The lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world
Notes
Transcript
When I planned this service, I looked for hymns on the subject of the lamb of God, and there is quite a lot of them. Not all of the hymns we are singing today contain the words; “the lamb of God” but most of them do, and I had the choice of many, many more. The lamb of God is a title for Jesus that I think most Christians are very familiar with. It’s a title that John the Baptist uses in our gospel reading today and I want to suggest that it’s a title that guide our identity as Christians and our sense of mission. Amazingly it’s a title that is only used twice in the gospels and both of them are in this passage.
Today’s passage comes right at the beginning of Jesus ministry and the first chapter of John’s gospel. John has been baptizing in the river Jordan. The other gospels tell the story of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus, but John the gospel writer doesn’t relate the baptism itself. John has already Baptised Jesus when he sees Jesus walking towards him. John the Baptist declares; “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.” And John explains that the very reason he had been sent by God to baptise was so that Jesus might be revealed to Israel.
John had witnessed the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus and remain on him; the sign that Jesus would be the one who would baptise with the Holy Spirit, not just with water. “Behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”, John the Baptist declares.
And John the Baptist uses these words again the next day, when he sees Jesus a second time, this time while he, John the Baptist, is with two of his disciples. John’s disciples follow Jesus and he turns and talks to them. “What are you looking?” for he asks. “Where are you staying?” they reply. “Come and see” says Jesus and John’s two disciples go with Jesus and spend the day talking with him.
One of the disciples is Andrew, the brother of Simon. He goes to his brother and tells him; “We have found the messiah” and brings Simon to Jesus, who says; “Your name is Simon son of John, but you will be called Peter.”
So this is Johns account of the calling of the first disciples. In essence it’s the beginning of the church, and so I think we have some key principles for mission here.
The first principle is that we need to be clear who Jesus is. John the Baptist is clear that Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He only uses that term here, but the fact that he uses it to introduce Jesus is surely significant. But what does John mean by the ‘lamb of God’ or ‘taking away the sins of the world’?
John is referring to two things when he calls Jesus the lamb of God. He is referring to Jesus purity, that he is uniquely someone who is without sin, and he is referring to the crucifixion Firstly, ‘the lamb’ is a reference to the Passover lamb. Jewish people to this day, celebrate the rescue of the Jewish people, from Egypt, by God, by cooking and eating lamb. Eating the Passover lamb is a celebration of God’s mercy and deliverance. Later in the gospel John is very keen to emphasise that Jesus crucifixion and resurrection took place around the Passover and Christians have long drawn parallels between God’s rescue of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and Jesus rescue of the world from the slavery of sin.
In addition, lambs were sacrificed daily in the temple. Because these were dedicated to God it was important that they be pure and unblemished. It wasn’t right to sacrifice something shoddy and second rate. If this was true of the lambs that were sacrificed to God, how much purer would be the lamb of God, God’s own son, the word of God made flesh. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews tells us In , "We have a high priest who was tempted in every point like we are, (that’s Jesus) yet without sin."
John is also thinking of the suffering servant passage in Isaiah which uses sheep and lambs as an analogy: “All we like sheep have gone astray; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent.” () So this again is a reference to Jesus coming crucifixion.
There is also a link between the lamb and the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham is instructed to sacrifice his son Isaac. Trusting God, Abraham prepares to do so. “We’ve got the fire and the wood, Dad” says Isaac, “But where’s the lamb?” Abraham replies “God himself will provide the lamb, my son”. Ultimately Abraham is not called to kill his own son, but the son of God willingly gives his life to take away the sins of the world.
So, all these references point to two things; to Jesus purity, that is his sinlessness, and the importance of his crucifixion which takes away the sin of the world.
So why does this matter? It matters because the Jesus Christ who John the Baptist proclaims here in this passage is the Jesus Christ we are still called to proclaim today; Jesus Christ, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
And that’s not always easy to do.
Because, as a friend at college argued with me a few weeks ago, most people today don’t believe in sin and therefore don’t see it as a problem to be resolved. To the vast majority of people in Rubery, in Birmingham, in the UK the concept of anyone, anything, taking away the sin of the world is meaningless. It’s a solution to a problem that they don’t see themselves having. For my friend the answer wasn’t to tell people about sin, it was to recognise the problems that they do see themselves as having, loneliness, lack of meaning, abuse, victimisation. Talking about sin was an irrelevance for them, and so an irrelevance to mission. Meet people where they are, with the problems they’ve got, don’t go bringing sin into it.
And to be fair, I’ve got some sympathy with that, and with my friend’s point of view. Concepts of sin have been used to provoke guilt and to bully and to make people bad about themselves, especially when Christians have been quicker to preach God’s anger than God’s love. Focusing on people sin sometimes implies that their problems are their fault, not the fault of others.
But I don’t think my friend is right to do away with all mention of sin. I’m a nurse, well for a few months longer. I worked in an operating theatre and many of the operations I was involved in were people having cancerous growths removed. Sometimes people had left if far too long before going to the doctor because they had been in denial about their illness. Sometimes they genuinely didn’t know they had cancer, and others they had half known but didn’t want to think about it.
In either case the longer cancers were left the larger they got, and the chances of survival for those who suffered from them were much reduced. Even if they did survive, the surgery was far more radical than if they had seen a doctor earlier. You see, not facing up to things doesn’t make bad things go away, we all know that. Sin is a thing, whether we like it or not. Our sin, our selfishness, distorts our relationships with each other and with God. It leads to wars, to exploitation, it leads to the strong dominating the weak. Unchecked it will destroy us. But we have a saviour, Jesus Christ, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, and we have a responsibility to proclaim that saviour. If you aren’t clear about the problem, you can’t be clear about the remedy.
So, the first thing this passage tells us about mission is that we need to be clear who Jesus is. The second is that ultimately growth is down to God not us.
Many of us are concerned about the fact that our churches are getting smaller and I know that it’s a concern here at the Beacon Centre. We see our congregations shrink, our numbers decline, and we find it particularly hard to attract families and children. It’s a hard problem without easy solutions. I don’t have easy solutions to offer you, I wish I had.
But it’s easy to forget that our reading today takes place when the global church was smaller than the congregation here today. There’s Jesus and his first three disciples. That’s four people, three of whom were deeply flawed.
That the global church, with all its vibrancy, grew from this was down to God not them or us. We can easily forget this, and worry about what we are doing wrong, what techniques we should be using. But ultimately, it’s down to God, our call is simply to tell people about him, as Andrew told Simon Peter.
On one occasion Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was. He replied; “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ And ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” It’s paradoxical, but we can’t really love our neighbour without loving God first. For a start, we can’t see what really ails people, their separation from God, and their ignorance of God’s love if we suffer from the same thing.
But most importantly any strength we have comes from God. It’s God’s strength, not ours. we have no strength of our own. Three times Paul appealed to God to remove the thorn in his flesh only to get the reply from God “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness.” (). God will give us the strength for us to do what he wants us to do, where he wants us to do it. The challenge is to love him so much, to spend time with him in prayer, both as individuals and as a church, that we know what God is calling us to do. That’s our challenge here in Rubery.
As I said earlier, there are no easy solutions. But it’s too tempting to look down at our problems, not up at the one who loves us, who strengthens us, who went to the cross to redeem us. I don’t know what the future will bring, but God has not finished with us. Certainly not as individuals, but I don’t believe he has with us as a church either. As the writer of the letter to the Hebrews says; “let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Brothers and sisters, as the hymn writer puts it; lets fix our eyes upon Jesus, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face, and the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.”