Second Sunday after the Epiphany (January 15, 2023)

What an extraordinary, audacious, outrageous claim Jesus’ locust-eating cousin makes here in John 1:29.

“Here is the Lamb of God,” John the Baptist confidently declares as Jesus approaches, “who takes away the sin of the world!”

All of it, John? The sin of the whole world? How could that be? How could anyone even grasp all the rot and filth and failure and evil put out by the whole world across all time – let alone just “take it away,” as if it were a bag of last week’s garbage? Surely this is just more hyperbole from the half-crazy, camel-clad prophet whom we heard yelling a few weeks ago about fiery baptism and a Messiah who would clear-cut the world of bad guys.

What if it were true, though? What if every terrible thing I’ve done and every shameful failure to do what I should have done – and all of the ones still done and not done – are simply gone? Taken away two millennia ago by this dusty, sandaled Nazarene whom John called the Lamb of God, the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the savior of all of us? To even glimpse such a thing leaves me dizzy. No condemnation at all? Not even a little bit? I am wholly and irrevocably right with God? I have nothing at all to fear? Are you sure, John? Could it be?

Hold on a minute, though. I’m all about having the left side of my own ledger erased. But I’m not so sure about everyone else having theirs wiped clean, too. After all, I personally hold the note on some of the debts this Lamb of God has declared null and void. That co-worker who screwed me over a few years back never has apologized. Hasn’t even acknowledged the wrong. And I’m still out all the money that my decision to trust that other guy – to try to help him, even, when no one else would – ended up costing me. And how about the venomous thing that toxic woman said to me, back when I was at my lowest point, when even if she couldn’t have offered something encouraging, she at least could have kept her mouth shut? Where’s my revenge for that?

Suddenly, this Lamb of God seems more robber than savior, more enemy than friend, and I’m not sure who He thinks He is, letting people like those scumbags off the hook for things they did to me, things he wasn’t even involved in, let alone harmed by. “Forgive us our trespasses,” I can pray, but not without adding, in the same breath, “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

This isn’t the Messiah I want. I want one who will forgive me if I at least try to be a better man but who will countenance no such nonsense from my enemies. I want him on my side, smiting all who have wronged me the way he smote all those enemies of Israel in the ancienttimes.

Beholding the Lamb of God isn’t easy, John. Not easy at all. If seeing that my sin has been taken away means seeing that everyone else’s has, too, I fear the wounded, angry little man inside me, not far below the surface, just might prefer to be blind.

Baptism of the Lord (January 8, 2023)

Jesus said and did a lot of hard-to-explain things, one of them being his decision to wade into the Jordan River and ask John the Baptist to baptize him.

Understandably, Christians who see baptism as connected to the absolution of sin have a particularly difficult time figuring out why Jesus wanted to be baptized. If Jesus was sinless, why would need to respond to John’s call for repentance?

Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know what baptism truly accomplishes, and if it does have something to do with getting rid of sin, I don’t know why Jesus felt compelled to undergo it. It’s odd, too, that while the Gospels indicate that Jesus’ disciples baptized people at Jesus’ direction, they never depict Jesus baptizing anyone himself.

The explanation for Jesus baptism that I like the most, though, is rooted in the idea that baptism is about making a covenant with God, about identifying oneself both as someone who belongs to God and as someone to whom God belongs. It’s an overtly mutual thing. I don’t just take possession of God, and God doesn’t just take possession of me. In baptism, we take possession of each other.

Seen in this context, Jesus’ baptism makes perfect sense to me. He stepped into the Jordan with John the way he steps into the baptism with anyone who meets him there. My Anabaptist forebears tended to discount baptism unless one entered into it with willing awareness of what one was doing. Thus, they took a dim view of infant baptism, because babies who are being baptized generally have no clue what is happening beyond the immediate sense of being momentarily held be a stranger and feeling some perhaps uncomfortable wetness in the vicinity of their foreheads. How can a child make a covenant with God without knowing who God is, or even that God is at all?

The answer, perhaps, is that Jesus is standing there with us, having waded in to receive from us whatever we bring, no matter how little there is of it, and to give us more than any one of us could possibly fathom, no matter how sober and wise.

First Sunday after Christmas Day (January 1, 2023)

Christmas probably will always look to me the way it does in Luke, with May, Joseph, and the shepherds clustered around a manger and gazing, awestruck, at the baby Jesus. And I’ll always place the several angels in our ornament collection in the upper branches of our tree, as if they were assembling, as Luke says they did, to announce a saviour, peace, and good will.

But the older I get, the more Matthew’s version of the story captures the way Christmas feels. Matthew focuses immediately on the fear and conflict pervading Mary’s unexplained pregnancy and the dilemma it presents to Joseph. Next, the wise men take the stunningly unwise step of showing up in Jerusalem to announce that Herod, the tyrannical king running Israel for the Roman Empire, has a newly born rival growing up in defenseless anonymity somewhere nearby. Predictably, Herod orders an atrociously bloody offensive aimed at eradicating the threat. Divine intervention saves the Christ child, but none of the babies and toddlers whom Herod’s soldiers stab to death in search of him. Having packed up Jesus and fled in the middle of the night, Mary and Joseph escape to Egypt, finding shelter, most likely, among the Jews who had lived there since Israel had set up an outpost in Egypt some 750 years earlier. Only after Herod finally dies do Mary and Joseph bring the family back to Israel. And even then, they cautiously settle in Nazareth, a town in Galilee away from the center of what had been Herod’s kingdom.

We rightly feel outrage at Matthew’s story of a ruler so corrupted by power that he would slaughter children to keep it. And we wisely direct our own children’s attention away from Matthew’s violent scenes and toward the fluffy lambs, gentle shepherds and singing angels on display over in Luke. The kiddos have trouble enough as it is going to sleep in Christmas Eve. Indeed, if preachers in some areas of Christianity these days mention Matthew’s story at all, they tend to deflect the outrage toward those involved in abortion. I think that’s a conveniently narrow take on what the passage indicts, though.

Herod got away with slaughtering Bethlehem’s children partly, and probably mostly, because nobody who wanted to stop or penalize him had the power to do so. That’s how tyranny worked then and how it still works today. But it’s worth noting that Israel prospered greatly under the Roman Empire and the various henchmen, like Herod, whom the Romans put in charge. Among other accomplishments, Herod famously expanded the Hebrew temple in Jerusalem, the same one Jesus’ disciples would express admiration for later in the Gospels (only to have their enthusiastic nationalism smacked down by Jesus), and the same one that, until its destruction, rested on a foundation buttressed by the still-visible Western Wall in modern Jerusalem. Herod may have been an evil tyrant, but tolerating his rule had advantages that made overthrowing him and his kind costly.

That’s the uncomfortable truth Luke’s angel doesn’t mention. The Messiah has come, the angel tells the shepherds. Rejoice! But Matthew warns us that what the Messiah has come to challenge won’t go down without a fight. All four gospels will converge on Jesus’ agonizing death as the price of evil’s defeat, and the transformation his resurrection will unleash in the world still gets plenty of pushback. I could join the antiabortion preachers in singling out others whom I can comfortably denounce as present-day Herods, but I think Jesus would have me focus first on all the ways in which I am Herod, doing my worst to keep God from doing God’s best, and all the ways in which I am just another ordinary guy enjoying the perks of not paying too much attention to the atrocities happening around me.

I need that peaceful manger scene. We all do. But Christmas ultimately isn’t about where the baby Jesus lies. It’s about where our allegiance lies in the struggle the baby Jesus will grow up to lead.