Second Sunday after Epiphany – Year A

Welcome to the second week after Epiphany. Last week, we watched John baptize Jesus. This week, John looks back on that moment and tells us what it meant. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” 

The word sin is singular, not plural. Unfortunately, the word sins is often inserted, erroneously, by pastors and theologians. The difference matters. Sins, plural, implies that Jesus came to manage a long moral checklist of “bad” behavior, like some cosmic game of whack-a-mole. On the other hand, sin, singular, suggests something far more elemental: the deep disorder that runs beneath it all — the futility of a creation that is ruled and run by violence.   

Then there’s the sacrificial imagery: “Lamb of God.” Lambs were the quintessential stand-in for human sacrifice, which was an undeniable and well-documented practice of ancient Israel. This imagery is often used to affirm the sacrificial system, as though it were God’s own invention — that somehow God needed blood sacrifice in order to satisfy divine wrath. 

The Gospel of Jesus reveals something entirely different. Jesus finds a way to occupy human violence creatively, peacefully, in a way that saves us from our own wrath. In doing so, Jesus reveals a God in whom there is no violence and who is in rivalry with nothing, not even death. 

He takes away the sin of the world by giving himself freely to the wrath of humanity, thus exposing the ritual killing for what it is, the abattoir of our own making. It is we who demand blood, not God. And so the sacrificial lamb gives itself freely to a violent system, exposing it for what it is by forgiving all who participate. Jesus is the “Forgiving Victim” who takes away the sin of the world.