Introduction 

Epiphany is a season of revealing who God is. Today’s big reveal or “showing” comes from the voice of John who twice in our gospel points to Jesus and says, “Look, the Lamb of God.”

Speaking of God’s anointed one, the Prophet Isaiah says in the  53rd chapter (verse 7): 

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.

John announces as Jesus walks toward him, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”

And a second time, the next day, John says again, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.”

John echos the language of the Prophet Isaiah. He even says it two times.

What do we mean when we say that Jesus is the “Lamb of God”? I want to take, perhaps, a different route than what we're used to when talking about Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God. 

What did John mean when he pointed to Christ and said, “Look, the Lamb of God”? If you aren’t spontaneously or naturally curious about our gospel texts when we read them, I invite you to think of other times when we talk about Jesus being the Lamb of God such as when we sing about it as we come forward to receive Holy Communion. O Lamb of God, we sing, who bore the sin of all the world away…have mercy on us.

Our associations with Jesus being the lamb of God often center on one word: sacrifice. Jesus was the sacrifice for our sins.

Our understanding might be partial because as soon as you say “Lamb of God” you quickly loop in words like sin and blood and we don’t often like to talk about these themes. It doesn’t make for polite conversation or warm, fuzzy feelings.

But here’s my main contention: We might feel a little uncomfortable talking about it in large part because it’s been misunderstood. 

Christians in our day might say something like this: God’s justice demands a blood sacrifice to pay the penalty of sin. Jesus steps in to be that sacrifice in place of us. The sins of the world are placed on Jesus and he dies for our sins. And now God’s disposition toward us has changed from anger to love because of what Jesus did.

Yes, lambs were offered to God as sacrifices under the Old Covenant. They were a part of the sometimes elaborate sacrificial system which was designed by God as a way to manage the sin problem that was present with God’s people so God could dwell with his people. But that description sounds more like Zeus or Moloch than Yahweh, the God of the Bible.

Think of it this way…For that “Lamb of God” metaphor to hold up, then we would expect that there would be an actual lamb in the Old Covenant (Old Testament) that receives the sins of the people and then is killed to eliminate the sins. Nowhere in Scripture are sins placed on an animal and then that animal is killed as a sacrifice.

To be the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” means something much, much different. The God of Christianity as revealed in Scripture and Tradition is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and comes to us in our time of need instead of requiring us to appease his wrath with blood sacrifices.

Two Goats/Lambs

The idea comes from Leviticus 16 where God gives instruction for the Day of Atonement which is the foundation for “Yom Kippur" - the most holy of the Jewish high holy days. In that chapter we see not one goat, but two. And what those goats do, is exactly what Jesus does. Let’s take a look.