This Sunday, the lectionary invites us to ponder John 1:29-42. The English Standard Version supplies the heading “Behold, the Lamb of God,” to verses 29-34, and “Jesus Calls the First Disciples,” to verses 35-42.
Last week, we read Matthew’s account of Jesus’ baptism, and I pointed out some ways in which his account is similar to and different from, the accounts in Mark and Luke.[1]
Many incidents reported in Mark are also reported in Matthew and Luke. But if we read only their accounts, we won’t know that when John Baptist baptized Jesus, he saw the Holy Spirit coming down on him.
Every Gospel was written with an agenda. The Gospels are like extended advertisements, designed to persuade people to do something.
We expect Coca Cola to taste the same everywhere, and it does. But when you watch Coke’s ads, you quickly see that they’re different every year and are also different in different countries.
For example, this month, Coke’s ads may feature brothers and sisters in India, baseball stars in the USA, a poor family celebrating a birthday in the Philippines, and managers celebrating a business success in Hong Kong. But the cans, bottles, and logos will be the same.
In the same way, the four gospels are different, but the same. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, called “the synoptists,” took a seemingly sequential[2] approach to telling people about Jesus.
John took the approach of writing an interpretation of Jesus and supporting it with accounts of events in his life.
If the other three Gospels are like Coke ads, John’s Gospel is like a documentary which explains why every Coke ad includes emotional stories of joy, togetherness, and good memories.
To serve his purpose, John includes information left out by the others: information which helps us understand the meaning behind events.
In today’s reading, in verse 31, he tells us the Baptist had been told by God that he was to baptize with water so that Jesus would be revealed.
He also tells us the Baptist “saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on [Jesus].” Clearly, the Baptist knew who Jesus was.[3]
Any book has one or more themes. You can think of a theme as a string which holds stories, like beads, together. When news reporters write stories, they usually use the theme of time. For example, a child was hit by a car at 7:00 pm, the ambulance arrived ten minutes later, the victim died an hour later.
Matthew’s theme is fulfilment of prophecy. John’s theme is Jesus performing miracles as signs to reveal his identity. Only John speaks of seven signs which Jesus did, which reveal his identity. The synoptists do speak of two of the same incidents,[4] but they don’t call them signs.
For John, the most important thing about Jesus’ baptism is that it’s a sign:[5] a sign principally for John Baptist, to know Jesus was God-incarnate, and to point him out to people, who would then “follow him.”
But why did Jesus come? The answer lies in the words “Lamb of God,” which none of the synoptists mention.
After John Baptist saw the Spirit descend upon Jesus, he called Jesus “Lamb of God.” Why? Why did he call Jesus “Lamb of God?”
The answer lies in the Passover festival, when lambs were killed on altars as sacrifices to atone for sin, to “pay” the price for having committed sins,[6] to ask God to forgive and to remove the justly deserved punishment for the sins.
In baptism, Jesus identified with people who have sinned. The biblical teaching is clear: all have sinned and fallen short of God’s standard. This is not a popular teaching. Most people reject it. In fact, most people are offended by it. But you can’t be a Christian if you don’t agree that everyone has sinned; that everyone is infected.[7]
Jesus joined sinners in solidarity. Not to commit sin together with them. But to reveal sin as the cause of so much trouble in our world, and to reveal and to act out God’s solution to it – a solution which required his death on the altar of a Roman cross in Jerusalem, the Holy City.[8]
Jesus embodied, enacted, what Prophet Isaiah prophesied long ago: He marched to the cross “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter.”[9]
Christians’ solidarity with people springs from our belief that all people have been infected by sin – and therefore all people suffer because of sin, because all people often put themselves before others – and this results in oppression, especially of orphans, widows, foreigners and the poor.[10]
Christians’ solidarity with people is a result of our following Jesus. Notice that John immediately tells us of the response of three persons: they immediately went to stay with Jesus, to learn from him, to follow him.
And so, what John said in verse 12 happened: the followers became children of God, became people who call God “Father,” people who are intimate with God through acting for him in the world, by healing, feeding, clothing people; by speaking truth to power. And by dying for the sake of others. I have no doubt that about these children, God says, “with them I am well pleased,” just like he said when Jesus was baptized.
Baptism announces intimacy with the Father, and results in solidarity with people. The solidarity is strange because it’s not based on shared beliefs about Jesus. What do you think?
Peace be with you.
[1] I wrote about it under the title “Words never spoken before or since the Baptism of Jesus.”
[2] Also known as “chronological.” I say “seemingly,” because their accounts don’t match. For example, they give different accounts of when Jesus called the first 12 Apostles.
[3] Unlike Matthew and Luke, John says nothing about the Baptist’s later doubt, which caused him to send his disciples to ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or do we have to wait for another?” See Matthew 11:2-6 and Luke 7:18-23.
[4] They speak of the feeding of the 5,000 and Jesus walking on water. Only John speaks of Jesus turning water into wine, healing the royal officer’s son, healing a paralytic at the pool of Bethesda, healing a man born blind, and raising Lazarus from the dead.
[5] Though he doesn’t use the word “sign” (simeio) in his discussion of it.
[6] The classic prayer in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer puts it beautifully:
We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things
which we ought to have done;
and we have done those things
which we ought not to have done;
and there is no health in us.
[7] See Romans 3:23; see also Isaiah 64:6
[8] Later, he said he’d come to save bad people, sinners. See Luke 5:32.
[10] See for example Deuteronomy 10:14-19. This is a recurring theme in the Bible. The Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff calls them “the quartet of the vulnerable.” Pastor Matthew Erickson has an extract from Wolterstorff here.
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