I’m
sure many of you have horror stories of when you were a child and had a chest
cold and sore throat and it was likely it was your grandmother who whipped up a
mess of boiled potatoes mushed up with mustard and onions and a few other
stinky goodies; an old family recipe.
She then smeared it all over your chest and throat and it smelled so bad
you didn’t want to breathe, but it worked.
Anybody have that happen? I was lucky.
My mom just rubbed Mentholatum all over me and that has been our go to
for the kids. They even ask for it.
Since
the onset of pharmaceutical solutions to colds, aches, and infections we don’t
see too many people going the route of treating with an herbal poultice. A
poultice is a form of treatment where you apply a cooked up paste of stinky
goodies to an infected area that is supposed to absorb the infection into
itself. After a few hours you remove it
and reapply. I’ve made one here with
turmeric, ginger, onion, and garlic.
It’s supposed to be good for drawing the infection in a boil to the
surface and for relieving pain in an arthritic joint and, all the while,
warding off vampires. There are all
kinds of recipes for poultices and as many of them work as don’t. Regardless, the idea is that they will draw
out the infection in the affected area and relieve the inflammation associated
with it.
Keep
that in mind because I am going to try to convince you that the proper way to
understand what God was doing in, through, as Jesus Christ is similar to the
healing work of a poultice. God the Son
himself became human to draw out humanity’s disease of sin and its consequence
of death into himself so that he might once and for all die with it and heal us.
His healing work is applied to us and
continues today carried out by the Holy Spirit in the midst of Christian communities. As we love one another as Jesus loved us, lay
down our lives for one another, serve one another, listen to one another, speak
the truth to one another Jesus draws out the infection of sin from us and heals
our wounds.
Looking
at John’s Gospel, here we first encounter John the Baptist about a day after he
baptized Jesus. Apparently Jesus stayed
for a period of time among the crowd of people that surrounded John as they
were waiting for the Kingdom of God to come.
As Jesus walked through the crowd John blurted out, “Here is the Lamb of
God who takes away the sin of the world.” And then John continued saying that
he saw the Holy Spirit descend upon Jesus and that Jesus would be the one who
baptized others not with water as he baptized, but with the Holy Spirit for Jesus
is in fact the Son of God.
When
John said, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” he was
making reference to two specific sacrifices that the Israelites offered every
year: Passover and Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. Before saying more about those sacrifices I
need to first clear up a misunderstanding we have of the sacrificial nature of
Jesus’ death due to an overemphasis of what theologians call the penal
substitution theory of atonement. This
is the courtroom way of understanding Jesus’ death.
It
goes: all humans are legally guilty of sinning.
We’ve broken the divine laws of God.
Therefore, God’s verdict on us is the death penalty and eternal torment
in Hell as some would add. And so in
love for us, God the Son became human as Jesus of Nazareth, lived a faithful
and sinless life, and died an innocent man.
God the Father accepts his death as being on behalf of all those who
will believe that Jesus death was in place of their own death and who
henceforth try to live faithfully and those who do will upon death go to heaven
and eternal life.
We
don’t have time for me to break that theory down, but I will say that penal
substitution is only one of at least twelve ways the Bible gives us to
understand the death of Jesus and is likely the least used model by the
biblical writers. There is truth to
it. We are guilty of sin and Jesus did
die the death we deserve on our behalf, but that understanding is secondary to
the predominate way the writers of the New Testament explain Jesus’ death which
was called Christus Victor model of atonement.
It goes: by his death Jesus defeated sin, death, and the devil and he
reigns as Lord and Saviour over all Creation and he will return to make his
reign complete by making all things new.
So,
put the legal ideas of Jesus death on the back burner for a minute and let’s
get back to what John the Baptist meant by saying, “Here is the Lamb of God who
takes away the sin of the world. First,
the term “Lamb of God” refers to the lamb that every family was supposed to
sacrifice at Passover. Passover as you
may remember was/is the annual celebration of the night God delivered his
people from slavery in Egypt. On that
night God told Moses to tell the people to kill a lamb and smear its blood
around their door posts to mark their doors for life so that when the angel of
death came to kill the firstborn of Egypt he would know to pass over the homes
of the Israelites and they would live.
This
term “Lamb of God” applies to Jesus in that he is, so to speak, the Passover
sacrifice for the world. He would die on
the cross and his blood is applied to his people to mark them for life. That’s going to take some explaining.
Leviticus
17:11 and 14 tell us that the life of the animal is in the blood. They had offerings called sin and guilt
offerings that they did when they knew they had sinned and wanted
forgiveness. For the sin offering they
would take an animal to a priest. They
would lay their hand on it. The priest
would slaughter it and then take some of the blood and sprinkle it on the
ground before the curtain outside the room where the Ark of the Covenant was
kept and where God was supposed to be. What was happening was in the laying on of the
hand they symbolically transferred their sinful selves to the animal, who then
was put to death, and then the priest symbolically presented their life that
had passed through death to God and he granted forgiveness and fellowship with
God was restored. They did the same
thing with the guilt offering but in that one the priest also put some blood on
the person’s earlobe. Applying this
blood, this life that had passed through death, to the person’s earlobe was
meant to heal the ear so that the person could hear the Law of God better and
keep it.
This
life passing through death thing applied to Passover as well. On the night of the Passover in Egypt they
smeared the blood of the lamb, the lamb’s life that had passed through death,
over the doorposts to mark their households for life. It was life that had passed through death
that saved them. So also, Jesus raised
from the dead is life that has passed through death and he marks us for life by
giving us his life in the gift of the Holy Spirit to us.
Moving
on, the “takes away the sin of the world” part of what John the Baptist refers
to is part of the Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement sacrifice. On Yom Kippur the High Priest sacrificed three
animals: a bull and two rams. The High
Priest slaughtered the bull as a sin offering as I explained above on behalf of
himself and the priests. But in this
case he actually took the blood further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkled it
on the Ark where God was seated in a cloud of smoke that was created by a big
incense burn. Thus, God and the priests
were united in this life that had passed through death. The High Priest then took one of the rams and
slaughtered it as a sin offering on behalf of the people. He also sprinkled some of that blood on the
Ark thus uniting the people with God in this life that had passed through
death. He then also sprinkled this blood
all over the temple and its furniture to cleanse it of the stain of sin
incurred by contact with humans. So also
the Holy Spirit unites us to God and cleanses us of guilt and shame.
Next,
the High Priest took the second goat and whispered the sins of the people into
its ear. This goat was thus laden with
the sins of the people. A priest then
led this goat out into the wilderness where it and the sins it bore would be
destroyed by the beasties out in the wilderness. This goat took away, carried away the sins of
the people and they perished forever along with the goat. So also, Jesus, God the Son become human,
took the Sin of humanity upon himself by becoming one of us and he removed Sin
from us by his death on the cross. When
God raised him, he became the life of humanity that passed through death and
unites us to God himself.
Finally,
Jesus gives us this new humanity, this new human life by the gift of the Holy
Spirit who lives in us each and bonds us together as a new humanity. In Christian fellowship, in the love that God
has placed in our midst God continues the poultice-like work of removing sin’s
infection from us and healing the inflammation by healing our broken selves and
our broken relationships. Like the folks
in the Old Testament who brought a sin offering laid their hand upon the animal
to transfer their broken selves to the animal, we need only lay hold of Jesus,
give our broken selves to him, and he will bear it, bear us, to Father who will
not withhold his very self from us and who heals us with new life in Christ
Jesus by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit coming to live in us.
