Agnus Dei (Zurbarán)
[with contributions from Bishop Barron's recent homily/insights on the same topic]
Good morning/evening, brothers and sisters.
Our Gospel today is the source of that familiar prayer, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.”
We recognize these words, of course, from the Mass.
[The entire Mass is steeped in Scripture. We have the readings: from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the New Testament Epistles, and the Gospels. Beyond this, the rite of the Mass itself is interwoven with Scripture, and there are multiple occasions when Scripture is quoted verbatim. For example, there’s the Gloria, or ‘Glory to God in the highest’, which quotes the angel’s Christmas proclamation to the shepherds: We also have the Sanctus, or ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ which is the song of the Seraphim Angels in Isaiah, before the throne of God. And then we have the words of the Centurion, ‘Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof’, shortly before we receive Holy Communion. And of course the words of the Our Father and of the Consecration - ‘This is my body, This is my blood.’ – are direct quotations from Scripture.]
But the Lamb of God is unique, in that this phrase is repeated 5 times: first, in the Gloria: “Lord God, lamb of God, son of the Father”, and then we repeat it 3 times, around the climax of the Mass, shortly after the Consecration; we sing or pray the Agnus Dei:
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: have mercy on us. – then we repeat:
Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world: grant us peace.
As we pray this, the priest is breaking the Host, showing how Jesus’ body was broken for us. Then he holds up the consecrated host and chalice and says:
“Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. Blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb.”
And then we reply with the Centurion’s words, ‘Lord, I am not worthy…’Perhaps you’re like me, that you’ve heard and recited these words so often, that the prayers sometimes go in one ear and out the other…
So I’d like to focus on this concept of the ‘Lamb of God’, which is so central to Catholic worship. We will start with the Gospel and then move to the multiple references to lambs in the Bible.
In our Gospel today, we have John the Baptist at the banks of the Jordan River. He sees Jesus walking nearby and says, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’… And then the next day, John is again there with 2 of his disciples, and he again says, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’. These words were apparently impactful, because then John’s 2 disciples immediately leave him and follow Jesus.
Why does John refer to Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’? What does this mean?
We need to step inside the mindset of a 1st century Jew, to recall the special importance of lambs, especially sacrificial lambs, seen throughout the Old Testament.
Sacrificial lambs and sheep go all the way back to the beginning, to Cain and Abel, sons of Adam and Eve. In Genesis, Abel is described as shepherd, a keeper of flocks, and he offers the ‘firstling of his flocks’ – either lambs or sheep as a sacrifice- and God looks in favor on this offering. So the first acceptable sacrifice in human history was of lambs or sheep. And we know that the final, perfect sacrifice from human history is the Lamb of God, the consummate self-sacrifice of the Son to the Father.
The lamb theme continues with Abraham, who is instructed by God to offer his son Isaac in sacrifice. So he climbs Mount Moriah with his beloved son Isaac, who carries the wood of sacrifice on his shoulders. Isaac asks his father: “where is the lamb (שׂי שׂה) for the burnt offering?” no doubt heartbroken, Abraham responds, “God will provide the lamb.” At the top of the mountain, Abraham binds Isaac and prepares to sacrifice him. Isaac was younger and no doubt stronger than Abraham, so the implication is that Isaac allowed himself to be bound, and lay there docilely, like a lamb for the slaughter. Fortunately, in the last moment an angel stops Abraham’s hand. And instead they find a ram stuck in a thicket and sacrifice that animal. God spares Abraham’s beloved son, but he will not spare his own beloved Son, who will carry his own wood on his shoulders up the hill of Calvary and then lie down docilely on the cross to be sacrificed.
Moving forward in the Bible, the book of Exodus gives the lamb central importance at the Passover. The Passover lamb was required to be a young, spotless, unblemished male lamb – and it was sacrificed during the late afternoon, around 4pm. Does that sound familiar? The roasted lamb is eaten, and its blood is used to paint the doorposts, which saves the Israelites from the Angel of Death. At the end of the Passover Meal the Jews eat a piece of unleavened bread and drink from a cup of wine. The rite is described as a ‘statue of remembrance’ to be repeated ‘forever’. Of course Jesus transformed this Passover meal in the Last Supper, when he offered his own body and blood in the unleavened bread and cup of wine, as a rite to be repeated ‘forever’ to remember how his blood was shed to save not just the Jewish people but the entire world.
Continuing in the Old Testament, the book of Leviticus describes the ritual sacrifice of lambs and sheep, which was central to temple worship. The highest form of offering was a holocaust offering: in which an animal – like a lamb- was slaughtered then entirely burned up, offered to God. The animal had to be male and unblemished. The offerer would first put their hand on the head of the animal, to transfer their sin or guilt to it. Then it was sacrificed and burned- the person is saying ‘this is what I deserve’; the lamb takes on the person’s guilt.
One critical holocaust offering was the twice daily sacrifice offered in the Temple, every single dawn and every single twilight: a year-old unblemished lamb would be sacrificed, along with an offering of grain and wine. One can imagine the amount of blood that was shed, and smoke generated, from these continuous lamb sacrifices at the Temple. As Bishop Barron says, the Temple must have smelled always like a barbecue. And yet, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, these continual sacrifices could not actually remove sin; they only prefigured the perfect sacrifice of Christ.
Leviticus also describes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in which a ram is offered as holocaust offering, and then two goats are offered – one is sacrificed and its blood is used to cleanse the temple. Then the high priest holds the head of the other goat with his hands and speaks over it all the sins of the people, as if transferring the sins to it, and then it is released in the wilderness as a literal scape-goat for the people’s sins.
So for hundreds of years the Jews have been sacrificing these lambs and scape-goats – we can imagine how much this became ingrained into their psyche. But there were also hints that this was not the full story.
In our Psalm today, we hear:
Sacrifice or offering you wished not,
but ears open to obedience you gave me.
Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not;
then said I, “Behold I come.”
This theme, that God wants something more than physical lamb holocausts, comes up repeatedly.
And in the book of Isaiah, we have a prophecy about someone who is to come, who will be [quote] ‘pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. … by his wounds we were healed.’ 6 We had all gone astray like sheep,
all following our own way;…
the Lord laid upon him
the guilt of us all.
7 Though harshly treated, he submitted and did not open his mouth;
Like a lamb led to slaughter
or a sheep silent before shearers,
he did not open his mouth.’
This is a powerful prophesy about the Suffering Servant, who in fact was Jesus: someone who was pierced for the sins of the people, who received our guilt and lay down like a docile lamb before the slaughter.
To prepare for this homily, I did some youtube research on slaughtering lambs: and it’s true, if you hold them right, they become very calm, very docile right before they are slaughtered. They don’t fight at all.
It’s quite fitting, because this is precisely what Jesus did – he did not put up a fight as he endured torture and death – he even forgave his executioners.
I did more research into lambs, by talking with my sister, who is a nun living in Italy. Her convent has a school and a farm with many animals. She told me that lambs are particularly weak and vulnerable: they are at high risk of death in the first few days of life – they have to be really pushed to bond with the mother ewe, and special care has to be taken for diet and to avoid infection. But if they do survive, they are very white, and beautifully cute and soft. At a couple of weeks old, when you put them out to pasture, they bounce all around with this pure joy.
How amazing is it, then, that God chose for his Son to be represented as this weak, vulnerable, beautiful, blissful little animal. It is not ‘behold the lion’ or the ‘bear’ of God, but behold the lamb. Just like God the Holy Spirit chose to be represented not as an eagle or a hawk, but as a humble cooing dove. This follows a pattern: in the Old Testament, Elijah discovers that God is not in the earthquake or the rushing wind or the fire, but in the gentle whispering sound. The almighty Creator of the Universe is unimaginably humble.
Of course, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist knew all of this, and understood how appropriate the lamb was as a symbol for Jesus. They knew plenty about lambs and farms, and they knew the Old Testament and Temple worship well. Recall that John the Baptist was the son of Zachariah, who was a temple priest, and of Elizabeth, who was a descendent of Aaron, the first high priest. So John the Baptist was very aware of the daily sacrifice of lambs in the temple. And John the Evangelist was closely connected to the High Priest; this is how he and Peter are able to enter his courtyard. John’s Gospel places several important events on the Feast of Passover. For example, Jesus dies on the cross precisely as the Passover lambs are being sacrificed in the late afternoon. Jesus is truly the Lamb of God, replacing the innumerable Passover lambs.
We also cannot forget the importance of the Lamb of God in the book of Revelation, which many attribute to St. John. The Lamb of God is mentioned 28 times. Jesus appears ‘standing like a Lamb that has been slain’ – and he alone can break open the seals, leading to final, apocalyptic victory of good over evil. The saints have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
So St. John had a special insight into Jesus as the Lamb of God – as the willing and docile sacrifice who offered himself as the definitive atonement for our sins. In the movie The Passion of the Christ, there’s the poignant scene when St John watches as the crucifix is hoisted up, with Jesus’ bleeding body on it. It flashes back to the Last Supper, when Jesus raises the unleavened bread and the cup and says, ‘take and eat, this is my body, given for you’ ‘this is my blood of the new covenant, which is given for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.’ John sheds a tear, because he understands. He understands that, on the hill of Calvary, the sinless Son of God replaced the son of Abraham, and the unblemished Passover Lamb, and the Yom Kippur scape goat, and the countless lambs sacrificed daily at the temple, with his once-and-for-all sacrifice.
And so, brothers and sisters, when we pray the Agnus Dei in a little while, and when the priest raises the broken host and the chalice, and proclaims, ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ , hopefully we can be reminded of the profound power of these words.
Hopefully we can recall the shocking humility of our God, who chose to be represented as a little lamb, and chooses to share Himself in the humblest guise of unleavened bread. Jesus lay down like a lamb before the slaughter… he sacrificed Himself without a fight. What sacrifice might God be asking from us this week or this year? Perhaps it is to complain less about a hardship that God has permitted in our life. Or perhaps it is to try to come to Mass more often, even during the week, where we celebrate Christ’s definitive sacrifice - which is infinitely greater than the daily sacrifice of burned lambs. How beautiful is this gift that Jesus gives us.
‘Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world… happy are we called to the supper of the Lamb.’
