2nd Sunday Year A - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2008

Jesus had been baptised.  He had faced into, and taken on (for the purpose of taking away) the sin of the world.  Our television screens with their nightly news saturate us with the sin of the world “writ large” – the same sin that, in less spectacular ways, can be embedded in the politics of local communities and sometimes even families.  Sin is not the whole story, of course; but it is what takes out of people’s lives – out of our lives – the fulfilment, the peace, and the joy.  The sin of the world springs from our radical sense of insecurity and uncertainty that leads, in turn, to fear, to compulsive control, to envy (that compulsive need to have more) and to the bitterness and violence to which they give birth, or to emptiness and consequent frantic busyness or distraction and sometimes quiet despair. Jesus takes it on.

John the Baptist indeed recognised him and referred to him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  How on earth can you take away the sin of the world, and still leave people free? The Gospel passage gives a clue, even if a somewhat cryptic one.  John saw Jesus as the one who would baptise with the Holy Spirit.  What does that mean? The Spirit of God is simply the love of God at work in the world.  Jesus is prepared to baptise people, that is, to immerse and saturate them in the Holy Spirit, the love of God.

When the Gospel of John went on to describe Jesus’ crucifixion, the author quoted a phrase from the Hebrew Scriptures: not a bone of his body will be broken.  The phrase originally referred to the Paschal Lamb: the lamb first sacrificed on the occasion of the Hebrew liberation from Egyptian slavery, and then sacrificed annually at each Jewish Passover – just at the hour that Jesus was crucified.  Jesus had himself taken on, got caught up in, and, like the Paschal Lamb, by his crucifixion, been made victim of the sin of the world.

But the story did not end there.  Jesus who had absorbed the world’s hatred and its cruel violence in the guise of political expediency, national security and sheer power, rose out of death; and his immediate message was not revenge, or even triumph but simply: Peace be with you. Wonderful!  He had answered the world’s violence - the sin of the world, with calm forgiveness and the gift of peace.  He had met evil with love.  He had baptised the world with the Holy Spirit, the love of God at large.  

Crucifixion and resurrection were one great Liturgy where God, in Jesus, was both priest and victim.  What happened in microcosm on a hill outside Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon was an act that symbolised and contained love’s answer to violence – that echoed through the whole of humanity and across history.

As we gather today for Eucharist, we are drawn sacramentally into that one great liturgy where, with Jesus, we are both priests and victims.  We open ourselves to be immersed ever more deeply into the love of God – the Holy Spirit.  We let that love overwhelm our personal sin and the world’s sin, as it takes shape in our rather mundane lives.  The impact of each further encounter with God’s love in every Eucharist can strengthen our true sense of identity; it can speak to our radical insecurity; it can change our fear of other people, and our competition with each other, into profound respect, and a desire to draw close in dialogue, and in mutual compassionate care.  Thank God for the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!