Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
Epiphany 2: January 20, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
John 1:29-42
John saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, `After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.' I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel." And John testified, "I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, `He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.' And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God."
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, "Look, here is the Lamb of God!" The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, "What are you looking for?" They said to him, "Rabbi" (which translated means Teacher), "where are you staying?" He said to them, "Come and see." They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, "We have found the Messiah" (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, "You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas" (which is translated Peter).
I perplexed myself when I chose the idea of sacrifice as the topic for my final paper in my systematic theology course at Virginia Seminary. Why, when all of my classmates had chosen other “cooler” subjects, had I chosen sacrifice? Was it because I was genuinely dumb-founded by the topic? Was it because I was hoping my research would finally explain to me why there was so much language about sacrifice in the church’s liturgies? Was it because in Scripture as in our gospel in which Jesus is called “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” that we keep running into images that evoke the idea of sacrifice? Or was it because I, myself, had a hard time with the way sacrifice was talked about when I was growing up—as if sacrificing oneself for others was supposed to substitute for having a self?
Whatever my motivation, I had chosen sacrifice as my topic. So I set out to write the paper, and write it I did. In it I traced the idea of sacrifice in the Jewish tradition, in what I thought was the Christian tradition and in the liturgical controversies and practices of the Christian Church. I filled many pages and accumulated many, many footnotes—103 to be exact. But while I had done a very thorough job, I noticed that I had not come away with any new insights on the topic. Despite this, I went ahead and turned in my paper. And then I waited.
Two weeks passed. And then one afternoon, our professor came into the classroom with a stack of papers to give back to us. When I got mine, I began going through each page to see what remarks he might have written in the margins. To my surprise, I didn’t find a mark on the paper. When I got to the bottom of the last page—there was the grade and a two-sentence comment. “B minus,” it said. “An outstanding job of summarizing the complex history of the idea of sacrifice in Christian thought. What you fail to understand, however, is that for us, Jesus redefines what sacrifice looks like, what sacrifice is all about.”
It was a riveting comment. The B- was a shock to be sure—the lowest grade I had ever received in seminary. But more riveting was where my mind immediately went. It went to the mural in the Joseph of Arimathea Chapel at Washington National Cathedral just twenty minutes from the seminary. It went to the depiction in that mural of a group of people solemnly bearing the body of Jesus on a bier toward the tomb it would rest in at least for a little while. It went to the depiction of Jesus’ body, itself—shown not as a weak-looking, battered corpse but as the beautiful body of a warrior king, a warrior king whose head was turned towards us revealing his handsome features and whose torso was covered with an iridescent white silken cloth, the kind of cloth that would adorn a king.
Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Jesus redefines what sacrifice looks like, what sacrifice is all about.
And so the comment on my paper and my mind’s journey to the mural at Washington Cathedral pushed me even more into the questions I had taken into my paper. What was Jesus’ sacrifice all about, and what did it show us about the sacrifices we make in our our own lives? Are they about being sacrificial lambs full of a lowliness and self-abnegation that seems to border on having no self at all—or is the sacrifice of Jesus and are our sacrifices something else, something different?
In our gospel for today, John the baptizer sees Jesus and proclaims that he is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It’s an image that can immediately evoke the idea of the sacrificial lamb in those of us who hear it. But what John may be getting at in this image is something different from what we think.
For the ancients, the constellation known to the Romans as Aries and to Jews and Greeks as a male lamb, was a powerful constellation. This was so much the case, in fact, that a 1st century astronomer referred to Aries as “the leader and prince of the constellations.” Aries, the divine Lamb, was thought to be the ruler of the other constellations, and the starting point from which all other constellations were mapped.
For Jewish people, the image of the lamb was equally powerful. The lamb was connected to Passover, the feast that Jewish people observed when the constellation Aries the lamb ruled the sky. Passover was the first month of the Jewish year when the coming of spring reminded Jews of how God was at work liberating and making all things new. This kind of powerful imagery, then, also came into play as Jesus' followers imagined what the climax of God's redemptive work through Jesus would be like.
But the final indication of power connected to this image of the Lamb of God comes in the context of the gospel of John, itself, the gospel that places the crucifixion on the day leading up to the Passover meal. This means that in John’s gospel, the crucifixion itself occurs when the Passover lambs were being slain, all in order to make the point that this Jesus, this incarnate word of great power, the one who at his death says “it is finished” meaning it has been completed or consummated” redefines what sacrifice means and is all about.
All of this is to say that the sacrificial lamb and that Jesus’ sacrifice and that our sacrifices have little to do with having no self. Each instead is about a conscious claiming and pouring out of our strength and our energy in the name of something we come to value or to love more than the protection of ourselves or the holding apart of that strength or energy. And strangely, that pouring out, that giving away, is our consummation, our completion even as it is also our becoming “used up.”
And this is the great contradiction in sacrifice: in our sacrifices, we claim who we are, use ourselves up and are ennobled just as the figure of Christ being borne to the tomb in the mural has both given his life away and is depicted as beautiful, full of human dignity in having given it away.
Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
And so our lives are always, with God’s help, in the process of discernment about this question: toward what and for whom is my life to be offered as a living sacrifice? Toward what and for whom is my giving myself away and, therefore, my consummation to be directed? In my experience, while there’s a thread that emerges for most of us in our lived response to this question, many of us also find that our lived response to this question can change and grow over time. And so we find yet another challenge here, our staying open to the question of what we give our life’s energy to and having the courage to move toward what we would be willing to give our life for, not five or ten years ago, but now.
Joseph Campbell in the chapter “Sacrifice and Bliss” in his book entitled The Power of Myth, written with Bill Moyers, describes his interactions with students when he taught at Sarah Lawrence. Most were, of course, trying to figure out what vocations to follow, what to offer their life to. Campbell called this their “bliss” and said that he knew he was getting closer to what it might be for a particular student when in their discussions about what they reading, the student’s eyes would open wider and the complexion would change.
But many were afraid to follow their urgings for fear that to do so was impractical or would ask more of them than they had the strength to give. To this Campbell said: “I have a superstition that has grown on me, that if you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, (so that) the life you ought to be living (becomes) the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
Jesus’ sacrifice redefines what sacrifice looks like and is all about. It is not the denial of self but the strong, royal offering of all that we are to the vocations, to the families and friends and to the communities that are our bliss, for which we want or even must pour out our life’s energies. Don’t be afraid. The Lamb of God has gone before you. Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep and live the feast.
Works Cited or Consulted
For a look at the mural in the Joseph of Arimathea Chapel at the Washington National Cathedral, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/neddy/73985699/
Dylan Brewer’s blog on the gospel for 2 Epiphany in which she relies heavily on Bruce Malina's and Richard Rohrbaugh's Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John.
Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth
