Lord, and then He will believe. When he has seen the mark of the nails, he
cries out “my Lord and my God.[4]” And of course, above all the other writers of
the New Testament, St. John emphasizes that our final destiny, the goal set
before us, is the vision of Christ in His glory. “We shall be like Him,” he writes, “for we
shall see Him as He is.[5]”
When we look
upon Jesus, faith is awakened in us. We
gain courage to do things we could have never imagined before. We become one with Jesus when we behold Him,
and thus we become like Him, sharing in His saving mission.
John the
Baptist describes Jesus, the object of our vision, as “the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world.”
Biblical commentators have spilled oceans of ink trying to distinguish
exactly which symbolic lamb John the Baptist had in mind, as the stories and
rites of the Old Testament are packed full of them. Archbishop Temple suggested that the best way
to tackle the question is to begin by pondering what is meant by “the sin of
the world,” that Jesus has come to carry away or to take upon Himself.
“There is
only one sin,” Temple wrote, “and it is characteristic of the whole world. It is the self-will which prefers ‘my’ way to
God’s, which puts ‘me’ in the centre where only God is in place. It pervades the universe. It accounts for the cruelty of the jungle,
where each animal follows its own appetite, unheeding and unable to heed any
general good. It becomes conscious, and
thereby tenfold more virulent in man.[6]”
Among all
those who have come into the world, Jesus alone was free of this “self-will
that prefers my way to God’s.” Only His
life was given entirely to securing the general good. The very first act of human worship, you may
remember, was a sacrifice, two brothers who brought the fruit of their labors
to God. And the perfect offering, the
one God looked upon with favor, was Abel’s lamb, the firstling of the flock[7]. Jesus’s life is that perfect offering, the
One among us who fully expresses God’s purposes.
But the sin
of the world is taken away only when that perfect life is surrendered for the
sake of rest of humanity, so that the fullness of His life might become a
source of life for others. We think
then, Archbishop Temple says, of the other great lamb of Genesis, the one God
placed in the thornbush so that Abraham’s beloved son could be spared[8].
That lamb was slain so that
faithfulness could see its reward and God’s preserving mercy could be fully
revealed.
Jesus is
both priest and victim. He is the one
who gives His life freely because it is the life of complete faithfulness. He is also the one who dies in great humility
so that love, which always gives, might run its full course. John the Baptist marks Him out and bids us to
look and know and adore Him, the source of our life, the well-spring of grace.
But He also
is calling us to become like Him, to be transformed by what we see. For by nature, our vision is shaped only by
the sin of the world. We see God as a
tool to be coopted for our little projects.
We see people as instruments in our struggle for mastery or the securing
of our pleasures. We look into the
events of our lives, and we see danger and scarcity, competition and folly.
But to see
Jesus, as the Fathers often say, is to have the eye filled with light. Another world is revealed to us, a graced
world, with our good and loving God standing at the center of it. We see others as creatures of dignity, filled
with the Spirit’s gifts. In the events
around us we see abundance and peace, opportunities for cooperation. When I looked at the lamb in the chancel
window at Saint Paul’s, I also saw the meaning of my own vocation, the power at
work in me to make my labors fruitful.
It’s the same for all of us. When
we truly see Jesus, we feel the pull to spend ourselves for others, to answer
His love for God and the world with the best we can offer.
To behold
the Lamb of God in this way is not the action of a moment, but the work of the
Spirit in us, across the course of our lifetime. It’s why our hymns and anthems return so often
to praise Jesus, His name is, as Newton’s great hymn confesses, “a never-failing
treasury filled with boundless stores of grace.[9]” It’s why we pray before the Cross, fixing our
eyes on the great sign of self-giving love and victory over sin. It’s why we bow low before the bread which
has become, for us His Body, a foretaste of that unbroken communion to
come. Looking up in faith, we acclaim
Him: “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world, grant us thy peace.[10]”
[1] II Cor. 4:5.
[2] John 1:14.
[3] John 9:38.
[4] John 20:25, 28.
[6] Temple, William. Readings in St. John’s Gospel. Wilton: Morehouse Barlow, 1985, 24.
[7] Gen. 4:4.
[9] Hymn 644, Hymnal 1982, vs. 3.
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