Day: December 18, 2022

“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”

It is known as the witness of John. In answer to the questions about who he is, John the Baptist instead proclaims his mission as vox clamantis in deserto, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord”. He humbles himself in order to point to the one who comes after him, “whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose”. Only at the end of the passage is it revealed who that is who comes after him and yet is ever prior to him. Jesus. Thus what John says is particularly arresting. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. His witness is really a confession, confession in its truest sense, a confession of the truth which is greater than oneself.

We need the strong objectivity of the Advent Gospels. They point us to the radical meaning of Christ’s coming. The image of the Lamb of God is particularly telling. It counters all of the false sentimentalities of the Advent and Christmas season which are often more about ourselves in the quest for a sense of coziness and comfort, hyggelig, as the Danish call it, but only, it seems, for some and not for all. The humility of John in pointing to Jesus and not to himself points to the greater humility of God. God comes in the lowliness of our humanity as sacrifice. Only so is he Lord and Saviour. Only so is God revealed to us. This is not exactly hyggelig, however much we may seek it for ourselves. It belongs to a deeper consolation of the soul but only through confession.

Christ as the Lamb of God turns the world on its head. John’s witness convicts us far more than we realize because it is a standing rebuke to our humanity in all ages but especially our own. The Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. This is a different kind of triumph and glory because it happens through the encounter with sin and evil; in short, through suffering, a counter to the illusions of the self in claiming to be whatever one chooses to be and in denial of the givenness of things. We are not autonomous, self-complete beings. That Christ comes as the Lamb of God, as Sacrifice and Saviour points to the nature of our mutual interdependence with God and one another, and, even more, to the forms of our co-inherence with God and creation. This reveals the true meaning of God as love. Love gives of itself but without losing anything of itself. Christ’s Advent seeks to embrace us in that all-enfolding and never-ending love of God in contrast to our empty illusions and narcissism.

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