John 1:29-34

09/14/08
John 1:29-34
Hudson UMC

Everyone, at one point or another, wonders about the meaning of life. We all wonder what our purpose is on this planet. We all want to know what it is that we are supposed to be doing and we spend rather a long time in this intellectual exercise. You would think that knowing that there is a God and that this God has a plan for you would make things easier, but it really doesn’t. Knowing this might make things worse, because now, you know that there is a right answer. I have known many people who, once they realize this, try to make sure that God wants them to do something that they already want to do. When God calls them to do something that is not financially advantageous, or might cost them their reputation, or other things like that, they tend to lose their dedication to the will of God.

What if you were to know exactly what God wanted you to do with your life beyond a shadow of a doubt, but it seemed really simple and the opposite of glamorous? Would you be excited? This is what happened to Simeon in the Christmas narrative. He was quite an elderly man who had been told by God that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. He had waited somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy or eighty years, waiting for a single moment in time when he would lay his eyes on a baby and confirm that it was indeed the Son of God. That was it; that was all he was called to. He wasn’t called to preach about the Messiah, nor was he called to set up a Messiah ministry or anything like that. His entire purpose in life was to wait for decades for a single moment, then fade into the background. His entire life built up to a period of less than ten minutes, but he was able to rejoice in the goodness of God.

The same is true for John the Baptist. From the time he was very young, John lived out in the wilderness, eating locusts and wearing camel skins. We read, in the Gospel of Luke, that he lived in the deserts until the day of his public appearance to Israel, which didn’t happen until he was thirty. At that time, the voice of God spoke to John and said, “John, go; preach repentance to and baptize everyone who comes to you. Do this until the Messiah comes. When you baptize someone and the Spirit descends on Him like a dove and remains on Him, that is the Son of God.” What an incredible task. Now, we need to notice that he isn’t told how long it will be until this happens. It could be a week, or it could be twenty years. John isn’t concerned. He simply gets ready and goes to preach. His entire purpose in life, the twenty-some years in the wilderness, is summed up in only a few minutes when he is able to cry out and say, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Who does this kind of thing? Who is willing to give up their entire lives for a moment? Who lays awake at night dreaming of being able to point to someone greater than themselves, then recede to the background? Would you do it if God called? John the Baptist did.

The main focus of the sermon for this morning is the exclamation made by John the Baptist at the very beginning of our passage. He cries out, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Now, I do not often shout, comparing people with animals. As you might imagine, if people were to compare everyone they met with an animal, it might prove to be very offensive indeed. I want to spend some time and investigate what in the world was going through John’s head when he made this statement and how it impacts our understanding of Christ.

When John says that Jesus is like a lamb, what is he talking about? If we look at lambs from general human experience, what do we have? We have a small woolen animal that eats grass and drinks water; now, which of those things is like Christ? It isn’t very helpful. There are other images from the animal kingdom that are also applied to Christ and these make a little more sense. For example, Christ is called a lion, which, since He is a powerful and conquering king, our general experience of lions makes perfect sense, but a lamb? It just doesn’t seem to make sense. The fact of the matter is that John is not at all saying that Jesus is like a lamb in this sense. He is referring to lambs as they are understood within the context of the nation of Israel. And there is a long and rich history of Israel and lambs.

Think back to your days in Sunday School, when you learned about the Exodus of Israel from Egypt. God sent a bunch of plagues on the Egyptians because they were treating the Israelites poorly. Pharaoh would not let them go after any of them so God sent one last plague, he was going to send the angel of death to kill the firstborn son of every family. Now, God did not want to punish the Israelites, so He gave them some instructions to follow so they would be safe. What they were to do was have each family take a lamb, kill it, spread its blood over the doorposts so the angel of death would not enter, and then prepare the animal into a meal with bitter herbs and eat it. This was the institution of the Seder dinner that is held as part of the Jewish festival of Passover, even today. Lambs, in this context, were not merely cute animals that eat grass and drink water, they were used as a key component to protect the people of God from death and destruction. To call Jesus the Lamb of God is not to emphasize his meekness and compassion, it is to highlight the fact that His main purpose was to die, not for anything that He has done, but for the sake of others. If this was the only thing that people would have thought when John said what he said, it would have been enough, but there is more.

Lambs have been killed and eaten in remembrance of the Exodus for around thirty-five hundred years. This has been a somewhat graphic way to remember the good things that God has done and learn the lessons from long ago. Lambs were not only used in this context, though. There are five different types of offerings that are prescribed in the beginning of the book of Leviticus. One of them in particular, the guilt offering, required the sacrifice of a lamb without spot or blemish. Now, this sacrifice was not only made when someone did something really bad by society’s standards; it was needed to atone for even “smaller” sins. The sins particularly mentioned in Leviticus chapter 5 are: refusing to bear witness when asked, touching anything unclean, and making rash promises. These things made a person guilty whether they were intentional or unintentional. This sacrifice is a bit unpleasant when described in detail, but the blood of the lamb would be sprinkled on the altar and the rest poured out as an offering for sin.

Believe it or not, I’ve given you the most “family friendly” version of the Israelite Guilt Offering as I can and still have you understand how important it is. Now, we don’t sacrifice animals in Christian churches so we think all of this sounds very unusual. However, imagine growing up in a culture that has performed sacrifices like this for hundreds and hundreds of years and that these sacrifices are intimately related to your national and cultural identity. How might this affect you? All of the blood and death that surrounded the atonement for sin was meant to show the nation of Israel that sin was absolutely deadly real. Sometimes we are tempted in modern times to talk about sin as this kind of impersonal “badness”. We often treat sin as if it were nothing more than a violation against prevailing cultural norms. In reality, sin is a transgression against the law of God and the sins of humanity are an offense to the one who created us.

The animal sacrifices also showed that, because God is supremely just, sin cannot simply be wiped away. Sin needs to be punished. It cannot be atoned for simply by not doing it again, nor will it be forgotten merely if we end up doing more good than bad in our lives. Sin was understood as being extremely serious. It is so serious that the penalty of sin is death. The one who commits sin must die; a penalty must be paid. In fact, we read in the book of Hebrews the intensity of sin. The writer says, “without [the] shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness. This is precisely why God cannot simply declare everyone forgiven, regardless of anything. To refuse to punish sin is to make the God of the universe unjust. Sin must be atoned for; it cannot be ignored, no matter how much we might want to ignore it.

Israel’s sacrifice of lambs shielded them from the just judgment of God. Even when we understand that sin must be paid for with death, something just seems incomplete with the sacrifice of lambs. Again, we read in Hebrews that, in the end, the blood of animals cannot finally take away sin. After all, lambs did not bring sin into the world, humans did. If humans are to blame, humans will need to pay the price; lambs just don’t cut it. And yet, it’s a pretty good thing that the people of Israel were not sacrificing humans to pay the debt of sin. It wouldn’t have worked anyway because, just like sacrificing a lamb which has never sinned cannot redeem sinful humanity, how can sacrificing a sinful human redeem it? It can’t, so it was never tried.

I hope you are beginning to see the significance of all this. If we were to try and ignore the Old Testament, to only focus on the teachings of Jesus, John’s statement would make absolutely no sense at all. If we understand this claim as being rooted in general human experience of lambs, there would be nothing to say this morning because it would be absolute gibberish; when we understand it as reflecting and reminding us of the relationship between Israel and lambs, John’s exclamation that Jesus is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world becomes supremely powerful. Jesus is not a soft, wooly animal that eats grass and drinks water, He is a sacrifice, sent by God and acceptable to God, that is to be made on our behalf.

Some of you might not like the fact that Jesus represents, not a cute and fluffy lamb, but a bleeding and dying lamb. You might have always thought that John was talking about the friendliness and gentleness of our Lord and you may have wanted to continue thinking that forever, but you would miss the beautiful imagery. I made the comment earlier that sin was seen as absolutely deadly real to the Israelites. It is absolutely deadly real to us today. On the one hand, the deadly reality of sin in our world and in our lives is very sad, because it acknowledges that sin is not as innocent as not cleaning your room when your mom wants you to, but brings with it the penalty of death. There is even a sad side to the fact that Jesus died in payment of that debt because it means that each one of us, since we have all committed sin, are, in a way, the very cause of the death of Christ. We love to think about the fact that Christ died for us, but we don’t like to dwell on the fact that there is a reason we needed Him to do so.

All of this is sober imagery and, if we only tell half of the story, we might start to get pretty down about a lot of things. However, this need not be the case; indeed it should not be the case. John, when he shouted out, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”, was not sad, but overjoyed. His whole purpose in life was to wait for the Son of God, the Messiah, who would redeem the people of God from bondage to sin and death. The lamb was traditionally sacrificed at Passover, to remember when God, through a dramatic and mighty act of power, turned the world of the Israelites upside down and saved them from a captivity they could never have escaped from any other way. It is no coincidence that Jesus, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, was crucified during Passover. It is not a coincidence that the deliverance story of Christ’s death on a cross reminds us so much of the deliverance of Israel all those long years ago. In so many ways, the Exodus and the mighty works of God associated with it happened primarily so that we could understand what God was going to do fifteen hundred years later in Christ. God knew what He was doing. Most of the people in the church in today’s world are not Jewish; we don’t think like Jews and we don’t have the history of the Jews. In most cases, that doesn’t matter, but can you see how we might miss this powerful point if we do not enter in to the Jewish mindset? The image of Christ as the sacrificial lamb, so far from being disturbing or unsettling, is meant to be the single most hopeful and comforting of all the images of the New Testament. It is so powerful and moving that John could not contain himself when he realized whom he was seeing.

Every single human being has a purpose in this life. Very often, this is manifested in a particular calling, that God has set us aside with a particular goal in mind. For Simeon, it was to live until he saw the Messiah and spread the hope that God would soon come and rescue His people. For John the Baptist, it was to preach and baptize until God revealed the Messiah to him in the wilderness, then to spend the rest of his life pointing to him in all he did. Jesus came with a purpose and He never lost sight of that purpose. We spend so much time in the church speaking poetically about the teachings of Christ that we might think that it was His purpose to teach us really sound doctrine. This is not the case. We might think that He came to be our example, to show us what it really means to be human and, while there is certainly an element of truth in that, it is far from a complete picture. Jesus came as a sacrifice, He came to take our place. He came to earth as a weeping, wailing baby, giving up His rights as the second person of the Trinity, so that He could be ill-treated, beaten, and nailed to a cross, so that we might have eternal life. Can we even imagine what that must have cost? At the beginning of the sermon, I asked you to consider if you would engage in a wilderness ministry like John the Baptist if God called you to it. I ask you now, can you even imagine suffering such terrible things, which you did not deserve, just so you could show unconditional love on the very people who killed you? It seems unbelievable. If we did not have the witness of the Scriptures, the testimony of the church and the witness of the Spirit with our spirits that we are the children of God, we would laugh if someone told it to us. As it is, we see that we serve a truly awesome God; a God that does not give us what we deserve, but what we need; a God that shows us grace instead of wrath. God commands us to be living sacrifices, devoted to God, but He only does this because He already knows what it means to be a sacrifice. He asks us to give of ourselves to spread the good news, but He only asks this because He has already given everything. Every time you think about Jesus, remember the words of John the Baptist. Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He has not only taken away the world’s sin, but, at the moment you believed, He has also taken away your sin. Our God is gracious and good. Let us pray.

AMEN