St Stephen On-The-Cliffs

How do we come to understand God and our faith? Many people don’t really understand it at all of course and have a kind of totemic thought that just turning up in church saves them, which is in complete contradiction to the teachings of the Bible. We should claim no complete understanding of Jesus, and there is no Gnostic knowledge of Him that has been hidden from public view for centuries- and the original deceit of the devil was of course to offer that to Adam. What there is, of course, is scripture and history. Jesus cannot be understood apart from the history of Israel. God’s covenant relationship with the chosen people — ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’ — is the golden thread running through that history. Everything recounted in the Old Testament, whether in the law or in the prophets or in the writings, records the fortunes of that covenant-relationship and looks forward to its consummation in the coming of Messiah, the Christ. Jesus himself tells us that ‘salvation is from the Jews’ (John 4.22). In identifying him, John the Baptist describes him as ‘the Lamb of God’ (John 1.29). Lambs were slaughtered and eaten by the Hebrews in the moment of their deliverance from the land of Egypt. The blood of those lambs marked the houses that the Lord ‘passed over’. The annual remembrance of the Passover that began their journey towards a promised land, still involved, in Jesus’s day, the slaughtering of lambs in the Temple.

These are thoroughly Jewish titles, then, and they take us to the heart of Jewish experience and faith. Jesus is the lamb, the servant, the chosen one, and the beloved. In Jesus the promise of an everlasting covenant (Jeremiah 31) is fulfilled. In Jesus, God visits His people in a ‘once and for all’ sealing of the covenant (Hebrews 7.27), its establishment on a foundation that can never be shaken. We can even say that Jesus is Israel. The servant of Isaiah is an individual from among the people but represents the whole people and stands for them so that what happens between him and God is happening between the whole people and God. John the Baptist has been described as the parting voice of the Old Testament and it is to the Old Testament that we must look to begin to understand his description of Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. The lamb occupies an important place in the story of the people of Israel. In the first few pages of their sacred text we encounter Abel, son of Adam and Eve, offering a lamb in sacrifice to the Lord. An atonement sacrifice of lambs would become part of the daily ritual of the Temple in Jerusalem. When God asks Abraham to go to one of the mountains in the land of Moriah – perhaps the mount on which the Temple would later be built – and offer his son Isaac as a burnt offering, the unsuspecting Isaac asks his father ‘where is the lamb?’ Abraham’s responds ‘God will provide’ – words which only become at the close of the Old Testament when John the Baptist points to Christ and says, ‘Here is the Lamb of God’. The prophet Isaiah speaks of a suffering servant of God, a man who would be despised and rejected by men and wounded for the transgressions of the people. He compares this suffering servant to a lamb that is led to the slaughter. From the very beginning of his life, Jesus is on a trajectory that will lead to the sacrifice of the Cross, he embodies perfectly the sacrificial lamb.

Jesus would be crucified on the feast of the Passover. This feast recalled the Exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. John the Baptist was the son of a priest, Zechariah, who would have participated in the daily Temple sacrifice. The blood of the Passover Lamb delivered the Israelites in Egypt from death in Egypt. When John describes Jesus as the Lamb of God he pointed to the definitive sacrifice that would deliver humanity from everlasting death. So Jesus is the fulfilment of the Old Testament story. The golden thread that had run through that story was God’s covenant relationship with his chosen people which began when God had said ‘I will be your God and you will be my people’. What also becomes clear in the story is that this Jewish Messiah, this servant of the chosen people, would be a Saviour not just for the people of Israel, but for all people, for us in Blackpool. He would take away the sins of the world. Until he came, the task of the chosen people of the Old Testament, as Isaiah insists in our first reading, was to act as a light to the nations. And this task of being a light to the nations is one that we must continue. Strengthened by the grace given to us in the Eucharist, the sacrament which makes present the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross, the fulfilment of the old Order, we must go out as signs and instruments of the love, mercy, and forgiveness that Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, offers to all peoples of the world, and then we will come to understand God and our faith, because we will see it in others.

St Stephen On-The-Cliffs

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