Second Sunday of Ordinary Time
Jan. 16, 2005
John 1:29-34

This episode is in organic continuation of John's Prologue. He who was said to be "the Word" now receives from the mouth of John the Baptist another title, one used as infrequently as the previous title, but immensely important for the message of the gospel: the Lamb of God.

Historical and critical studies intent on the precise reconstruction of the external events of Jesus' life have raised the question whether John the Baptist could have given such an abstract theological title to Jesus, especially at first sight. An ingenious reconstruction of the events involves the claim that the Baptist called Jesus "God's servant" using the Aramaic word "talya'" which would have been used ambiguously to mean both "lamb" (equivalent to "taleh" in Hebrew) and "servant." Most of the modern literature on this verse, written in the sixties and seventies (R. Brown, I. de la Potterie, C. H. Dodd, Boismard, C. F. Burney, C. J. Ball, J. Jeremias), review this question and conclude that the evidence is not quite conclusive. Highly influential books have come down on contradictory sides of the question: in The Theological Dictionary of the NT Joachim Jeremias defends the interpretation, while in his commentary on the gospel Raymond Brown sides with C. H. Dodd, who has "definitively" proven that the interpretation is without sufficient basis.

In either case, we are left with a most impressive image of the suffering lamb that does not open his mouth before his shearer (Jesus before Pilate). The sacrificial lamb resembles the paschal lamb because its "bones were not broken" (Jesus on the cross with no bones broken according to John 19:36 quoting Ps 34:21). In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul declares that Jesus is our paschal lamb, a datable reference and one that is really just a side remark with which he assumes all Christians in Corinth are familiar: “For our Paschal Lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed" (1 Cor 5:7).

It is not surprising to find at the beginning of the Johannine Gospel a term purposefully made to carry deep significance, the full explanation of which is not obtained until the end of Jesus' drama. Nor is it surprising that the use of irony in Johannine preaching comes from the oldest layers of the tradition. The whole Johannine work proceeds by means of hidden references anticipating the Son's exaltation by means of brutal humiliation and resulting at that very moment in his glorification. That the Baptist fulfilled his role with this kind of preaching is not supposed to be a word-for-word reproduction of his vocabulary, but a revelation of the meaning of his role in hindsight. The Baptist anticipated a sacrificial life not only in these or those "statements" but by his own existence that ended in prison and martyrdom. As "a voice" anticipating "the Word" he announced that "the sin of the world" (the darkness in which the light came to shine) was about to lift due to the innocent Lamb's willingness to die as one for the many, as one whom no one could have accused of sin.

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