Guest Post - Here is the Lamb of God

A huge thank you to my dear friend Candyce for guest posting a couple of times over the next several days. With diocesan requirements and ordination in a week, I'm feeling swamped. She has been so kind as to offer some reflections that will add a great voice to this blog. Enjoy her work.

“Here is the Lamb of God” – spoken not once, but twice in this reading from John. It’s easiest for me to read over this – I’ve heard it most of my life – Jesus is the Lamb of God, but what does it mean to us and what did it mean to John and to the people of 1^st Century Israel?

I need to put in a disclaimer here. I am reading N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian on the recommendation of Phall (and I thank him immensely). The book has me thinking about how I put scripture into the context of God and the world. Also, I have just finished the first two parts of this 3 part book and so I may not have all the pieces of the puzzle just yet. But Wright talks about how we “see” the relationship between God/heaven and humanity/earth and gives us three options. The third is the one that Bishop Wright embraces and it sees that heaven and earth are separate, but have places where they meet and overlap. Early in our story, he says, we found this overlap in the Torah – the way we were to enact our part in the covenant. Later – after the rescue from Egypt – it was the Temple – the place that was built to house God when God came to earth. And finally – or the last that we know at this point in time – this union came in the form of Jesus Christ and – as we are baptized into the body of Christ – to us.

So now, how does the Lamb of God image fit into this picture?

We’ve all heard that Jesus was the first born, spotless lamb sacrificed for our sins – replacing the Passover lamb that saved the lives of the Jews in Egypt.

This idea of sacrifice has made me stop and think about what sacrifice may have meant – throughout Jewish history, at the time of Christ, and how it fits into our current ideas of God, church, and culture. According to The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology sacrifice has been part of religion from its beginnings and that there has never been one, unified concept of its efficacy. So if we look at sacrifice from the point of view of the intersection of heaven and earth, then no matter what its justification it was performed at those places and times when we were most trying to invite or experience that union of holy and secular. Christ, as the Lamb of God, I believe then, could be just that intersection. Who would not follow the one who was the union of heaven and earth?

What an invitation that is!! It was a remarkable invitation to those in Jesus’ time – Andrew and the unnamed disciples in Sunday’s reading, but it is also an amazing invitation to each one of us. Do we think of our relationship with God through Jesus as just such a union? Do we realize that we’ve been linked to this union in our baptism? Do we live out such intimacy?