Sunday homily

When you hear the word, ‘lamb’, what comes to mind? Fluffy white creatures gambolling in the spring sunshine? Dinner? Both? Those clever ads from Meat and Livestock Australia?

We are used to lamb in this country.

For the Jews of Jesus’ time, as for their ancestors, a lamb was extraordinarily valuable. It was a livelihood for many, worth a great deal to a family. And once a year a lamb for each household was killed in sacrifice. That was quite a sacrifice. They would give up something of great value to remember, to re-enact the covenant God made with them. They would sacrifice an animal which was at the heart of very life of their community and its future. Why? Because the covenant relationship with God was truly at the heart of who they were, they are.

God did not, does not need the blood of sacrifice. In Psalm 50, we hear the Lord say to his people, ‘Do I eat the flesh of bulls? Or drink the blood of goats?’ Obviously not. The psalmist goes on, ‘a sacrifice of thanksgiving honours me and I will show God’s salvation to the upright’. What gives the sacrifice of the lamb its value is the humility and thankfulness to God which shows itself in justice – caring for the orphan, the widow, the stranger. This is what gives the sacrifice of the lamb its significance; this is the sacrifice which God wanted. The prophets had constantly to remind the people that ritual sacrifice and justice went together.

Today, we hear John point to Jesus as the ‘lamb of God’. Human beings do not have to provide a lamb for the new covenant. God provides the lamb. The lamb is God’s own Son become one in a flesh like ours. He takes away sin. He takes away everything that separates us from God. And he does this not just for a family, a nation, but for the whole world.

He takes it away through his self-giving presence in our flesh, through his service, through his self-giving love even in the face of hatred to death on the Cross; and from the Cross he pours out on the church his Spirit; he makes us the ‘holy people of Jesus Christ’. This divine gift is so total that St Paul can write ‘nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ As a result of Jesus’ loving gift of himself there is no need for any lambs to be religiously slaughtered ever again.

Every time we participate in Mass, each time we receive Communion the Spirit makes us one with the Lamb in his body. The Spirit enables us to follow the Lamb, to live out our communion with the Lamb of God in love, compassion, forgiveness, service.

Living in love, compassion, forgiveness is to share in the Spirit’s joy, but also brings pain in our broken world. But the Lamb has joined in our pain: the lamb’s loving sacrifice fills our own senseless sorrows with meaning and makes our pain pregnant with power (Tetlow). When we keep loving and so witness to Christ, Isaiah’s prophecy in the first reading from millennia past is fulfilled in us:

I will make you the light of the nations

so that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.