John 1:29-34
When I was growing up, a good friend
of my father was a priest who taught at the local catholic college in
Helena, Montana. Father Mackin was short and overweight and had a
great sense of humor. In those days my parents would invite him over
for supper now and then and I liked to listen to him talk; he seemed
to know a lot. But to me he was just another priest and the faculty
of Carroll College in Helena was made up of priests. In fact in
those days when there seemed to be a surplus of priestly vocations,
most of the faculty lived in a dormitory and in the basements there
were about sixteen altars so that the priests could offer their
masses every morning.
One day when I was a teenager Father
Mackin asked my father to show a guest of his around Helena. I went
along, and the guest turned out to be the secretary of commerce for
Germany – he had come to this country on a fact-finding trip and
made it a point to visit Father Mackin, who was a world-renowed
expert in the economic effects of worker's unions on the financial
health of countries. I learned later that the union movement was
growing in Germany and the government was trying to figure out how to
deal with this situation. Father Mackin was widely known in economic
circles for his expertise, and in Germany unions are part of the
management of large companies instead of being antagonistic. This is
largely due to Father Mackin's advice and expertise.
The secretary of commerce from Germany
opened my eyes to something about Father Mackin that I had not known.
After that car ride, I saw him with new eyes.
Something like that is happening in
the gospel today. Jesus, who has been a follower of John, who
probably grew up with John, since they were cousins, had been seen
by John as a pretty ordinary guy, a carpenter who looked after his
widowed mother. John seems to have had no reason to regard Jesus
otherwise. But today we hear John exclaiming that this is the lamb
of God who will take away the sin of the world. John goes on to tell
his followers that this is a revelation from God, and John now sees
that his whole purpose has been to prepare the world for Jesus.
I think there are two things in John's
proclamation – that Jesus is the Lamb of God, and that he takes
away the sin of the world.
Perhaps we think about Jesus as a
sacrifice – that's been the common understanding of this passage.
But perhaps John and those who listened to him were thinking of
something else. In the book of Exodus, the Jews were told to prepare
a lamb for the Passover supper, and smear it's blood on the door
frame. If they did this the angel of death who was sent to kill all
the first born in each house would pass over the houses signed with
the blood of the lamb.
The second point is that the Lamb of
God takes away the sin of the world. Sin is singular, not plural.
We could certainly talk about the sins of the world – God knows
there are an infinite number of them. But John's revelation is that
Jesus will take away the sin of the world. One of the things about
being human is that we are quite aware of the sin of the world. I
visited a 90 year old woman yesterday, and she reminisced about her
life. She missed her husband, who had passed away suddenly about
eight months ago; she missed her daughter, who had moved to Illinois
with her husband. She had few contemporaries and lived alone. She
was in the nursing home because she had developed severe heart
failure and had been told she could not expect to get any better.
Her life was drawing to a close; her body was rebelling, those she
loved were not at her bedside – and she had lived an exemplary
life, as far as I could tell – a regular church-goer, charitable in
terms of money as well as good deeds – certainly someone who,
unless there was some deep dark secret, should not be barred from
heaven. But her life was dwindling away. And that's the sin of the
world. We lose our friends, our loved ones, our strength, our
memories, and ultimately we lose our lives. And we know that deep
down it is not supposed to be this way; we know that deep down we are
meant to live forever, we are meant to be loved and to love, we are
meant to be complete. The difference between what should be and what
is is the sin of the world. So Jesus doesn't just forgive your sins
and mine, his life, death and resurrection set in motion the work of
God to restore everything to Him. Because of Jesus, the world will
be the way it should be. It is an incredible promise, but in the
redeemed world, nothing will be lost, no dear ones will be separated,
and we will never lose our bodies or our minds. The blood of the new
Passover lamb will spare us from all those things which we take for
granted – the sin of the world.
John's revelation shows Jesus to be
someone who is not what everyone thought he was. And on the strength
of that revelation, as we know, many people including some of John's
own disciples, followed Jesus.
And maybe that's the whole message of
today's gospel. The role of Jesus in God's plan for the world is
central. You and I have been invited to participate in this plan –
we are like the Israelites who were spared from death because of the
blood of the lamb. But there are many people who haven't heard the
invitation. And they haven't heard it because we haven't proclaimed
it. We haven't said to them, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes
away the sin of the world”.
What a wonderful thing it is to be
taken up into this new world, this redeemed world, this world where
sin and death have been conquered. And what a tragedy it will be for
those who never learn about this.
So let us listen to this gospel and
understand that we have been given the same revelation that God gave
John, and that it is our task to proclaim what we know. Whom have we
invited into the world where sin will be taken away, where the Lamb
of God will make all things new?
