[AI translation] According to the old church calendar, today is the so-called Sixth Passion Sunday. These Sundays before Holy Week were meant to allow Christian congregations to immerse themselves in the mystery of Christ's Passion not just once a year, on Good Friday, but for seven Sundays every year. And there is something good and right in this practice, for it is in this Passion that the miraculous source of healing springs up on this earth, from which we can always draw grace and heavenly strength, in which we can always be cleansed and renewed. I too want to point to the suffering Jesus, in the well-known words of John the Baptist, for who knows how many times, What I have to say is not new - but bread and water are not new, and yet they are essential to life. And the more we reflect on the mystery of bread and water, the greater the miracle we see. It is the same with the Passion of Christ: John the Baptist calls Jesus, as he sees him for the first time in his life, the Lamb of God. Indispensable and miraculous. It cannot be understood, but it cannot be ignored either! A divine mystery from which life flows, new life - eternal life!
I want to talk now about what this means for John, what it means for Jesus and what it means for us!
1) What it meant for John, he himself later put it this way, "He must grow, and I must fall." In other words, John, as a true preacher, wanted nothing more than to turn people's attention from himself to Jesus. John, with this Word, "Behold the Lamb of God...", went beyond himself, and this is important here because many looked to him, thinking he was the one the world was waiting for, he was the Messiah! Great expectation, hope and enthusiasm surrounded the wild Pushtun preacher and he kept saying that he was not the one to be expected, he would come after him, the One who would be much greater than he was. John kept saying this, but still the people flocked to him. Then when Jesus appeared, John immediately retreated from the centre of popularity and interest, almost disappearing from the scene, so that no one and nothing would obscure the One for Whom it was all about, Jesus, the Lamb of God!
It is very good sometimes to remind ourselves again, both as congregation and as preacher, that at the centre of such a church worship gathering is not a sermon, oh, alas, still less a pastor, but Jesus Himself! I have often wondered what that garment, the robe, is for on the preacher? Is it to distinguish the servant of God from other men, to set him above the rest, to give him weight and dignity, to give him authority, as it were power over the others? On the contrary, the cloak is intended to hide the man who preaches the Word from your eyes, so that the preacher is not visible, but only the One to whom he points, and so that the man disappears behind Jesus! So that there may be nothing left of the preacher and the preaching but an outstretched arm pointing to Jesus. It is as if the whole sermon were a means to hear and feel the great mystery: here is God among us! The sermon is not meant to give us beautiful and clever thoughts, but to reveal to our faith the sublime mystery: Behold, God is here among us! Look not at me, men, but at Him; listen not to me, but to Him; it is not what I say that is important, but what I say to Him and what He says to you. It is not by being here that a sinful man is cleansed, not by being among us that a sorrowful man is comforted, not by being renewed in a weary soul by intellectually assimilating certain biblical truths, but by the fact that God is here among us! No one has ever been born again by listening to a beautiful sermon, but always by being touched, touched by the presence of God. Woe to us as a congregation and as preachers if we talk more about the sermon after the service than about Jesus. If the outstretched hand attracted more attention than the One He wanted to point to! A sermon is good if we forget who is speaking, if we don't remember afterwards the words he used, only that our hearts are warmed, that we are overwhelmed by the sublime mystery that God is here among us!
Behold the Lamb of God! With this sermon, John the Baptist descended that Christ might be greater! He did not insist that the people gathered around him should stay with him. He led them on, he sent them on to Jesus! The result was that two of his disciples immediately left him and followed Jesus! Later, the rest of them did too.
That is the most beautiful effect of a sermon, when those who hear it leave the preacher and follow Jesus. And you don't care who points to that Lamb of God in front of you, because that's not what's important, following Jesus is! It is never wrong if someone has to humble himself in order to be made greater by Christ!
2) "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world." With this statement, John seems to have given the story of Jesus' life, suffering and death a title that completely covers the content. The whole mission of Jesus, his role in this world, the mystery and the work and significance of his person, can be summed up in what John declared of him: the Lamb of God... This is how the Word of God presents Jesus to the world. And the mystery of the person of Jesus is never what the world thinks of Him, or what any man, friend or foe thinks of Him, but only what God Himself says of Him in His Word.
I believe that it would be much simpler and much more acceptable to the world if we could define Jesus' characteristic in this way. If we were to proclaim this about Him, we would certainly have more success with Him before the world. Such a figure of Jesus would also be sympathetic to the world. But to say that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world is an incomprehensible, even stumbling, nonsensical statement to the world. There is nothing sensible to be done with it. I know, too, that it would be more pleasing to the religious man's ear if he could see the mystery of Jesus as this One Who gives His blessing to all that we do, Who listens and does what we ask of Him, Who helps us in all the trouble we may get into in the course of our lives. I can imagine that such a Jesus, whose role is to be a miracle worker, to be available to people with His miraculous power, would be much more popular with church believers. But Jesus did not come for this, or at least not primarily for this, but to take away the sins of the world as the Lamb of God. And even if the world smiles down on us because we are not modern enough, not scientific and rational enough, not comprehensible enough: still, insist that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. So, to the fact that Jesus is not one of the many founders of religions, not one of the great men of history, not one of the many men of good will who sought to reform the old society, not a model for humanity to imitate, but Jesus is what can be said of Him alone: the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. If Jesus allows Himself to be thus presented to the world, and does not protest against John's words; if Jesus Himself has accepted this for Himself, then let us also accept it, and let us not seek to understand this divine mystery, but let us bow down before Him and worship the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
From the very beginning, therefore, from the manger in Bethlehem, Jesus carried the cross, invisible though it was, the cross on which he was later blessed as a lamb. He walked among us as one who was moving with determined steps towards the certain death penalty. If Jesus had been only a man, he would have shuddered with terror at this terrible declaration: 'Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. For it is as if they were to point to someone and say, "Behold, there goes the condemned, the damned, the scapegoat, the wretched victim whom the world casts out, whom God himself also forsakes... What the Old Testament cult symbolically represented was when the high priest laid his hand on the head of a lamb, confessed the sins of the people over it, and then cast the lamb, which had become sin, out into the wilderness, to carry the sins of the people with him to its destiny, to destruction: this holy rite is no longer symbolically but actually performed by One, the Lamb of God, who came to take the sins of the world to the place where sin belongs, to damnation, to hell! For He has become a curse for us, He has descended into hell for us, He has damned for us! He is the Lamb of sacrifice, in Whom all the sins of the world were lifted up to heaven, and in Whom the full severity of God's wrath, punishing sin, was poured out on earth.
Let us never want to see Jesus as anything other than the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
3) For us, this means first of all that we cannot play with sin, because sin is something ultimately serious, a deadly danger. If God regards sin as such a great thing that in the person of Jesus his love had to become human flesh in order to take away our sin on Calvary, then we should not pretend that sin is just a weakness that we forgive so easily, especially to ourselves. In judging sin, it matters nothing how we weigh or evaluate it, how serious or how insignificant we consider it, but only how God weighs it.
I don't know what your sins are, what the cardinal sins of your life are, and what your little sins of habit are, little lies, little thefts, little tempers of anger - but I do know that nowhere is the awful seriousness and deadly peril of all these sins and sins so exposed as where God is dealing with the sins of the world in the sacrifice of the Lamb!
I have said it here lately, I have come to realize that the greatest peril would not be a possible sickness, or misfortune, or bereavement, but my sins! And if I were sick, or lost my family, or my bread: it would be trouble, but not the greatest trouble. The greatest evil, the irredeemable misfortune, would be to die without remission, and to go before the judgment seat of God laden with my sins. That would be the greatest tragedy. But behold, the sacrifice of that Lamb of God is of such great value that in view of it God can forgive all sin and embrace the sinner as fully cleansed. For all your sins, great and small, there is forgiveness! So even if someone ate of the fruit of the forbidden tree, like Adam and Eve, there is forgiveness. If anyone killed anyone, like Cain killed his brother, there is forgiveness. If a man deceived his own father, as Jacob did, there is forgiveness. If a man seduced another man's wife, as David did, there is forgiveness. If anyone has denied Jesus, as Peter did, there is forgiveness. If anyone persecuted the church of God, as Paul did, there is forgiveness.
Behold, the Lamb of God takes away the sins of the world! He takes away and takes away all that is laid upon the whole world! So there is forgiveness not by God condoning and forgetting, but by Jesus the Lamb taking it away on Himself, out into the wilderness, back to hell, to Satan, the devil, from whom He came.
If God said that He would gather the sins of the world in Jesus and blot them out in Jesus, so that they are no more for God, then we must lay our sins on the Lamb! There is forgiveness for the sin that you confessed and called Jesus by name. The emphasis here is really on laying it down! Otherwise the forgiveness is not valid. So to put it down in such a way that Jesus takes it, takes it away. By confessing and laying your sins on Jesus, Satan gets back all the evil, meanness, pain, sin that he has caused.
Some might now call all this, from the outside, a strange superstition, a contemplation divorced from practical life, or even downright foolishness, but for us, real life, a serene, liberated life, a life of loving and serving others, a life filled with the power of the Spirit of God, a peaceful, happy life, an eternal life, always begins when one can pray in this way with a sincere heart:
Lamb of God, who takes away our sins, have mercy on us!
Lamb of God, Who takest away our sins: have mercy on us!
The Lamb of God, who takes away our sins:
Give us thy peace! Amen, Amen.
Hymn 183
Date: 15 March 1959.
Lesson
Jn 1,29-41