The Lamb of God

When I was very little, I had a stuffed animal. It was a lamb. I called him Lambo. Lambo went everywhere with me. He was dirty and he smelled just right. I would suck my thumb and rub his tail under my nose. I felt safe when Lambo was in my arms.

My mother tells me that, when I was about two years old, she took me for a walk in a stroller. I dropped Lambo somewhere along the way. When I realized he was gone, I was beside myself. I cried and cried. My parents searched high and low, retracing our steps on the walk and scouring the house, but they could not locate Lambo. My mother went out to the toy store and bought a nice new stuffed lamb, but he only made me scream harder. Finally, after two days of exhaustion and no sleep, my mother took the new lamb, rubbed it in dirt, washed it, rubbed it in dirty clothes, washed it again and handed it to me.

I looked at her with a suspicious look. But I took the lamb. And Lambo 2.0 would stay with me for another four years leading to four years of braces from sucking my thumb for so long.

Epiphany means showing. An epiphany is an AHA moment, when God reveals something new and exciting to us. In this season, God reveals Jesus to us in many different ways and from many different perspectives. Today, God gives us the gift of this perspective on Jesus, that Jesus is the Lamb of God.

John the Baptist was the greatest prophet because he was able to listen deeply to God and to hear what God was doing. When John the Baptist saw Jesus walking along, John said these famous words, “Behold, the Lamb of God.”

Later on, John saw Jesus again and John repeated the very same words, “Behold, the Lamb of God.”

Lamb of God. Agnus Dei.

At the time of the Passover, the Jews would take a lamb or a goat that was one year old and they would slit its throat and pour the blood on the altar. The lamb was considered a pure offering. The lamb must be without deformity or blemish. It should be young and perfect, white and pure. And it was killed so that God would be happy. The lamb was the best thing that people could give God. The people knew that they were not perfect, but the lamb was perfect and they hoped that God would be pleased with the gift of the lamb.

You see, human beings have felt inadequate in relationship to God for as long back as we can remember. We realize that we are finite and that we make mistakes. We realize that we must be a disappointment to the God who made this Universe. We don’t seem to be able to do what we want to do and we often do things that we don’t want to do, as St. Paul once wrote. We make mistakes. But we want God to love us and be happy with us. We want to say we are sorry and make it up to God, for all our stupidity and inadequacies. So we killed an innocent lamb. The poor lamb had done nothing wrong but someone had to make it up to God. Someone had to pay the price for our mistakes. Someone had to bridge the gap between us and God.

Sir Edmund Hilary was the first man to reach the top of Mt Everest, on May 29th 1953, or so that’s what everyone said until just recently. Most people did not seem to notice that there was another man who walked beside Hilary, who carried most of the weight on his back and guided Hilary to the summit. This man was Tensing Norgay. Tensing Norgay was a sherpa.

Norgay was born in the Himilayas and his body was built for altitude. Like many of the sherpa, when the soft Europeans and Australians were climbing, they would hire the sherpas to do the real work, to hike to the summit while carrying heavy loads of food, water and supplies. The sherpas bore the burdens so that foreigners could climb to the summit and see the glory of God.

The lamb of God is like your own personal sherpa. He looks pure and innocent but the lamb of God is actually immensely strong. The lamb of God came to us so that he could carry our load. The lamb is BUILT to carry your burdens. There is nothing too heavy for him. Nothing.

You see, most of us do stuff we regret almost every day. We say stupid things, we hurt our loved ones, we don’t do the things we wish we did and we do stuff we shouldn’t. We confess these things every week but just saying them is often not enough. If you really begin to pray to God, you begin to realize that you cannot ever be perfect or deserving of God’s love because you carry too much baggage. You get too grumpy or selfish or controlling or scared. Whatever it is that you do, we all do something. We can’t make it to the summit without handing off some of these bad habits and activities that drag us down. Broken relationships, failed jobs, disappointment in others, plain stupidity. Every morning, I wake up with the knowledge of some mistake I made or something I could have done better. And if I held onto all these things, I could not walk.

So God takes our burdens. The lamb carries our hurts and wounds and inadequacies and he takes all these things and gives up his life for us so that we can reach God. He does all the work. All we need to do is hold onto him.

John said of the lamb, “He takes away the sins of the world.”

The lamb doesn’t just bear your personal burdens. He will also carry the brokenness of the world, the failures of our government, the violence and evil and struggles that seem to overwhelm the world. The lamb can carry it all.

Human beings were not built to carry the burdens of the world. We cannot become all that God has called us to be when we rely on only ourselves. Let the lamb carry your burdens. That way, you will be free to climb to the heights that God has intended for you.

I still need my lamb like I did as a little girl, but now I have to have the real one.

The Lamb of God. I carry this lamb in my heart.

And the lamb carries me.