The Conquering Christ and Other Sermons

“Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” — JOHN i. 29.

“And I beheld, andj lo,... a Lamb as it had been slain.” — Rev. v. 6.

One of the disciples of the Baptist who heard his proclamation of the Lamb of God was John, afterwards the apostle and writer of the Apocalypse. Long years had passed since that hour. The Baptist slept in a bloody grave. The young fisherman had learned to know Jesus with a larger knowledge, and to love Him with a love more than life. He had found in Jesus depths which he had little dreamed of, on that day by the fords of Jordan; and now, in his rocky Patmos, with the waves dashing round him, in a scene so unlike the earlier one, and himself most changed of all, the heavens were opened, and the vision of his Lord granted to him again. Is it not beautiful and significant that the words in which he tells of what he saw through the door opened in heaven read like an echo of those spoken so long ago, and never to be forgotten? — “Behold the Lamb!” “And I beheld, and, lo,... a Lamb!” The word for lamb is, indeed, different, and in the difference lies a pathetic and lovely lesson; for that employed to describe the heavenly state of the exalted Christ is humbler than that used by the Baptist, being a diniinutive form, which we might represent by lambkin. But the whole ring of the sentence is like that of the original proclamation in the Gospel. If we further notice that the fourth Gospel alone has preserved this testimony of the forerunner, and that John alone of New Testament writers uses this name for Christ, and that it occurs in the Apocalypse some twenty-five times, we see how deeply his first teacher’s words had sunk into his heart, and how constantly, as years advanced and his experience widened, he had found them assuming new meaning. Happy is it for us if life but reveals to us the fulness which lies in our earliest glimpses of Christ, if our old age can repeat the creed of youth with deepened significance, and if we can hope that heaven itself will but give us a clearer vision of the same Christ, in the same character as we had dimly seen Him amid the confusions and sorrows of earth!

The purpose of this sermon is to gather into one view the Apocalyptic uses of this name for Jesus Christ, and thus to try to bring out the remarkable fulness and variety of the representation of what Christ is to men, thence deducible. We may arrange the whole roughly in four classes, and consider the teaching of the Apocalypse as to the slain Lamb, the enthroned Lamb, the Shepherd-Lamb, and the Warrior-Lamb.

L We have first the representation given in the words of our second text — the slain Lamb, the Sin-bearer for the world.

If we recur for a moment to the testimony of the forerunner, and try to throw ourselves back to his standpoint, and to ask the meaning on his lips of that remarkable saying, we shall better understand the vision in Patmgs,

The aspect in which Jesus appeared to the last of the Old Testament prophets was necessarily moulded by Old Testament facts, and if we seek what these may have been, we shall not go far wrong if we point to a triple source for that testimony of his, in the Lamb of history, the Lamb of ritual, and the Lamb of prophecy.

As for the first of these three, recall the pathetic question and answer which passed between Abraham and his son as they travelled to the mountain of sacrifice. “Where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” said the unconscious son, bearing the wood for the pile. “My son,” said the father — and how hard it must have been to have steadied his voice to say it, and to look the confidence which he did not feel! — “God Himself will provide the lamb.” The despairing father was “wiser than he knew,” and the event shamed the little faith which he had in his own words. Surely that utterance, floating down from the sacred past, helped to shape the Baptist’s speech, and the remembrance of it suggests the interpretation of the “Lamb of God,” as being the Sacrifice appointed and provided by God Himself.

Further, a second source, confluent with the former, is the Lamb of ritual, whether the daily sacrifice or the Paschal lamb. In this connection it is to be noted that John in his Gospel lays stress on the fact that, by reason of the remarkable rapidity with which death followed our Lord’s crucifixion. His sacred body escaped the cruel indignity practised on the two robbers to hasten their end. He sees therein the fulfilment of the prescription concerning the Paschal sacrifice, “a bone of it shall not be broken,” and thus by that one passing allusion identifies Jesus with the Passover — an identification which is also distinctly asserted by our Lord in His institution of the Last Supper.

Further, we must take into account also, and perhaps chiefly, the I^amb of prophecy — the great picture of the meek and suffering Servant of the Lord in the second part of Isaiah. “He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth.” But not meekness only was predicated of this Sufferer, but also that in some mysterious fashion He should “bear our griefs and carry our sorrows,” and that the Lord should “make to meet on Him the iniquity of us all.” The coincidence of representation is too striking to be fortuitous; and the interpretation of the words of the Baptist, which takes no account of the words of the prophet, may be admired for its courage, but scarcely for its clear-sightedness.

If we give due weight to these three sources — history, ritual, and prophecy — we shall be shut up to the conclusion that the title given by the Baptist to Jesus is a name of function rather than of character. It is a transparently inadequate explanation to make the name a mere expression of meekness or of innocence. True, these qualities must and do attach to the Sacrifice which is to avail for men, but it is not these qualities, but the fact of sacrifice, which is insisted upon in the title. That is made certain as having been the Baptist’s meaning by his own following words, which place the point of comparison between Jesus and “the lamb” in His sin-bearing rather than in His disposition. And how strong and emphatic the description of His mighty work is! He “taketh away” by taking on Himself. The burden is not “sins,” but “sin;” as if all the black deeds were gathered into one huge mass, enough to crush any shoulders but His on whom it is laid. The universality of His work of bearing, and bearing away sin, is put in the strongest form by the addition — “of the world.”

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