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.
