Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40; John 1:29-42; 1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Many of those names of Jesus we thought about earlier help us, as they have helped readers of John’s Gospel through the centuries, in our understanding of who Jesus is and why we want to follow him. We all know about teachers, about leaders, about rescuers. We can see them in our everyday lives. We understand their value.

But Lamb of God? That’s something else again.

In our tradition we don’t talk much about the blood of the Lamb washing away our sins. And we’re often not that happy about the whole language of altar and sacrifice, priest and victim. We listen to the choir singing ‘Behold the Lamb of God’, and because it’s Handel’s Messiah and beautiful music, we can enjoy it without thinking too deeply about what it actually means. But unless we take up that idea about ‘Lamb of God’ actually meaning ‘son of God’ in colloquial Aramaic – and frankly, to me that seems rather a convenient cop-out – it seems a long, long way from the hasty pre-escape slaughter of lambs in Egypt, to make the angel of death pass by, or from the floors of the Temple running with the blood of animals killed in order to take away sin, to us in twenty-first-century, health-and-safety-conscious Sheffield, where we buy our lamb chops frozen and shrink-wrapped to pop into the microwave. Can we still use this language today?

Partly it’s the whole idea of comparing Jesus to an animal that gives rise to our problems. You’ll see I’ve found an image from the internet to go on the back of our order of service this morning, of a lamb – well, let’s be charitable and pretend it looks like a lamb – holding up something which, if it were in colour, would look remarkably like the English flag. In fact that symbolism for Jesus, surviving in pubs called the Lamb and Flag, predates the English choice of St George’s cross by centuries, and symbolises his resurrection. But faced with this sort of picture, it can be hard to suspend our disbelief. And while sweet little lambs appeal to our sentiment, sheep are such silly creatures that it seems downright rude to compare Jesus with one.

It has been suggested that when John was describing Jesus as the lamb of God he was thinking of the young ram that would lead a flock of sheep in New Testament times. That fits in with his calling Jesus rabbi and Messiah, and, like ‘God’s kid’, it’s another ingenious suggestion, but again to me it says as much about our discomfort with the idea of animal sacrifice as about what John really had in mind.

The idea of sacrifice forgiving sins reflects a culture very different from ours; it hints at magic or at an angry God who must be appeased by blood. And though, from the ram killed by Abraham instead of Isaac to the minute sacrificial detail in Leviticus and Numbers, and the animal carcases piled up to rededicate Ezra’s Temple, the Hebrew Bible is full of sacrifice, we are not Jewish but Gentile. In the New Testament many of the Hebrew Bible regulations, such as the food laws, are no longer considered binding on Christians. So if Jesus has indeed, as Isaiah’s servant song this morning suggests, been sent to be a light to the nations, surely we should focus on images of Jesus that can easily transfer into our culture?

Even in the Hebrew Bible we can find a voice supporting our unease with sacrifice: in our psalm this morning. Interestingly, though Psalm 40 has several sung versions, they all cut out the verses about sacrifice, so we had to say it responsorially in order to get the point. But in this psalm we plainly hear: Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt-offering and sin-offering you have not required. So what purpose can there still be for us in hanging onto the idea of Jesus as God’s sacrificial lamb, distasteful, old-fashioned and theologically mistaken as it appears to be?

And yet, and yet, taking all that into account, I should like to give one reason why we still need to take very seriously indeed those words offered by John’s Gospel to Andrew and to Simon Peter, before they had even met Jesus, foreshadowing those terrible days to come when they would be watching from a long, long distance as he was nailed on a cross to die.

And the reason is this: Jesus, I believe, chose to become a sacrifice, not to the anger of God, but to human destructiveness. He chose to take the betrayal of Judas, the desertion of his friends, the fear of the Jewish authorities, the paranoia of Rome onto himself, and to suffer the results in himself, rather than to pass on that fear, that anger, that hatred, to others in further destruction. He became a sacrifice to put an end to sacrifice, to challenge the whole sacrificial system and bring it crashing to the ground. No longer would the dreary cycle of death and destruction carry on its way: your father killed my father so I will kill you; she hurt my feelings so I’m entitled to hurt hers. Of course, just because Jesus showed us that another way was possible, and gave us the power to choose it, didn’t mean everyone would do so. Destruction is still very much in evidence in our world. But we Christians can be assured that the lamb of God has taken away the sins of the world: for death, the ultimate result of all our destruction, could not hold Jesus in its grip.

So what? What practical difference does that make to you and me, buying our lamb chops – or our veggieburgers – in the supermarket? That’s the question that was preoccupying Paul, as he began to write his first letter to the church in Corinth. He had some difficult things to write. They seemed to have been dazzled by some of their leaders into overlooking Jesus’ cross, that hard reminder that God in human form had died in a weak and shameful way. They were split by their loyalty to different leaders. There was an open sex scandal in the church. Christian spouses were wondering whether they should divorce their non-Christian partners. People were getting hot under the collar about how far they should go in interfaith dialogue. When they met for Communion some were laying heavily into the wine before others had even got there from work.
And it was to these people, a church in turmoil if ever there was one, that Paul, who had started off his career by throwing Christians in prison, wrote. He named himself as an apostle; he named them as saints.

In both cases, the names seemed less than likely. But because Jesus, the lamb of God, had sacrificed himself to human destructiveness, had absorbed in his own body the deadly consequences of human sin, he had made both Paul and the Corinthians worthy of their new names: apostle, sent by God, and saints, holy to God. This was how God saw them; though, like Simon Peter, the rock on which the church was built, they would have to grow into that new reality, to make their names fit.

So after all, the image of Jesus as God’s lamb, sacrificed so that sacrifices could end, can have a positive meaning for us in Sheffield today. As we, like Andrew, Simon Peter, Paul and the Christians at Corinth follow Jesus, we will also, week by week, be confronted with parts of our own lives where we have been damaged by the destruction of others or have damaged others in our turn. If we did not admit our sins and mistakes, we would not be truthful about the limitations of being human. Yet, just like the church at Corinth, we have each of us been named by God as saints. And if we acknowledge our failures with sorrow, we will also experience Jesus’ power to forgive and to heal, and to give us his own ability to break the cycle of human destructiveness by refusing to pass it on to others.

Then we will know in our own experience the glad truth of what John the Baptist said: Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Thanks be to God.