“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.
John the Baptist points to Jesus not simply as the Babe of Bethlehem but as the Crucified Christ of Calvary. Christmas and Easter, Bethlehem and Jerusalem, are inescapably intertwined. We forget that the Advent journey is not just to Bethlehem but to Jerusalem. Bethlehem and Jerusalem are the twin poles of the Christian imaginary around which, as in an ellipse, our thoughts turn. “His Christmas-day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day”, as John Donne says.
The end of this Gospel returns us (well, almost) to the beginning of the Gospel read (in the Cdn. Prayer Book) on the Sunday Next Before Advent where John points to Jesus as “the Lamb of God”. The First Sunday in Advent was about Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem, not Bethlehem, but not Jerusalem without Bethlehem either. We behold the way in which these mysteries are intertwined. One cannot think the one without the other. This is the great challenge to our age in its machine-like logic which turns us into bots, into cogs within the machine of technocratic culture. We are all implicated in it. The question is the extent to which we succumb to it or are able to transcend its false demands and certainties. Such is the challenge of Advent.
Advent is not simply the journey to Bethlehem. On this pole of the ellipse, to use the geometric image, everything focuses on Bethlehem but already as informed by Jerusalem. The Incarnation envelops both the Nativity and the Passion. We cannot rejoice in Christ’s holy Birth without acknowledging his Passion and Death. His Death and Resurrection also depend upon his Conception and Birth, his being “incarnate of the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary”, his being made man for us. The real journey of our souls is into the deep meaning of the Incarnation which embraces the whole story of Christ and thus into the deeper joy of the Christmas mystery. “The Lord is at hand,” now and always.
Christ’s advent awakens us to a deep and profound spiritual truth. The spiritual journey is not linear; it gathers us into the eternal circle of God’s love. “God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere”, to put it in a marvelous mystical phrase that has captured the spiritual imagination. And rightly so.
John points us to that mystery. The mystery of God with us, Emmanuel, is the mystery of the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, the center which is everywhere and which embraces the whole of our humanity. This is the logic that informs the Veni Emmanuel which contemplates the different scriptural and theological registers of the radical meaning of Christ’s coming.
Its recurring refrain is “rejoice! rejoice!”, even as each verse – there are actually seven which shape the Advent Antiphons and form an acrostic – highlights something of the meaning of Christ as the Lamb of God, perhaps the greatest of the images of self-giving love. Such is the love that John’s witness proclaims. Our joy in this the last and the longest week of Advent IV, since Christmas comes next Sunday, brings us by penitential adoration to the mystery of Christ’s holy birth. Let us use this week to deepen our hearts and minds in the mystery of God’s coming to us. The Babe of Bethlehem is the Christ of Calvary. We “behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world”. We rejoice in John’s witness to the radical meaning of Christ’s coming.
In the week of the deepest darkness and the longest night, we are raised up by God’s “bountiful grace and mercy” into joy and gladness. In our anxious and troubled world, here is the good news of metaphysical truth, the radical good news of the meaning of the one who comes to redeem and save. At issue is our beholding the one to whom John points us and names, our looking at him to whom John witnesses.
“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”
Fr. David Curry
Advent IV, 2022