Bloomsbury Central
Baptist Church
15 January 2017 11.00am
John 1.29-42
The next day he saw Jesus coming
toward him and declared, "Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin
of the world!
Exodus 12.1-14
Isaiah 53.1-7
Listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/simon-woodman-behold-the-lamb-on-monsters-and-teddy-bears#t=7:20
Listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/simon-woodman-behold-the-lamb-on-monsters-and-teddy-bears#t=7:20
I wonder, when you were very young, were are you afraid of
monsters?
It seems to be a fairly universal experience of childhood
that we fear the unknown,
and fill it with monsters of our
own imaginings.
From the void under the bed to the dark of the wardrobe,
the lurking
spiders of the dark have the capacity
to assume
monstrous and threatening proportions in our minds,
as we place onto them our worst fears and darkest dreams.
And let us not kid ourselves for even a moment
that the
inner world of a child is all innocence and light.
I can remember, even at a very young age,
finding
within myself the capacity to explore very dark thoughts and emotions,
and I
assume I'm not alone in this.
What is significant, of course, is how a child learns to
process and cope with
their
developing sense of themselves.
What we do with our inner monsters
is a key
question of the process of reaching maturity.
And one of the things we do
is to take
those inner demons and externalise them,
we
get them out of ourselves,
and then we
try to find ways to appease their gnawing appetites.
And so I remember that when I was very young,
I had a
teddy bear that I loved very much,
and I would dangle him over the edge of my bed
so that he
could see into the fearsome and unplumbed depths beneath me,
and face
the creatures that lived there on my behalf.
I used to promise him that I'd never let him go,
that he was
safe as long as I held his hand;
but I also took comfort in knowing that if anything happened
to him,
if the fear
got too much for me and my grip faltered,
I could quickly withdraw my hand back to safety,
leaving him
as a sacrifice to the dark,
to be
collected in the morning if he survived the night down there alone.
The question I have, re-visiting these memories from my
childhood,
is who, or
what is the real monster here?
And who, or what, is the sacrifice that is being offered?
And so to John's Gospel, to our lectionary reading for this
morning.
"The next day, John saw Jesus coming towards him and
declared,
'Here is
the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.'" (1.29)
And I find myself wondering what we mean
when we
speak of Jesus as the 'Lamb of God"?
What did John the Baptist mean
when he
greeted Jesus in this way,
and what did John the author of the fourth gospel mean
by
repeating it here at the start of Jesus’ public ministry?
The background to the phrase "Lamb of God" is well
known,
finding its
origin in the two old Testament passages
we had read
for us earlier in the service.
The first of these is the story of the institution of the
Passover,
set in the
time of Israelite slavery in Egypt.
Moses had been unsuccessful
in
persuading the pharaoh to release his people.
Despite the devastation of the nine plagues that had already
happened,
Pharaoh's
heart remained hard, and set on slavery.
The final plague to visit to the Egyptians was that of the
death of the first born,
with the
citizens of ancient Egypt bearing the horrific cost
of their
leader's dedication to domination.
But the Israelites were spared the angel of death,
because
they obeyed the instruction to kill a lamb without blemish
and
to mark their doorposts with its blood,
so that the
curse of death would know to pass over their houses.
It is clear that the author of John's Gospel
has the
festival of the Passover very much in mind
as
he tells the story of Jesus,
as, unlike the other gospels, we find that John’s Gospel
gives us
three specific mentions of the Passover (2.13; 6.4; 13.1),
with the events of the crucifixion taking place at the third
of these,
and the
Passover being celebrated on the day following the death of Jesus.
The gospel writer clearly wants his readers to understand
that Jesus
is the Passover lamb,
with his death functioning to bring release from the empire
of domination
that, like
the Egyptian pharaoh of old,
still holds
people in perpetual captivity.
But still, what kind of a lamb is this?
What kind of
a sacrifice is being offered here?[1]
And so we must turn our attention to the second scripture
passage
that lies
behind the acclamation of Jesus as the Lamb of God;
the
suffering servant passage from Isaiah.
This is a text which, like the Passover story,
also finds
its origin in a time of imperial oppression.
These words from Isaiah were offered originally to the Jews
in exile in Babylon,
and they gave
the people of God a way of understanding
their
present sufferings in exile
in the
context of God's activity for the release
of
all who live in slavery and oppression.
As the sins of the pharaoh caused the suffering of many,
so the sins
of the many cause the suffering of the one,
who goes to his death like a lamb that is led to the
slaughter (Isa 53.7).
However Isaiah's words were understood
by those
who first heard them,
John's Gospel is quite clear that Jesus is to be understood
as the Lamb
of God who goes to his death
because
of the sins of the many,
to secure
the release of the many
from
the dominating powers of sin and death.
"Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the
world." (1.29)
But even if we are clear that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb,
we still
haven't resolved our question
of
why this sacrifice is being demanded, by whom, and on what basis.
And here, I'd like to return to my childhood for a moment
again,
and think
about the human experience
of how we
deal with our own monstrous desires.
There is a way of understanding the death of Jesus
where God
is like the small child, perched up on high,
safe
from the monsters that live below,
dangling
his dearly beloved son over the precipice
and
then letting go, as an offering to assuage the appetites
of
the monsters that would otherwise devour the cosmos
and
all who live there.
Or, to put this perspective another way:
God is in
his heaven,
but
the wages of sin demand a sacrifice unto death.
Someone has
to pay that bill,
so
Jesus pays it, and the rest of us get off scot-free.
Many of us will have heard this, or something very similar
to it, before.
It is, in
essence, the standard evangelical understanding
of
the death of Jesus as the one who pays the price for our sins,
so
we don't have to.
Sometimes, it even comes with diagrams,
so that it
can be more easily explained to those
whose
sins have not yet been washed away by the blood of the lamb,
which
apparently (according to one way of reading the book of Revelation)
washes
whiter than white (Revelation 7.14).
However, I have something of a problem with this way of
seeing things,
because the
more I think about it,
the more it
seems to me that in this scenario
the
monsters are not dwelling on the earth,
or
even under the bed.
The monster here is God.
This is a
monstrous view of God,
who tosses
his son to feed the encircling wolves of sin and death.
Just as the monsters under my bed as a child existed, in
reality, only inside my head;
so it is
with God if we fashion him as the divine child on high,
projecting
his own needs and insecurities onto his creation
before
destroying his own beloved son
to
appease these demons of his own creating.
No, in the final analysis, I reject this understanding of
the death of Jesus
as an immature
projection by humans,
in which we create God in our own image
and then endow
him with our own sinful characteristics.
It seems to me that, for any understanding of Jesus as the
sacrificial lamb
to be
genuinely transformative of our human experience,
it must begin with an understanding of God as love.
If God is not love, and love unrestricted and freely given,
then I
would suggest that God is not God.
If God is violent, vengeful, cowardly, remote, or
judgemental,
then God is
nothing more than a projection
of our own
psychological traumas.
For God to be God, God must be love,
and
therefore God's saving action in Christ
must be an
act of love, and not violence.
So here's a thought:
what if it
is not God who demands the sacrifice?
What if the sacrifice is not required by some immutable laws
which God grandly
wrote into the universe,
but which now
not even he has the power to overrule?
What if the monsters baying for blood
are not
projections of the tortured mind of God?
What if the monsters are really me, and you?
What if the sacrificial monster,
demanding a
sacrifice to expunge its guilt, is humanity itself?
This, I would suggest, changes everything.
By this understanding, the death of Jesus
is not
about paying some cosmic debt,
but rather is about exposing the sacrificial predilections
that lie
deep within each of us,
as we cast about for someone to rid us of the guilt
of our own
darkest fears and desires.
By this reading, Jesus is the one who bears our infirmities,
and carries
our desires;
he is wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our
iniquities,
and by his
bruises we are healed.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray;
and the
Lamb of God comes from the father and returns to the father
that we may
be freed from the burden of our fallen humanity.
This is not God casting our sins on Jesus
as an act
of divine violence against an innocent victim.
Rather, this is God entering into the depths of human depravity,
to expose
to the light of his truth
our
capacity to inflict violence on one another,
in our
quest for personal or communal justification.
This is the act of a God of love, who so deeply loves
humanity
that he is
willing to take into himself the worst we can do to another,
in
order that our desires for a violent solution to our plight
may
be deconstructed.
Jesus the sacrificial lamb is not some spotless Lamb of
perfected humanity,
given to
appease a vengeful God;
but the Lamb of God, given to bring release to human
communities
locked into
cycles of scapegoating.
And, I would add, the world has never needed the Lamb of God
more than
it does at the moment.
We are locked into global cycles of violent scapegoating,
where the
"other" is continually and creatively held accountable
for
the sins of the many,
in order
that the many might feel some brief glimmer of justification.
The sins of the world are many and grievous,
as we
victimise the powerless,
and
systemically extinguish empathy for the other.
It happens on all sides, and there is no way out
without an
intervention to unmask the darkness that lies within each of us.
The world needs those who will join with John the Baptist
in the
heralding another way.
It needs those who will cry to a world of sin:
"Look,
here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."
The world needs to hear the story, and see the brutal
reality,
of the Lamb
of God sent to his death by human hands;
because without this unmasking of our sins,
we continue
to misrepresent the victim as the enemy,
and the spirals
of sin and death continue unabated.
And this task of proclaiming of the Lamb of God to the world
begins with
and within each of us.
If it is not true for me, or for you, then we have nothing
to say to others,
because we
ourselves are still trapped by our own monsters,
unable to step down from the safety of our beds,
forever
retreating into our own comfort zones,
and all the while scapegoating those who we deem expendable,
requiring
others to pay the price for our own sins.
We have to grow up, and to grow into Christ.
We have to learn to see Christ in the other,
and to
recognise the monsters in ourselves;
rather than seeing Christ in ourselves
and
monsters in others.
We need the Lamb of God to take away our sins.
And so we need the spirit of Christ to remain within us,
that we may
remain within God.
And, I wonder, what might this mean in practice?
What does
it mean for us to recognise in ourselves
our
capacity to deny our own inner darkness
by
demonising others?
I think it starts with self knowledge,
with us
learning to have the courage to stare into the darkness within,
and to
recognise our fallen state for what it is.
For me, this meant a year of psychotherapy,
as I
exorcised certain ghosts that had been haunting me
for most of
my adult life.
It was Socrates who famously declared
that the
unexamined life was not worth living.
But of course, merely learning to face the darkness
is only the
first step of the process.
Because to truly abide in Christ, the Lamb of God,
is a
process of surrendering to love,
and of
letting go of our driving sense of self.
It is allowing him to take from us the hatred, bitterness,
pain, and guilt,
that define
our lives and our relationships.
It is becoming vulnerable to the ultimate other
who comes
to us in love
and offers
us release and forgiveness.
And this means becoming vulnerable to one another,
as we
surrender ourselves to the body of Christ,
the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
[1]
http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-a/epiphany2a/
