Lambing time

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 1: 29-34) is brief but, like all Scripture, revelatory. John the Baptist first declares Jesus the Lamb of God, a title that will be recorded again in the Book of Revelation and be enshrined in our daily liturgies. Then, John dwells on the fact that he did not know Jesus until he saw the dove descending upon Him at His baptism, affirming finally that I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.

Like John himself, this passage is simple and bare, unadorned, and stark in how it delivers its message. And yet, like many passages from the gospels, it tells us both about the Lord and about ourselves, at least ourselves insofar as John stands for us all.

It tells us about Jesus for it seems to foreshadow the vision John the Evangelist will share with us again in the Book of Revelation. Here, the Lamb appears in various guises: as shepherd, as conqueror, and as temple of the Lord. When the Lamb is first seen, John had expected to see the power of the Lion of Judah. The feast of heaven for eternity is also called the supper of the Lamb, and yet this Lamb is said to be slain as it were from the foundation of the world. In other words, this apparently simple image is multilayered in its significance: the person of the Lamb is the redeemer and conqueror of sin who bestrides all time.

If we look forward into time and eternity, we should likewise look back, starting firstly with the moment in which Jesus dies on the cross which St John again associates with the hour of the slaughter of lambs in the Temple. We can go back to the birth of Jesus, born in the very village where lambs were bred for the Temple slaughter. Into the Old Testament, the Lamb is there in Isaiah’s vision of the suffering servant, led to the slaughter like a lamb, and in the rituals of the Torah where the people of Israel are passed over because of the blood of the lamb smeared on their lintels, a moment echoed in every slaughter of a lamb that takes place in the Jewish liturgy thereafter. This Lamb of God is everywhere, then. And this is surely the point for John the Baptist who calls Jesus the Lamb in the hearing of his followers and those gathered for His baptism. John here connects this central figure and symbol of God’s revelation and the Jewish imagination with the figure of the coming Messiah who takes away the sins of the people.

This then is Jesus: not the cuddly social worker of the liberal imagination, come to make us feel better about ourselves, but the blood-stained warrior, as meek as He is mighty, who comes to claim back His own from the grip of the devil. Now there is an answer to the question of Isaac to his father Abraham: where is the Lamb for the burnt offering? We also know the real significance of Abraham’s answer: God will provide. God Himself will come and save us, for Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us.

The enormity of this revelation is truly beyond us: our limited minds cannot begin to encompass what its implications truly are. And here is where this gospel passage tells us also something about ourselves through the figure of John. For in John, as in us, God reveals Himself little by little. All the Fathers of the Church puzzle over John’s remarks in this passage: having refused at first to baptise Jesus, saying that he ought to be baptized by Him, how could John thereafter say that he did not know who He was until he saw the dove descend? We may wonder also what he means, for surely, even if he has not seen Jesus since their childhood – we know for a fact the Holy Family was mobile and travelled several times between Nazareth and Judea – how could he not have known the stories around his own birth and the significance of his cousin? The answer to these questions, we may hope to ask for in heaven, but that is not really the point.

Rather, the point is that John himself comes slowly not simply to know Jesus – He knows He is the Messiah – but to know what that means, to know something more of the depths of that mystery of who He actually is; to be initiated further into that knowledge that Jesus says is the essence of the eternal life, i.e. to know Him and to know the One who sent Him. This is the blessing of John’s encounter with the Lord. It is not merely to have the privilege of making His paths straight; it is also to have an increasing knowledge and conviction, a revelation and vision, of who He actually is. John’s journey in this regard begins in humility – I am not fit to loosen His sandal  - it continues with insight and understanding in his perception of Jesus as the lamb of God, and of course it is accomplished in his own sacrificial death where, in the name of justice and in the name of the true meaning of the spousal relationship, the great figure of God’s offer to fallen humanity, he sheds his own blood in anticipation of the shedding of the blood of the Lamb.

We too are called to these transformations before the Lamb of God: an increasing awareness of the fact we are not fit for His blessing, a deepening understanding of who He is and what He means to us, and lastly the final act of offering where union with Him configures us to the Lamb, sacrificed as it were since the foundation of the world.

And beyond this, the Lamb’s supper for the little lambs of His flock, lambed into eternity by the labour of the Lamb.