2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

In today’s gospel, we see John the Baptist pointing to Jesus and saying “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” We know these words well, for they are the words said at every mass at the elevation of the host by the priest just before communion. We may think that when the priest says these words, they are said in imitation of John the Baptist who first identified Jesus as the Lamb of God. However, it is far more likely that the reverse is true, not that the liturgy copied the gospel of John, but rather that the gospel of John copied the liturgy. We must remember that the celebration of the liturgy of the mass predates the writing of the gospel of John. John’s gospel took its final form between the years 90 AD and 100 AD. This means that the liturgy of the mass predates John’s gospel by at least 60 years, for the first masses were evidently celebrated immediately after Jesus’ death and resurrection in the year 28 AD. It is therefore far more likely that the title Lamb of God was a title that was applied to Jesus in the liturgy of the eucharist which John then decided to put in the mouth of John the Baptist as he was writing his gospel 60 years after the celebration of the eucharist was already well-anchored in the practice of the people.

Indeed, a number of prominent scholars have pointed to the fact that the Early Church came to the belief in Jesus’ divinity not through complex theological speculation, but rather through the experience of worshipping Christ in the liturgy. We must remember that it would have been unthinkable for a Jew in the first century to countenance the fact that God might have a Son. At the end of Mark’s gospel, we have the centurion recognizing Jesus to truly be the “Son of God.” This represents the climax of the Christological development of Mark’s gospel. But in making this assertion, a first century Jew would not have understood the centurion to be asserting Jesus’ status as the second person of the Trinity. We must remember that the doctrine of the Trinity only fully developed itself in the third century. So the Centurion is not confessing Jesus’ divinity, rather he is pointing to Jesus’ special status as the Holy one of God: he the Son of God with a capital “S” in an analogous way that we are all sons and daughters of God with a small “s” and small “d.”

In terms of Christological development, John’s gospel takes as its starting point the end point of the synoptic gospels. If by the end of their gospels, the authors of the Synoptics have managed to firmly establish that Jesus is the Messiah, then this is the starting point for John, from which he will only develop a more sophisticated and high-flown Christology. It would be equally anachronistic therefore to think that John the Baptist could have really identified Jesus as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the World,” before the crucifixion and resurrection had even happened. Now it is possible, of course, that John the Baptist could have been given this knowledge as a special revelation from God, but given the reflections in these two homilies ( ), it is unlikely that John had such a revelation and then had the doubts referred to in Mt. 11: 2-11. So it is far more likely that the conviction that Jesus was the Lamb of God was a belief that gradually came out of the worship experience of the Early Christian community. It was through their experience of Jesus’s presence in the Eucharist that they came to experience him as the Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world. The Early Christians came to acknowledge Jesus as God because they experienced Jesus as doing all the things that they normally ascribed to God: forgiving their sins, reconciling them with one another, bringing them hope and joy even in the midst of great suffering and persecution.

Through their experience of Christ’s presence in the liturgy, and their worship of Christ together – the early Christian community were able to discover together the divinity of Christ and Christ’s power to take away the sins of the world. They were able to discover the power of Christ to bring reconciliation to situations that looked seemingly intractable and hopeless. This experience of Christ in the liturgy was such a powerful one that it got placed into the Gospel of John and put on the lips of John the Baptist. It was such a formative experience for the Early Christian community that it began to shape their theology and their basic ideas of who Christ was in relation to God the Father.

Many of the hymns in the Pauline corpus are where we find the most powerful and explicit expressions of Christ’s divinity. We might think of the Christological hymn of Philipians 2:6: “Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped. He emptied himself and became obedient unto death.” It was through composing these hymns, through worshiping the Lord in the liturgy, that Christians came to an appreciation of the power of Christ in their lives. They basically learnt by doing. For most of us, the catechism came first – we learnt all the beliefs – Christ is the Lamb of God, the Saviour of the World – the only begotten Son of God – and then only much later did we experience in our lives the truth of these words. But for the Early Christian community – it was the reverse – they first experienced Christ as the Lamb of God who took away their sins, as the person who reconciled them with one another and then composed their catechism of beliefs accordingly.

The point I want to underline here is how our worship affects our theology. This is why it is incredibly important that we reflect on the way that we are worshiping together as a Church. If the Early Church learnt by doing, then we must be able to do the same. The same Holy Spirit that led the Early Church very gradually to the conviction of Jesus’ divinity and power to take away the sin of the world is the same Holy Spirit active in our Church today. Though the time of Public Revelation officially closed with the death of the last Apostle, we are nevertheless still receiving revelation from the Holy Spirit as we learn to unpack what the Christ-event means for us today in our modern world with all its new challenges. It is to this deeper discovery that we are invited every time we celebrate the Eucharist together.

Questions for reflection

1. What lessons are we learning about who God is from the way that we worship and fellowship together?
2. What are we witnessing to about the nature of God from the way that we Church together?