“Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
John 1:29
On this day I find myself replying to John the Baptist’s declaration above with the question: “Yes, but how?” I know that somehow the birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus “takes away the sin of the world” but how. How is that cancerous tumor that exists in all of us removed? How is the condemnation that sin dishes out, itself condemned?
As is often the case, a picture is worth a thousand words. And one picture that is especially helpful is an icon in which John the Baptist himself is giving us the answer. In the crucifixion panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald the answer is found, as Karl Barth says, at the end of the “bony finger of the prophet.” Stare at the suffering Jesus and the answer will come into view. Take in those splayed fingers randomly writhing with his pain. Look at his emaciated body, his stretched torso that sems ready to snap. Notice the suppurating sores that cover his body. He looks as if he is dying of the plague that was taking the lives of folks who were dying in the hospice in which this altarpiece hung. The Christ depicted on this cross was somehow taking into himself the disease that was killing the community.
What is clear to me in pictures like this is that however it is that this lamb takes away the sin of the world, it isn’t merely because he is somehow paying a horrific debt that I owe and could never pay, or suffering for me so that I don’t have to suffer, or somehow appeasing the wrath of a distant God and so deflecting that wrath away from me. It isn’t just because he takes the hit that I should be taking, or that he stands in the place where I should be standing so I don’t have to stand there. He is taking away the sin of the world by joining us in our place. He is taking in what is killing us and somehow killing it in the loving act of joining us in it.
In the third verse of chapter 8 of his letter to the Romans Paul writes “God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh he condemned sin in the flesh.” Similarly in 2 Corinthians 5:29 he writes “For our sake [God] made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in [Christ] we might become the righteousness of God.” In both of these texts one gets the sense that in the act of joining us in this caustic environment of sin, breathing this toxic air that we breathe, being apprehended by the evil that has taken hold of us, infected with the disease that is killing us, he overcomes what we cannot overcome and effectively destroys what is destroying us.
Maybe still that question “Yes, but how?”, remains unanswered. Yet for me this act of empathy, this mercy of Jesus choosing to empty himself of his divine prerogative and instead join us in our experience and allow every human joy and every human pain to pass through his heart, points to the truth that it is ultimately love that defeats the power of sin. The human willfulness of choosing to worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, the narcissism that cannot take in a world bigger than the one we create for ourselves, simply cannot stand up to the power of a Love that has taken us in and eternally pledged itself to seeking our best.
Not long ago I was watching a stand up comedy special that featured Trevor Noah, the South African author and comedian who took over the Daily Show when John Stewart retired. In this special Noah pays tribute to his mother Patricia and tells several hilarious stories about her. At the end of his monologue, he tells the story of something she said to him after a man shouted a racist slur at them while they were out walking together one day. He was about five years old and asked her, “Mommy what do we do if people do the racism to us?” She replied “If somebody is racist, we take that racism of theirs and we shake it up with the love of Jesus and then we send it back.”
Patricia’s wisdom is not lost on me nor it’s connection with the theological question with which this essay has been working. How is it that the Lamb of God takes away the sin of the world? He takes it in and shakes it up with his Love and so destroys its power to destroy us.
David Rohrer
Good Friday, 2023