Hilton Head Island, SC – December 3, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Revelation 5:6-14; John 1:19-30
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" - John 1:29 (RSV)
Introductory Note:
This is the second in a series of five didactic or teaching sermons entitled Who Is Jesus? These sermons shall address titles given to Jesus by various individuals or writers in the New Testament. They are intended to help you to ponder the meaning behind these titles.
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The older I have gotten, the more I have found myself gravitating toward sermon series. I feel there is a greater challenge in preaching a series of sermons than in preaching a whole string of individual sermons, and quite candidly, I enjoy the challenge.
Further, I harbor the hope, which is probably a misplaced one, that in a sermon series there is greater interest among the listeners than there otherwise would be. In my addled imagination, you are more eager to hear the next sermon than you were the last one, don't you see. If that is the case, it is much better than that fictional lady of whom every preacher has spoken at some point or another, who said to the minister one Sunday morning on the way out the church door, "You are amazing, Mr. Smith; every one of your sermons is better than the next!"
Well, anyway, here we are on the first Sunday in Advent, and for four more weeks we will be thinking about the question, "Who is Jesus?" The answers to that question will be found in four different texts, two from the Gospels and two from the Epistles. However, in none of these sermons shall I take the traditional approach Today we are looking at a statement allegedly made at the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus by one of the most charismatic and curious people in the Bible, John the Baptist. When John first saw Jesus as Jesus approached him standing by the banks of the Jordan River, the Gospel writer John says that John the Baptist immediately cried out, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
On the annual Jewish holiday of Passover, a lamb, called the pascal lamb, was sacrificed for every Pesach Passover) Seder dinner. Thus when John the Baptist declared, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”, he was purportedly suggesting three years ahead of time that Jesus himself would become a sacrifice, and that his death would occur on a Roman cross.
John, the author of the Fourth Gospel, and St. John the Divine, a different John who wrote The Book of Revelation, both believed that the death of Jesus was a voluntary sacrifice of Jesus’ own life to atone for the sins of the whole world. That idea is called “substitutionary atonement,” meaning that Jesus died in our place because our own sacrificial deaths would accomplish nothing for ourselves. The concept is that only the cross can save us. This notion was first postulated by St. Anselm, the bishop of Canterbury, who lived at the end of the eleventh century.
That has been the traditional ecclesiastical view for the past thousand years, but especially in evangelical Roman Catholicism and conservative or fundamentalist Protestantism. Millions of contemporary Christians do not subscribe to that concept, and I am one of them. I believe that Jesus died because a Roman decree hoped to avert a religious riot and because of the insistence of some powerful priests and possibly also some Pharisees that Jesus be crucified. Many Jews also thought the end of the world was near, and the first Christians associated that apocalyptic doctrine with the death of Jesus on the cross.
John the Baptist also taught that the world would soon end, and he was certain that Jesus as the Messiah was pivotal to that process. Baptism symbolically washed away sin, so that the baptized would be ready for The End.
In the early chapters of all four Gospels, we encounter John the Baptist, who seems suddenly to have appeared in the Judean wilderness, baptizing people in the waters of the Jordan River. The peculiar thing is that the people he was baptizing presumably were all Jews. Previously, only Gentiles had been baptized, the implied purpose being to cleanse them of their inherent sin in being born Gentiles. So here was a Jew ritually baptizing other Jews. But he wasn't doing it for the "in-crowd" among the Jews. He was doing it for those whom Jesus later described as “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt. 15:28ff.).
None of the Gospels tells the theological or Christological background of what was going on at the Jordan River. From other sources, especially from the Dead Sea scrolls, which were discovered only in 1947 and following, we can safely deduce that the Jews who came to John to be baptized believed as he did that the Messiah was about to come, and that the world was about to end. Some of them even believed that John the Baptist was the Messiah; this the Gospels do tell us. John insisted that he was not the Anointed One of God, but rather that the genuine Messiah was about to appear. Quoting the prophet Isaiah, John declared that he was "the voice of one crying, 'In the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord!'" John was in the wilderness, and he was, in his own fashion, preparing the way.
According to the Fourth Gospel, when John saw Jesus coming toward him, he shouted, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" I don't think this happened historically, or that Jesus was ever baptized. But despite my reservations, it has been a concept as old as the Christian Church itself.
But what does "the Lamb of God" mean? Who -- or what -- is the Lamb of God? Never once does that expression appear in the Hebrew Bible. In the 53rd chapter of the prophecy of Isaiah, in that famous passage which talks about the Suffering Servant, it says of this un-named and unspecified servant, "He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth" (53:7).
There are two factors about lambs on which we now need to focus. First, lambs are gentle. Of all hairy or otherwise creatures, they are the most docile. Many years ago there was a commercial for a shampoo which had these words in its jingle: "Gentle as a lamb/ Yes, ma'am/ Pamper, Pamper, new shampoo"; remember? A lamb is not a fierce animal, a rapacious carnivore. Instead it is a quiet, peaceful herbivore, an eater of grass, a grazer in green pastures, a follower beside still waters.
Secondly, in the context of biblical religion, a lamb is associated with sacrifice. At Passover thousands of lambs were sacrificed in the temple. It was a lamb which was to be eaten in the yearly Passover feast. The Seder or Pesach dinner has lamb as its main course. A lamb is easy to kill, because it does not fight back, nor has it any zeal for fighting, and so it is a natural animal sacrifice as well as chief course in this ritual meal.
Thus when John the Baptist saw Jesus and he cried out, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!", the Gospel writer John was saying more than the mere words he was saying. He was implying something very profound and potentially profoundly disturbing about the identity of Jesus. He was suggesting in a very few words that the one who had appeared in the wilderness looking for the Baptizer was the gentle sacrifice whose life, but especially whose death, would wash away (baptize away) the entire sin of the human race. In other words, this was a prediction of the crucifixion of Jesus before Jesus had even begun his public ministry. That, according to the Gospel writer John, was John the Baptist’s Christology, his understanding of Jesus as the Messiah, and he was not going to let actual history stand in the way of the Gospel he intended to proclaim.
What a revolutionary idea was the substitutionary atonement! Without actually saying it, John was declaring that Jesus was the human sacrifice by whom humanity would be saved, that he was the human lamb by whose death life would come to all of humanity. Never in the course of biblical religion had that idea ever been presented.
However, it is important for you to understand that that imagery about Jesus is not messianic imagery. In the first-century Jewish concept of the Messiah there was no notion of sacrifice at all. The people believed that the Messiah would be a political figure much more than a religious figure. He would lead a Jewish army to a complete victory over their enemies. In the first century, that meant the Romans. But the idea of the Lamb of God is not that idea; if anything, it is the antithesis of that idea. "Lamb of God" and "Messiah" would never be associated together in the mind of any Jew. So when John the Baptist proclaimed Jesus the Lamb of God, he was not also proclaiming him to be the Messiah. Next week we will refer to the identity of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God, but for today, we are thinking about him only as the Lamb of God.
As a matter of fact, we are told later in Matthew's account of the Gospel (11:3) that the followers of John the Baptist, after John had been imprisoned by King Herod the tetrarch, came to Jesus to ask him if Jesus really was the Messiah. John had apparently begun to doubt it, and so had they. As was so characteristic of Jesus, he did not answer them directly, but he said, "Go tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them" (Matt. 11:4-5). There is nothing inherently political about that, and probably nothing even implicitly political. In other words, Jesus' own concept of himself was not that of a political Messiah. And because it was not, and because most Jews thought of the Messiah as being a military and political figure, most Jews did not and still do not accept Jesus as the Messiah. And it is perfectly understandable. If you're looking for a man on a horse, a great general or statesman or Fuhrer or Duce or Caudillo, Jesus is not your man. But perhaps if you're looking for a combination Lamb of God/Messiah, a winner who wins by losing, a Sacrifice who becomes the Savior, Jesus is precisely whom you are looking for.
In the Book of Revelation, that apocalyptic and ultimately unfathomable final book in the Christian Bible, the words "Lamb of God" or simply "Lamb" are used twenty-nine times to refer to Jesus. Jesus IS the Lamb of God, but it is in a manner which no one, including John the Baptist, ever could have predicted. John recognized Jesus as someone special, someone utterly unique, but he had no idea just how special he was. And in fact John's nose may eventually have gotten a little bit out of joint because of all the attention Jesus was receiving at his own expense. "He must increase, and I must decrease," John said a short while later in the Fourth Gospel (John 3:30), but still, it had to smart more than a little that Jesus' increase occurred directly as a result of John's decrease.
Sometimes there is a sardonic sorrow in the still, sad music of humanity. We know that something is inevitable, and we suspect it may all be for the best, but it hurts to see it happening anyway. A while back there was a very poignant cartoon in The New Yorker. It showed a man in his death bed. There was his grieving wife seated beside him, handkerchief in hand, and beside her the priest or minister with his clerical collar. The dying man gasps at them, "I want to be cremated and have my ashes sprinkled on the Republican Party." There is an anguished ambivalence there, don't you think? Does he want that done in order to take a final parting shot at the GOP for failing him in his final moments, or are his ashes to be the dust from which, like the phoenix, the Grand Old Party shall again spring into renewed life?
It was with a measure of ambivalence that John the Baptist of the Fourth Gospel cried out, "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" If he were able to obliterate those sins himself, John would gladly have done it, but he knew that was not in the divine plan of salvation. According to John and the three Synoptic writers, John was only the Announcer; he was not the Announced.
In the Fourth Gospel, the first time we encounter Jesus is when he came to see John the Baptist. There is no mention of Jesus’ birth in John, no frightened flight of the Holy Family to Egypt, no Song of Simeon, no utterance by the prophetess Anna, no childhood appearance in the temple, as in Luke. And, very curiously, there is no baptism of Jesus by John either, as there is in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. There is only "Behold, the Lamb of God!", and that's it: a prophetic recognition by John of a key concept in the identity of Jesus, and then the spotlight shifts almost exclusively to Jesus, and John immediately begins to fade into the forgotten background.
It is at best a bittersweet story. John was so big, and then he was so small that he became almost nothing. Herod had him beheaded, and nobody lifted a finger in his defense. Few seemed to mourn his passing, although in the Synoptics Jesus expresses some sorrow over John’s cruel execution.
But John the Baptist was a pivotal character in the Jesus story. Without him and his ready willingness to proclaim Jesus as the Coming One, Jesus' coming might possibly have gone entirely unnoticed.
"Behold, the Lamb of God!" said a mysterious man in a mysterious location to a mystified people. He didn't fully understand the one of whom he said it, he couldn't fully understand him, nor can we. Yet John knew enough to know that Jesus was the one for whom the world had been waiting. There is more to Jesus than just that, but at the beginning, there is that at a minimum. "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!"
Did Jesus have to die on the cross to fulfill his God-given messianic mission? Must Jesus be the Lamb of God in order to be the Son of God? And what does “Son of God” mean, anyway? That comes next week.