The baptist speaks

On Friday of this week, the Vatican announced that the Holy Father, Benedict XVI has just granted permission for the Servant of God, Karol Wojtyla to be raised to the level of Blessed.  His beatification ceremony will take place in Rome on Sunday, May 1, 2011.  For many years, John Paul II called the church to accept Jesus' calling for all of us to live our commitment to faith with conviction, and now his witness is recognized throughout the world at yet another level.


This week's scripture readings invite us to see our lives as responses to the call of the Baptist.  Here's my take on what it means for us today:


The baptist speaks
During the final Mass celebrated this weekend, we will baptise the newest member of our community.  Since it so happens that the scriptures also focus on the words of the Baptist, I thought it might be fitting to dwell awhile on these few words and what they might mean for us today.  Today's gospel does not take place at the Jordan river.  Rather it is somewhere else along the road, and it appears that John, the Baptist that is, recognizes Jesus perhaps from a distance and speaks to his own followers about him: 'Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world".  Now that's a very strange choice of words: John refers to Jesus as the Lamb of God, but why.

In this part of the world, not many of us are too familiar with living breathing lambs, much less their parents, the sheep, but there are indeed farms not so far away where sheep are raised, both for their wool and for their meat.  Unless they are provoked, sheep are gentle creatures.  As long as there is just a bit of grub for them to find, they don't usually make too much of a fuss.  They will even follow one another in seeming peace, except of course when they are being chased by a wolf.  Perhaps this is the first characteristic about sheep and their little ones that we need to keep in mind.  Jesus was a gentle man, and calls us to a docility of spirit, able to allow ourselves to be led under the guidance of the divine shepherd.

The second image that a lamb evokes is newness.  I once visited a farm in early spring.  The animals were giving birth, and it seemed that every morning when we awoke, there had been new births throughout the night, new reasons for excitement on the faces of the children, even if their parents then had more work to do, and more mouths to feed.  Jesus, the Lamb of God, calls us to a newness of life, a renewed relationship of love and trust between ourselves and our God, made visible in Him.

A third image that we associate with the Lamb of God is that of redemption.  Now here's perhaps the most significant learning for today.  When John the Baptist used the phrase 'lamb of God' he might have been thinking of a passage in Chapter 53 of the book of Isaiah, where the servant of the Lord is compared to a lamb.  In fact, in Aramaic, the word talya means both servant and lamb, so when John said, 'Look, there is the lamb of God,' he was saying 'look, there is God's servant', but he was saying even more.  John had to be thinking also about the passover lamb, which from their earliest days had been offered by the Jewish people as a gift to God in springtime, as part of the first fruits, in order to acknowledge His supremacy and their dependence.  It was during the passover feast that they had escaped from slavery in Egypt and entered the promised land.  The passover lamb invoked images not only of first fruits, not only of God's supremacy, but their own liberation.  So when John said, 'Look, there is the lamb of God', he was saying, 'Look, there is the world's deliverer.  Look at the one who will deliver not just the Jewish people, but the whole world from a slavery greater than that of Egypt, from the slavery to sin.  There is our redeemer, the one who will buy us back with his own blood, the innocent lamb who will sacrifice himself for our salvation, the one who will reconcile us to the Father.

In one sentence, when John uses the word 'lamb' he is saying: this is the suffering servant who takes away sin, by offering his life out of love - at the end of the mission that he's beginning right now.  There he is, the Messiah, the Redeemer, on his way to the cross, to the Resurrection, to the empty tomb to the fullness of salvation for us and for the whole world.  The fact that this salvation would be for the whole world is also indicated in today's first reading from the book of Isaiah: 'I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth'.

The Baptist's word 'lamb' suggests three things: gentleness, new life and redemption.  It reminds us of so much for which we should be thankful.

Oh, by the way, here is the podcast version in case you want to have a listen.