Mass readings for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Isaiah 49.3, 5-6 Psalm 40.1, 3, 6-9 1 Corinthians 1.1-3 John 1.29-34
John the Baptist identifies Jesus this morning, “Here is the Lamb of God!” – It’s important we know the full meaning and import of that; because we need to know who Jesus is because it is through that we know who we are called to be. Yet we are challenged in this by the disruption of Christian civilization by the forces of modernity.
I recently came across a description of modern life as like living in a foreign country where a foreign language is spoken. The writer was trying to convey that awkwardness of the adult trying to learn another language and always being caught doing what my French teachers always criticized me for: translating in my head what I heard into English, then formulating my response in English, and translating that, and then replying. It’s a stage in language acquisition that one has to get past before you can really be fluent. The writer commenting on modern life was making the point that we modern people never really get beyond this. Everything is foreign, and we are constantly trying to figure out what things mean, either in reference to the present or the past. And as a result, we’re kind of taken out of life, and experience it sometimes as bewilderment, but most often as something we’re increasingly indifferent to because we just don’t get it. The result is we collapse into ourselves, we become ever more individualistic, and navigate life according to feeling, reacting to the environment in terms of its pleasure and its pains.
I think a good example of this problem of meaning and how we experience life is if you’ve ever had to translate a joke. I remember doing Latin exercises translating lines from Juvenal and Horace. These were Rome’s two great ancient humourists – and apparently, they are funny. Well, at least to an ancient Roman. But after getting my dictionary out, and my grammar, and working through it all word by word… well, I got the joke, sorta funny, I guess. But translating a joke is a lot like explaining a joke – and we all know that explaining a joke drains it of all its funniness even as you come to intellectually appreciate the humour. It just doesn’t hit you the way intended by the joke’s composer. If I were an ancient Roman, or someone who had a living connection to that civilization, which until modern times, a great many westerners still had, I probably would have had a good chuckle.
I mention this because in the gospel we have this dramatic statement by John the Baptist, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
Can we appreciate what he said? Does it “hit” us?
I fear that a lot of us do that “translating” in our heads: we learned in catechism, or picked up through attending Mass or wherever, that Jesus is “the Lamb of God.” And so, this is like him being called the Messiah, or the Christ, or the Son of God, or the Son of Man, etc. It’s a title, a synonym, whatever – we “translate” it into “Jesus.”
But were I a first century Jew standing there with John and heard him say this, I would have shuddered. What John is saying is not what I’d expected. John, as far as I likely understood, was a prophet hailing the coming of the Messiah and for me I would have some clear ideas about what that meant. And recently John the Baptist has been giving every indication that Jesus is the Messiah. But here John calls him, “the Lamb of God” and that has, frankly, horrific implications; it carries with it the idea of sacrifice, and of ritual slaughter. John is saying this man from Nazareth has come to die as a sacrifice for the sin of the world. What would I make of that? How shocked would I be? How it would make me tremble!
And I would say that until the modern era, Christian civilization would have had a living connection to John the Baptist, and indeed, these words spoken in the 4th century, in the 11th, in the 16th, would have sent a shiver down the spines of those who heard it.
But today we “translate” them, and they are safely removed to the intellectual sphere of our lives where they are safe and unthreatening.
“Oh, he’s talking about Jesus.”
And the reason this should be concerning is that by removing this talk of sacrifice and suffering to a safe distance we make Christianity something “safe” for us, something we can have an opinion about, and not something that confronts us with hard choices that must be made and stood by.
We are all baptized into the death of Jesus, so that we might live in and through him unto resurrection to eternal life. That means that in a real sense we must walk his walk, talk his talk, and do so faithfully, even in dying his death, so that we might rise in his resurrection. And that means a life rooted in sacrifice.
I recently came across a discussion of prayer and worship on the internet among those whom I would describe as secular people. While the whole conversation was couched in the language of psychology and sociology, one outstanding thing they mentioned was how prayer and worship are acts of sacrifice that are essential to human well-being. It’s good for people to worship, to pray. It’s good for their mental health, their stress management, and so on; and it is in the sacrifice that the good is accomplished. It’s a sacrifice of time, of one’s attention, of one’s intellectual energies, and depending on the church building and the design of the pews, of one’s comfort. According to science people need to sacrifice because it takes you out of yourself.
Well, from a Christian perspective, the good also comes in lessening one’s attachment to the thing sacrificed; and we need to nurture what the great German mystic Meister Eckhart called “Divine Indifference” – we need to grow out of our care for ourselves and the things of this world, and toward an absolute devotion to God. And this does not mean callous indifference to suffering, or negligence toward our own physical needs. However, we must put them in their proper place. Jesus told us what the greatest commandment is: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, all our strength.
That’s the royal road to eternal life, that is the narrow gate through to heaven; not dropping your spare change in the collection box at the Canadian Tire; not in feelings of concern over news reports of some sad event or growing crisis.
This idea of our participating in Christ’s sacrifice in how we live is absolutely central to our discipleship.
In my graduate work in theology I had specialized in liturgy, and I focussed on certain phrases in our mass that can be traced to the fourth century and likely are more ancient than that. And the one phrase that I think applies for us today is “living sacrifice” – that is the living of one’s life as a sacrifice to God. We can think of monastics, nuns in their convents as being such sacrifices, but this is something not just the cloistered do, but good Christian men and women through their work, worship and family life can make the same sacrifice.
But we need to be careful in terms of to whom and for what we sacrifice. There are many people who are “living sacrifices” to the great evils of our day. The homeless, the addicted, those who find employment in the world of vice: gambling, prostitution, selling the stuff of addiction.
There are also those who sacrifice for odious ideas, ideologies of revolution, for example – if the ideas they are sacrificing their lives to are in themselves evil, and their realization bring suffering to others, then this sacrifice is not to God.
Then there are the more common lives of sacrifice that give everything for the things of this world. We all recognize the person who lives his or her life for mere things, thrills and experiences, for themselves and for others – you know, making a goal of family life a vacation to Disney World or having as a priority that the children have the latest cell phone.
The ongoing living sacrifice of the Christian is set against all this; it is at war with this, and, we pray, it will redeem the world because it is a living sacrifice that comes not from us but from Christ who is in us. Christ continues to take away the sin of the world even as the world continues in its sinful ways.
What we need to remember about our Lord is that his sacrifice goes beyond that of the cross. The cross is the culmination of his sacrifice; but the whole of his life is a sacrifice, and the earthly ministry, the months on the road, the great gatherings where he preached and taught and healed, spent his energy in service, and felt that flow of power from him to others; that was his “living sacrifice”.
For us as Christians, we are called to something more than celebrating his death and resurrection as the payment for our sins. That death which we enter into and participate in through baptism starts us on a life of living sacrifice.
We heard in St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians his message to a community that still hadn’t grasped what their faith is about, what their worship is in aid of. He writes to them as those “who are sanctified in Christ, called to be saints, together with those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
If we’re in engaged in the process of becoming saints, we’d best know what sanctification looks like and it is more than being nice and doing good deeds.
That’s an understandable mistake: pleasant manner and the generosity that one might have is a possible indicator of what’s going on with a person’s soul, but it isn’t in and of itself proof. We know that people can do good things for all the wrong reasons.
What God wants more than material generosity is growth in spirit. Eckhart famously said that the “outward work will never be small if the inward work was great.”
As we enter this new year, and this ordinary time, we will listen to stories about Jesus and hear him speak to us, teaching us how it is that we are to be in this life, showing us the way to holiness of living, of being that living sacrifice that leads to everlasting life.
Amen.