“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”
We seem to have come full circle. The Gospel for the Sunday Next Before Advent in our Canadian Prayer Book begins with John the Baptist looking upon Jesus as he walked and saying, “Behold the Lamb of God.” This morning’s Gospel on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, also from John’s Gospel, ends with John the Baptist “seeing Jesus coming unto him, and saying, Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Such is the witness of John the Baptist to the advent of Christ and to the meaning of human redemption.
In between the two Gospel readings for these Sundays are four verses which open us out to the mystery of Christ in his Advent to us. John the Baptist points us to Christ. That is his ministry. He identifies him as “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” But in the intervening verses (John 1.30-34), we have John’s account of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. An Epiphany theme, it nonetheless highlights the fuller meaning of his witness to Christ, “the one who comes after me,” he says, “ranks before me, for he was before.” Why? Because he is divine. “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God.” This is the witness of John.
The form of this witness is instructive to us in our approach to Christ and to Christmas, our approach really to the mysteries of God and his love for us. Quite simply, John the Baptist, like Mary, shows us the attitude of faith. They provide the strong counter to the endless narcissisms of our age. As if it was all about us! But no. The witness of John is very much about notcalling attention to himself, but to the “one who cometh after me, whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose,” he says. The questions about John the Baptist in this Gospel are all turned by John to Christ. “Who are thou?” he is asked.
There is in this a wonderful sense of wonder about John the Baptist, this strange and arresting figure of ascetic rigour and disturbing intensity. Last Sunday, Jesus pointed to John the Baptist and the significance of his ministry of preparation. Today, John the Baptist insistently points to Christ. “I am not the Christ,” he says. He calls attention not to himself but to Christ.
The questions about John the Baptist by the Priests and Levites reveal a deep desire, a yearning for the righteousness and the truth of God that belongs to the hope of Israel. But that hope is for all and is found only in God. “I am not the Christ,” nor Elijah, nor the Prophet, John says. His “I am not” sayings are a poignant contrast to Christ’s “I am.” But who then is he? In a wonderful phrase that resounds down through the centuries of poetry and philosophy, John describes himself as vox clamantis in deserto, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness.” What does he cry? “Make straight the way of the Lord,” quoting Isaiah (Is.40.3). In answer about his preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, a baptism which he says is “with water”, he points to the coming of Christ, the one whom he will say in the intervening verses “is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” John points us to Christ, the Son of God and the Lamb of God.
John the Baptist highlights the wilderness of our world at the same time as he points us to grace and salvation coming to us in Christ. He does not point to himself but only to Christ. The wilderness is within us in our self-obsessions and preoccupations, in our frantic busyness and anxieties to make Christmas. The point is that Christmas is not of our making. It is all God’s making albeit in us but that means to behold Christ. God is the great poet/maker of all things; the great poet/maker of Christmas. In Greek, poesis, poetry, is making, making with words.
Mary, too, yields her whole self to God to become the Theotokos, the God bearer. We await in the darkest time of nature’s year to her giving birth to the Word and Light of God, to the “Immensity cloysterd in thy deare wombe” as another John, the poet John Donne, puts it (‘Annunciation’, La Corona). Through her “the Word was made flesh.” This is the greater making. “‘Twas much, that man was made like God before/ But, that God should be made like man, much more” (Donne, Sonnet # XV). The questions addressed to John the Baptist belong to the heightened intensity of our waiting and hers, to a sense of rejoicing for “the Lord is at hand.”
The witness of John is about what we are given to behold and see in Christ. Without that witness, without that sense of awareness, our Christmas celebrations are but tinsel and wrap, mere empty show and vanity. It would be about ‘ourselves’ but bereft of the deeper truth of ourselves as found in the coming of God to us. If we are too much with ourselves, then we shall not be with God in Christ in the motions of his love coming to us. With John the Baptist, we learn to look to Christ and behold in him the redemption of ourselves and our humanity.
“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”
Fr. David Curry
Advent 4, 2019