Blood of the Lamb
What springs to mind when we think of a lamb?
My guess would be wool, first and foremost—followed by food,
perhaps, though kebabs and lamb chops aren’t terribly popular amongst Americans.
After that we would probably think upon meekness, gentleness, innocence. Such
would not, however, be what first occurred to peoples of the Bible. Certainly
they wove the wool and roasted the meat, but more than this the lamb had
powerful symbolic meaning. For Israelites a lamb represented religion and
identity, sacrifice and mercy, even death and life.
It goes back to the story of the Exodus, the story of how
God set His people free. You probably recall this from Sunday school. Abraham’s
family, Israel, had traveled down to Egypt and there they had flourished. But
fear and jealously led Pharaoh to enslave the Israelites and to attempt the
extermination of their children. God sent Moses to declare the liberation of
the slaves, yet Pharaoh was proud and hard of heart—a man who thought himself divine.
Pharaoh would not yield. And so God wrought a series of terrible plagues, which
afflicted the slaveholders as they themselves had afflicted their slaves: plagues
that proved the superiority of the One True God, worshipped by slaves, over the
myriad beastly gods of Egypt.
Most terrible of all was the tenth and last of the plagues,
the death of the firstborn. It sounds horrific, and indeed it was, but be not deceived.
This was not God lashing out at innocent children. The firstborn of Egypt were
the inheritors, the elite: priests and nobles, slave owners and overseers. The
firstborn were the strong who oppressed the weak. It was they who had murdered
Israelite children. Now came their judgment, their evils turned back upon
themselves.
Through Moses, God instructed His people, upon the night of
the tenth plague, each to slaughter a lamb for supper, and to paint its blood
around the doorway of every house. When the Destroyer came, the Angel of Death,
he would see the lamb’s blood upon the faithful homes and “pass over” such houses
untouched. It was a sign, you see. The blood of the lamb indicated the people’s
faith in God, their trust in His promises. It symbolized their free assent to
His mercy. The angel in his justice does not appear to distinguish between
Egyptian and Israelite. They all look the same to him. All are sinners. None
can stand against the judgment. But the blood is a sign of the sinner’s repentance,
of the family’s trust in God’s promise of life.
I used to wonder if God were nearsighted, that He needed a
painted door to distinguish His people. Now I perceive that it was God’s way of
leaving open the door, of offering the promise to all who would listen, of
allowing for everyone’s free assent in being counted among the people of God. Love,
after all, cannot force. I wonder at times about Israelites who might have left
their doors unmarked for lack of faith, or about Egyptians who heard of this proffered
mercy and daubed their own doors with the blood of the lamb. Surely there must
have been some.
To this day, the celebration of Passover—that is, the yearly
remembrance of this event, of the slaughtering of the lambs, the death of the
firstborn, the liberation of Israel from slavery—is the highest holy day upon
the Jewish calendar. The Passover is the story of how God’s mercy offers new
life to sinners and of how God’s justice lays low those who would proclaim
themselves gods over others.
It is also the highest holy day on the Christian calendar.
Remember that Jesus was Crucified when He came to Jerusalem in order to
celebrate the Passover—that moreover the Last Supper, when Our Lord instituted
the holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, was in fact a Passover meal. Throughout
the world today, wherever Christ’s death and Resurrection are celebrated, we rejoice
in the “Paschal Mystery,” pascha
being the Greek word for Passover. It is only in Germanic languages that people
sometimes call it Easter.
All of this instantly races through people’s minds in our
Gospel reading today when they see John the Baptist point to Jesus Christ and
declare, “Behold the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world!” Calling
Jesus “the Lamb of God” recalls the meekness and gentleness of lambs, but more
than that it recalls the slaughter of the innocent Passover lamb, that sinners
might take refuge beneath its blood and so survive the passing over of God’s
judgment. The blood of the lamb marks you as God’s chosen, God’s people, God’s
nation. The blood of the lamb offers mercy and protection, new life and
liberation. The blood of the lamb is your identity and your forgiveness and
your freedom all in one!
And that’s exactly what Jesus is, as John recognizes and
proclaims. But He is not simply anyone’s Passover lamb: He is the Lamb of God.
His sacrifice is God’s sacrifice; His Blood is God’s Blood. He offers
infinitely more than earthly life, earthly liberation. He offers eternal life
and the Promised Land of Heaven! This Passover Lamb saves us not simply from a
plague but from eternal death. It’s all taken to the next level, you see! Jesus
Christ is Passover squared, Passover ratcheted up by orders of magnitude. His
enemy is not Pharaoh but Satan. The scourge He ends is not slavery to Egypt but
slavery to Hell.
Yes, Hell. We don’t talk about Hell much anymore, but I
guarantee you that it’s real. It’s what Christ has come to save us from. It’s
why He had to die and rise again in the first place. Folks who don’t believe in
Hell don’t really believe in salvation, for after all, how can Jesus be our
Savior is there’s nothing from which to save us? That said, we tend to have
some funny notions about Hell. To wit: most of us probably have in our minds
this basic idea that Heaven is a nice place and Hell is a naughty place, and
everyone really wants to go to Heaven but God is like a great big bouncer who
won’t let you in unless you’re good. Do you think that’s fair? Is that an
accurate picture of how most people understand Hell?
Well I hope you good folks know that it doesn’t actually work
that way—at all. Far from it! The true story, the biblical story, goes more
like this. Heaven is eternal life with God, a perfect, limitless, joyous
relationship that never ends and never gets boring. It is a state of ultimate
rest and peace, while also being a state of infinite dynamism and activity.
Heaven is how we, through Jesus Christ, join in the dance of the Trinity and
thus share in the very Being of God Almighty. We were designed and built
expressly for this! That’s why humanity universally seeks out goodness, truth,
and beauty—because deep down we are forever seeking God, Who is the Good, the
True, and the Beautiful. He is the fulfillment of our every desire. He is
unbridled, perfect Wisdom, Light, and Love, forever.
… Yet the thing about Love, as I said, is that Love cannot
force. Love can only welcome, invite, seduce, chase after. Love by His very
nature offers a relationship that is freely entered upon, a relationship we
cannot earn but to which we may freely assent. We can choose to reject God. We
can choose to distance ourselves from Love. That’s what sin is—and indeed, that’s
what Hell is. The most horrific thing about Hell is that anyone who ends up
there ultimately, deep down, wants to be
there, wants to be his or her own god, wants to judge right and wrong for
himself, to set up his will and his desires above what is Good and True and
Beautiful. The damned are rebels, and successful ones, in a sense. Truly, in
the end, there will be only two sorts of people: those who gladly say to God, “Thy
will be done,” and those to whom God must say, “thy will be done.”
Jesus clearly states that God does not desire for even one
soul to be lost. He has come, in the flesh, to take away the sin of the world.
He has come to seal the breach that has opened up between God and humanity.
He will forgive us anything and everything! Nothing is beyond His power to heal—if
indeed that’s what we want. It’s not about earning Heaven. None of us can do
that. We’re all broken, we’re all sinners, and we are all deeply beloved by the
God Who throws open the gates of eternal life to all who seek out Truth and
Love. God is not a bouncer keeping you from the good life. God is a desperate,
loving Father, Who will do anything—even die on a Cross!—to bring His children
home.
The question is what sort of eternity we shall choose. If we
want a world in which we can pursue our own desires, assert our own wills, be
our own gods, forever—God in tears will grant us that freedom. And we will
cheerfully throw ourselves into Hell. But if instead we desire Truth and Love,
Goodness and Beauty, family and friends and forgiveness; if we desire to
delight in other people and to laugh at our own faults and to rejoice in
mercies we do not deserve; if we desire to be who and what we were always meant
to be and to live life to the fullest by living it in open relationship with Christ
and with each other and with all of Creation—
If that’s what you want, brothers and sisters, then by God!
You are already saved!
Behold the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the
world. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.
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