John 1.29-42
The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter).
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There’s a funny part of Monty Python’s life of Brian where Brian is being chased by a crowd because they think he is the messiah; and they’re running and shouting after him and basically going a bit crazy. Eventually they catch up with him and they start to worship him. He tries to explain that he isn’t the messiah, but they just won’t believe him, and hilarity ensures. There’s another scene where speakers are standing on podiums explaining their philosophies of life and people were watching them, interested in what they had to say. But the people were looking for an answer, an answer to a problem, and they latched onto Brian thinking that he has the answer.
Of course, this film is a parody of religion and faith problematising the ‘going along with the crowd’ mentality that people tend to have; understandably it caused a lot of controversy when it first came out in 1979. Nowadays I suppose it looks quite quant given the way that the world has changed in the last forty years. But still there is that sense of people looking for something, that sense of societies lack of direction beyond personal whim is an issue. A sense of ‘needing the answer.’ One of the markers of good mental health is a sense of ‘groundedness’ of knowing who we are and what we’re about and what the meaning of life is. We’ve lost that, and we are trying to find it again elsewhere. We look for it in all sorts of places, through meditation and mindfulness, self help etc., but the fact that we can’t find the peace we are looking for.
In the prayer derived from Saint Augustine in the fourth century., “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
There’s a joke sometimes in church, if a question is asked, the answer is always Jesus. And it’s true, For the past two thousand years the church has been obsessively proclaiming to the world that ‘it’s all about Jesus.’ Life itself is all about Jesus, for in him is life itself and it is in him that we find our rest.
And who is he? As John says, he’s the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. We sing that every week during communion. We have taken John the Baptists words and turned them into a song of sheer praise for who Jesus is.
The sin of the world…
Sin, now that’s a loaded word nowadays. Moral relativism is at the fore these days, though it isn’t really as we still pretend that we have morality. People say that morality is relative to the individual, but if you look at your daily lives you’ll see that we don’t live as if it is. If you think your children should act in a certain way and not do certain things, then you are appealing to a standard independent of yourself and indeed society. If you feel angry when people wrong you, it’s not because your feelings are out of whack, it’s because you know deep down that you have been treated in a way that you shouldn’t have been treated, and that justice should be done. Our criminal justice system is based on the idea that there truly is right an wrong, there is goodness, and there is sin.
Christianity has always and continue to take this seriously; I remember having a conversation with somebody once about morality and I explained that if moral relativism is true then no way can we criticises the Nazis for what they did during the Holocaust of the Jews and other atrocities they committed against Slavs, Roma, and those with disabilities. This person’s response was ‘well they thought that was the right thing to do.’
This is the age that we’re in, there is a dissonance between what we think and how we act. And I think it’s because we don’t like to admit that there is sin within us. We don’t like the idea that sin and the temptation to do the wrong thing is all pervasive. We are happy for others to be punished when they do the wrong thing to us, but when it comes to ourselves and the wrongs that we do, we make up excuses. We want justice for ourselves, but we forget that God wants justice not just for us, but for everybody else as well. And for that to happen, the sin of every single person in the world needs dealing with, all at once.
For a long time, even when I was attending church as a lay person, I was unable to say one of the prayers that we say at communion, the one that says ‘we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table.’ And I didn’t want to say this because I didn’t want to acknowledge my sin, I thought to myself ‘I’m alright really.;’
But no I’m not, fellow sinners I’m not. I need the grace of God just as much as anybody else, I need to know that I’m forgiven and that I am loved and cherished deeply by my heavenly Father.
When we do church on Sunday, we are reminded of that, in the confession and absolution, the declaration of righteousness is given to the congregation as a reminder of what God has been done through Jesus, showing his mercy to a broken world, where we are no longer condemned. That’s why we stand and sing the gloria after the absolution, we sing God’s praises for what he has done in and through Jesus.
Jesus takes away the sin of the world, that is what he accomplished on the cross. We no longer carry the stain of the things that we have done wrong. For the price has been paid.
But not only this, John speaks in our passage about how;
“He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.”
Jesus gives us his Spirit if we have faith in him. And if we trust in him we have His Spirit of truth and power, living within us, sanctifying us, (that means making us more like him. For a long time, I thought It was contemplative practices that would ‘sort me out and make me a better person,’ I thought that if I made sure I was fit and healthy, worked hard but didn’t burn myself out, meditated in the morning and had good prayer habits then that would make things better. Don’t get me wrong, it’s helpful, but it doesn’t truly change things.
But you know what changes things, what changes me? It’s the Spirit of God living within me, empowering me, empowering us to live a life of faith in him, giving us joy in the present, hope in the future, perseverance through difficulty, and peace that passes all understanding.
In the darkness of our sin Jesus shines as the light, brighter and brighter in our lives, ‘let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father which is in heaven’ says Jesus in the sermon on the mount. Let’s be filled with the power of the Holy Spirit today and be empowered to live our lives for him, always.
Amen.
