Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Behold, The Lamb Of God

Rev. Marcel Divine Emeka Okwara, CSsR

Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

Church of St. Bridget of Minneapolis, MN

Sunday, January 14, 2024

In African Traditional Religion (ATR), animal sacrifice is quite prevalent. When I was growing up in my maternal home, I would, from time to time, see animal sacrifice either in a shrine situated near an unpaved path or at the foot of a huge tree. Some of the pictures were so gory that one day I decided to ask my grandmother, “What are these and what do they mean?” Replying, my grandmother told me they are animal sacrifices performed by a traditional priest on behalf of people who may have committed abominable acts (taboos) or who are seeking favors from the gods. In a traditional African culture and society, certain actions are classified as taboos, and those who indulged in them usually perform animal sacrifice just to appease the gods. My grandmother told me that failure to perform such sacrifices can be cataclysmic for the sinner: the person’s family could be cursed, the daughters may never marry, and if they do, they may not bear children. The sons could also be cursed with generational poverty, and the land could be cursed resulting in poor harvest after farming. Other severe punishments like insanity, early death, incurable diseases etc. might be unleashed on the family of the sinner or to the entire community. Abominable actions or taboos are never personal. They have sociological consequences. To forestall huge problems, animal sacrifices are performed and their blood spilled over the land in order to cleanse the land. 

In today’s Gospel (John 1:35-42), we are told that the moment John the Baptist saw Jesus walk by, he said to his disciples, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” At every Mass, we pray, “Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” And at the end of that particular prayer, the priest raises the Eucharistic Jesus and says, “Behold the Lamb of God, Behold him who takes away the sins of the world, and happy are those called to his supper.” So, the phrase “the Lamb of God” is very familiar to us. But do we really know what that phrase means? My spiritual hero, Bishop Robert Barron spoke about an informal survey he conducted a few years ago in which he asked some Catholics the question, “When we say at Mass, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ what does that mean?” To his utter surprise, everybody responded, “It means he is gentle and he is innocent like a lamb.” Is Jesus gentle and innocent? YES! But when John referred to Jesus as the “ Lamb of God,” he was not addressing or commenting on the innocence and gentility of the Lord. John was the son of a priest. He grew up in the temple, meaning that he knew a lot of what happens in the temple. Among other things, he was well acquainted with animal sacrifice. Animal sacrifice was so common in ancient culture, not just in Jewish culture alone but in almost every ancient culture. Animal sacrifice was a basic religious practice at the time. Biblical figures like Cain, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, Elijah, Elisha all performed animal sacrifices. The temple was a place of sacrifice for centuries and in that place millions of animals were sacrificed. It is said that you could smell the temple before you saw it as you made your way there. It would smell like a combination of a slaughterhouse and a barbecue because so much killing and burning of animals’ flesh was going on there. So, as the son of a temple priest, John knew a lot of what happens in the temple. If he had said, “Behold, the great moral teacher who takes away the sin of the world by giving us new moral instructions,” we can say, “Ok, I get that.” If he had said, “Behold the great psychological counselor who helps us deal with our inner problems and personality,” we would say, “Well, I understand that.” But what John said is, “Behold the Lamb of God.” What can that possibly mean? When John called Jesus “the Lamb of God,” he meant that Jesus is the Lamb of sacrifice. He is the sacrificial Lamb who will definitively and decisively deal with the sin of the world. He will offer once for all sacrifice that will get to the root of sin. John meant that Jesus will offer not an animal sacrifice but the sacrifice of his own life and blood. But why do we need the Lamb of God to take away our sin? The human race is like a broken down car, and what is not going to solve the problem is another broken down car or ten more broken down cars. What is needed is someone who is above and beyond the level of the car, someone who is at another level and understands the working of the car. More to it, that same person has to be willing to open up the hood of the car, get his hands inside, and go underneath. He has to be ready to get dirty with dirt and oil and gasoline and work on that car and fix it. He has to make a sacrifice, a sacrificial move, if he is going to fix the problem with that car.

Jesus has come as Savior, Salvator in Latin, which means healer. He has come to solve a problem. He has come to fix something that is broken. What’s broken? We are broken. The human race is broken. We are all sinners. We’ve gone off kilter. Essentially, we remain good because we are all creatures of the good God. But there is something that is wrong with us. St. Paul’s letter to the Roman says that we all have fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23). What’s not going to solve our problem? Lining up similarly broken people! Bring all the philosophers, scientists, psychologists, sociologists and historians together, and they are not going to solve the problem because they are broken too like anybody. Bring all the politicians you know and even with the right social reforms, they still won’t solve the problem because they too are like broken cars. In fact, politicians are the major problems of the world today and in the past. To solve the problem of the human race, the maker of human life and human beings might be the one that best understands the problem. Someone has to come from outside of the dysfunction and enter into the dysfunctional human heart and fix it. What happened on that terrible cross? Jesus, the very incarnate Son of God entered into human corruption, sin and dysfunction so as to fix it from inside. He also brings Divine love precisely where it is most needed. The sinless Son of God couldn’t remain isolated in heaven making pronouncements. John says that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son all the way down into our humanity and by accepting even death, death on the cross, he offered once for all sacrifice that brought healing and salvation to the world. John the Baptist got it correctly. He didn’t say, behold, the great ethical teacher; he didn’t say, behold, the friend of the poor, he didn’t say, behold, the great miracle worker, even though Jesus was all of that. What he accurately said was, “Behold the Lamb of God” who is willing to make the supreme sacrifice to save us. That’s the great good news!