Epiphany 2                                                                                        16 January 2011

John 1: 29-34

“The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”  [John 1: 29]   This seems like an odd thing for John the Evangelist to put into his Gospel so near to the beginning.  He must have expected his readers already to understand what he meant.  But what could John the Baptist have understood about it?  This is a familiar expression to us.  There are many connections that we can make in our own minds between Jesus and a lamb.  We may think of the Paschal Lamb, because of the identification that Jesus made with Passover at the Last Supper, through whom God’s people are liberated from sin and death.  We may think of the Lamb “that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth,” from Isaiah 53—Jesus, the Suffering Servant through whose sacrifice the people is redeemed.  Probably most of you did not immediately think of Revelation 5: “Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.”  If the some of the scholars are correct, this latter image is one that John the Baptist might well have thought of on his own, because it corresponds to a strain of Jewish thought that was current in the few centuries before Christ. 

The idea of the powerful Lamb—with one large horn or many smaller ones, signifying great strength—was a messianic idea.  The powerful lamb was one of God’s own flock—one of God’s sheep—who had arisen to take away the curse, the sin, of his people, and defeat their enemies.  Jews of Jesus’ day—at least a significant number—lived with the idea that God had never really forgiven his people.  They had returned from exile, but nothing was really right in their community.  They were still ruled by pagan nations, the poor had very little, and the rulers were corrupt.  The conclusion was that the sin of Israel had still not been taken away.  This was something the Messiah would do.  When he appeared, he would remove the curse, show to the people that God had forgiven them, and restore them to the full grace of God, who would dwell among them and be their God again—Emmanuel.  So, when John saw Jesus and called him the Lamb who was taking away sin, he was in line with this earlier thought: here was Jesus, the Messiah, who would take away Israel’s sin and restore the nation to God’s favour.  But, John seemed to understand something even more wonderful about the Jewish Messiah: his work would be not only to take away Israel’s sin, but the sin of the whole world.  How might this be understood?

If Israel stood in need of redemption—and all the prophets said it did—then the world needed it as much or more.  Israel’s sin was a sin of disobedience—God had revealed to Israel how it should live in covenant with God and Israel had refused.  As a result its social life was disordered and eventually collapsed under pressure from invading nations.  The world’s problem was slightly different.  God had not revealed to everyone else what he had revealed to Israel.  Only Israel really knew God.  But Israel’s task was to take its knowledge to the rest of the world—which the nation had not done.  So the world went on its way in ignorance of God and became thoroughly disordered, too.  That is why the prophets saw that Israel’s eventual salvation would be the salvation of the world: when the Messiah came to lead Israel back to God, Israel could then be the light to the nations that had been God’s intention from the beginning.  In Jesus all of these things came true—he not only restored Israel, but as Messiah, one of the lambs of the flock that had arisen to restore Israel, he could now fulfill Israel’s vocation and take away the sin not only of Israel, but of the world. 

But how does that work?  How can Jesus take away the sin of the world?  How is sin taken away at all?  What, in fact, is sin, that it can be taken away?  Sin is the normal condition of this world—a condition in which people fail to live in complete knowledge of, openness to, obedience to, and reliance upon God.  Even the world’s best people do not have complete knowledge of God, live in complete openness to him, in perfect obedience to him and utter reliance upon him.  Wherever there is a failure of knowledge and obedience and openness and reliance on God, there are opportunities for false ideas and actions to enter in.  The sinful condition of humankind leads inevitably to all of those sins in thought, word, and deed of which we are only too aware.  I imagine that most of the world’s religions have had as their main object all of these centuries the task of helping people to a true idea of God and the disciplines by which they can be open to him, obedient to him, and reliant on him.  We Christians believe that only One was ever in a position perfectly to enlighten us, because he was the only One to have lived without sin—in perfect knowledge and openness and obedience and reliance upon his Father.  He not only taught us the true knowledge of God, not only demonstrated how to be open to and obedient to him, but he did something no one expected: he took the burden of the world’s sinfulness and sins upon himself.

And here, of course, we have to face up to the greatest of the miracles which we know: that this Lamb of God was none other than God Himself, the Son of the Father, who entered into the world he had made and suffered the consequences of its own sin.  Since he was the Messiah, the Lamb of God, and also the Son of God, Emmanuel, he could be God’s own answer to the world’s problem of sin.  In saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he could speak the word of forgiveness to the whole world.  His Cross was able to bear the weight of the world’s sin, because the One who died there was none other than God Himself, bearing the sins of his own world.

But how can you “take away” sins?  What does that phrase mean?  It means, it seems to me, a series of things.  First, it means that sin has been forgiven.  That is, a decision has been made not to make the sinner pay for his sins.  That is what we all do when we forgive someone.  The first step is coming to a decision in our own hearts that we shall not seek to make someone pay for a wrong they have done to us.  We cannot come to this without a willingness to bear its pain—there is no real forgiveness without sacrifice.  God bore the pain of the world’s sin on the Cross.  What that really meant at the cosmic level is a mystery I cannot fathom.  It means surely that wherever there is pain and suffering caused by sin, there is the presence of the crucified God.  But when we forgive, we also know a little of the Cross—because we cannot forgive unless we are willing to bear the injustice and renounce our desire for revenge.  This does not mean that we overlook sin or pretend that everything is OK.  We call sin and evil by their right names.  If we forgive, we bear the sin or evil in ourselves.  That is the price of forgiveness.

Secondly, we convey that willingness to forgive to the person who has offended.  We say to him that he has done wrongly but that we are not holding it against him.  This is what God has done.  He has not pretended that the world was healthy as it is—in fact, it is pretty messed up.  But he has decided not to hold it against us—not to make us pay for our sins.  The Cross announces to the world that it has offended seriously.  But God has already borne the weight of our sin and now says to the whole world: I will not hold it against you.

But, thirdly, if forgiveness is to move to its next level, it has to be accepted.  The one who has done wrong has to admit it and accept the offer of pardon.  Here is where the process often stalls.  Self-defensiveness and denial come in and the offer, at least for the time, is refused.  The person who is forgiving can do no more at this point.  God is not so limited as we are.  His Holy Spirit can still work in the hearts of the impenitent.  And yet, there is a freedom we all have not to be forgiven if we don’t want to be.  Sometimes defensiveness and denial become incorporated into social attitudes.  There are sins that adhere to countries and social orders and parties and classes, to which we find it hard to admit or become aware.  But Christ’s forgiveness is meant to extend to the world, and so we who understand what it means to know God, to open ourselves to him, to be obedient to and depend on him, must tell our contemporaries.  God has forgiven the world, but to be forgiven the world has to admit its sin, along with each one of us.

Finally, once forgiveness is accepted, relationships can be restored.  There may well be a long time of trust building, undoing the effects of wrongs committed.  But if the process progresses into this stage, then it is possible to build intimacy and find the energy inherent in reconciliation.  Sometimes at the personal level, we have to leave things at stage three—it seems impossible to rebuild the trust.  Under present conditions, we have as much as we can hope for.  We might desire more, but find it impossible.  In our relationship with God, however, everything has been leading up to this point.  We are meant to find a relationship with God that is intimate and energizing.  Sin doesn’t really come to be taken away until we are into this fourth stage of forgiveness.  For it is only in intimacy with God—in prayer and worship and scripture and meditation and so on—that the root cause of our sin is taken away: our ignorance of God, our disobedient spirit, our denial of dependency and desire to justify ourselves.  Of course, we are never going to cease the process of struggling against sin—not until we are perfected at some time in a future that only God knows.  But when we begin to live into the intimacy with God that forgiveness has given us, we discover the power of the resurrected life of Jesus poured into our hearts by the Spirit.  Gradually our ignorance of God is remediated, our openness to him is encouraged by the Spirit, obedience becomes less difficult and we are able to discover a humility that is not offended to live in reliance upon God. 

And what about the world?  This is the kind of intimacy with God that is being offered to the whole human race—and perhaps the non-human part of it, too.  It seems to me that the burden God bore on the Cross has opened such intimacy to everyone—even to those who do not yet know our Lord Jesus.  We don’t have to deny the spiritual integrity other kinds of believers in order to hold on to the uniqueness of Christ.  And our hope based on the promise of the Kingdom of God is that one day the whole world will have its sins completely taken away by the Lamb of God.  How long a process we are in for, I don’t know.  I rather expect it to be a while.  How it will all work out and whether all will finally be reconciled to God, I don’t know either.  People can be quite stubborn and self-destructive.  Will God force people to repent who don’t want to?  He doesn’t seem to, but he may have a way we don’t know about. 

That is why it is so important, it seems to me, for those who do know our Lord Jesus to model for the world this process of forgiveness and reconciliation and intimacy with God and each other.  It is possible that many people don’t really believe that there is a Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  By our loving and forgiving and reconciling relationships with others, we can show them that there is, that we know Him, and that, although we are still sinners, too, our sins are being taken away and we are living lives that mean more than we thought they could.  This relationship with the Lamb is the one that is renewed in us in every Eucharist.  In fact, we sing: Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us and grant us peace.  Then I lift up the Bread and Wine and ask you to recognize that the Lamb of God is present with us once again—even though we are not worthy, he speaks his word once again, and our souls are healed.