2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

In today’s gospel we see John designating Jesus as the Christ is the Lamb of God and takes away the sins of the world. But how precisely does Jesus take away the sins of the world? The image of the Lamb of God that we are given in today’s gospel is based on the Pascal lamb: the lamb that was sacrificed every year during the Passover. This practice commemorated God’s saving act that was mediated through the splashing of the blood of a lamb on the lintels of the Hebrew households that caused the angel of death to pass-over their doors and spare them from death. There was thus a very concrete substitution going on – the death of a lamb was substituting the death of the first born child each Israelite family. The same mechanism is applied to Jesus as the Lamb of God, where Jesus takes on a punishment of death that was supposed to ours on account of our sins and thereby brings us salvation. However, when we ask ourselves where this punishment comes from, we are forced to acknowledge that thin this schema, the punishment is can only be meted out by God the Father. Such a view completely distorts the image of God the Father that we are given by Jesus, by turning him into an angry and vengeful judge, demanding expiation for our sins in the form of blood, the blood of his own son! While it is important for any account of salvation to balance the mercy of God with his justice, this is clearly not the way to go about it.

Many of our problems on this front are solved if we are prepared to move away from using metaphors from the penal justice system to articulate how we think about salvation. Instead of seeing God as a judge, it is far more helpful to use the metaphor of a relationship between two people who are in love. In the context of a loving relationship, when one partner has hurt the other, it is not usual [though it certainly happens] for the offended partner to demand that the offending partner make reparation for the wrong that they have done as a condition of forgiveness. Normally, in the context of a marriage for example, it is enough for the offending partner to humbly ask for forgiveness from his or her spouse. Reconciliation occurs because the offended partner wants to get back into right relationship with the offender. Now I know that this is perhaps a somewhat idealized vision of how reconciliation happens in our marriages, but when we are talking about our relationship with God, we really do have to believe that God wants nothing more than to be reconciled with us requires nothing else for this other than a contrite heart on own part. He certainly does not require the suffering of a third party, especially not if this third party is God’s own Son.

This type of gratuity of relationship, this gratuity of forgiveness is so difficult for us to accept as humans because we are so used to living our relationships a commercial and transactional way – always keeping score – of what she owes me and what I owe him. I think a big part of Jesus’ work of liberating us from our sins is liberating us from this transactional way of being in relationship. Jesus does this by welcoming us into the space of his own way of being in relationship that is completely gratuitous. Jesus’ first hurdle is to get us to realize that God does not have a scorecard, that his forgiveness is freely offered and there is nothing we have to do to earn it. Then Jesus’ next invitation is to invite us to live the same way with each other – to throw away our scorecards. This is what he means when he says “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” – learn to love as God loves – set no limits on your love – be like your heavenly Father who makes the rain fall on the good and the bad alike.

We can now ask the question if there is a way in which we might reinterpret Jesus’ role as the lamb of God in a healthier way? We have already spoken about the tradition of the Pascal lamb. However, there was another associated ritual, which was held on the day of Yom Kippur, the tradition of the scapegoat. In this tradition, a goat would be chosen onto which the sins of the whole people would be transferred and this goat would then be sent off into the desert - symbolically carried off into the wilderness the sins of the all the people.

Rene Girard, a renowned French sociologist, has taken this image of the scapegoat and applied it to our human relations. He shows how since time immemorial, societies have had a scapegoating mechanism. The way this mechanism works is that in order to get rid of the tension and violence that inhabit a community, the community needs to find a scapegoat that it can blame for all its problems. The sins of the whole community, everything that is wrong with that community will then be heaped onto the scapegoat. What often happens is that it is the marginalized and the weakest members of a community who are scapegoated because they are defenseless to fight back. We might think of the way in which many wealthy nations have turned to blaming immigrants for many of their problems. This scapegoating leads to further oppression of the weak and marginalized by the strong and powerful. What the mechanism of scapegoating does is to mask the real root of sin as lying in the pride and self-righteousness of the powerful. This lie that undergirds human societies can only be unmasked if we proclaim the innocence of the scapegoat. René Girard has identified Christianity as the only religion to have correctly proclaimed the innocence of the scapegoat: Jesus the crucified one.

What our proclamation of Jesus as the Lamb of God does is precisely to unmask the lie of the scapegoating mechanism and reveal to the whole of human society the insidious sin that inhabits it. It is in this sense that the cross is salvific, namely that it reveals our sinfulness that leads to the suffering and the death of the innocent. But the cross also reveals something else, far more important: namely God’s response to our sinfulness, which is the response of gratuitous love. The cross is God’s ultimate and unconditional offer to us to move away from our transactional way of being in relationship. A transactional way of being in relationship does not only describe a “quid pro quo” relationship, but also a tit for tat relationship. The cross exposes the self-defeating nature of tit for tat relationships and invites to see that the only way we will ever be saved from the violence, jealous and hatred that inhabit us is by embracing the gratuitous love God offers us. By choosing to respond with love to the jealousy, hatred and violence of his enemies, Jesus invites into transcend tit for tat relationships and move into the space of gratuitous love. When we proclaim Jesus as the Lamb of God, we are not saying that Jesus has died in our stead, rather we are saying that through his innocence and love Jesus shows us the way out of the destructive cycle of sin. We are only truly freed from the destructive cycle of sin when we freely choose to embrace the paradox that only self-sacrificing love can defeat hate, that in dying we rise to new life. As Jesus invites the first two disciples to “come and see,” he invites us too to enter the mystery of his life, death and resurrection and to see for ourselves that it is in this mystery that our salvation lies.