The Baptist and the Lamb - What Epiphany is for
8am & 11am, Sunday 15th January 2023
Isaiah 49.1-7
1 Corinthians 1.1-9
John 1.29-42
Seeing is believing, but feeling’s the truth – a saying attributed to the writer and adage-collector Thomas Fuller. We are particularly familiar with the first half, but the second is practically never mentioned, perhaps because it’s less snappy and more puzzling.
It is tempting to use ‘Seeing is believing’ as an Epiphany slogan: this is the season of eyes being opened, from the Magi seeing Christ at its beginning, to Simeon and Anna seeing him at its end, via the seeing of the Spirit as his baptism, and the seeing of the signs in his ministry.
But what does this ‘seeing’ really amount to? For every one of those who sees, in our Epiphany scriptures, there must have been numerous people who didn’t – or rather, people who saw the same things, but who did not see their meaning. So for some, seeing is not believing. Conversely, for others, seeing is so crucial to their believing that they cannot get past the visual sense, to the reality which lies beyond it: thus the risen Jesus says to Thomas, who has insisted on seeing, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe’. So we might perhaps glean a fuller sense of Epiphany seeing if we add in the second half of Fuller’s dictum: this kind of seeing involves feeling, too – feeling which guides our believing towards the truth.
So, our seeing involves feeling. But, you might protest, what does this seeing with feeling really amount to? Is it that warm Christmas glow, continuing into the chill of January as we carry on celebrating the Incarnation? Or, beefing it up a bit, is it what Friedrich Schleiermacher calls ‘a sense and taste for the Infinite’? Each of these is undoubtedly true to the human experience of believing in Jesus Christ. But this morning’s gospel reading suggests that seeing and feeling the truth of his presence amounts to more than this.
After its prologue, John’s gospel cuts to the testimony of John the Baptist, who denies that he is the Messiah and points to Jesus, saying: ‘Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me…’ And then there begins a series of scenes, divided into days – ‘The next day’, says the Evangelist, and the next day, and the next day. And each day, all sorts of seeing takes place. Each day forms part of the fulfilment of the testimony. Our reading shows us the first two days. And the first person to see is the Baptist himself.
During Advent, we heard Matthew’s account of John in the wilderness, urging repentance, calling the Pharisees and Sadducees a brood of vipers, and talking of the wrath to come and the axe lying at the root of the trees. He was a passionate proponent of his own picture of the coming Messiah. Yet the Messiah who comes towards him here is not the one he was expecting: ‘I myself did not know him,’ he says. And then he saw the Spirit descending and remaining on him. Again, he says, ‘I myself did not know him'. He did not know Jesus, but he knew that he was the Lamb of God – the one who takes away the sin of the world. Jesus did not fit his picture of a wrathful, conquering Messiah. John had not known him. But seeing and feeling his presence changes John’s picture, and changes John.
The full implications of this change are not seen until the next day, when for a second time, John sees Jesus and declares him to be the Lamb of God. Now, two of his own disciples are with him. They hear what he says, and immediately, they follow Jesus. The next day, Philip and Nathanael will be called, and will leave their nets to follow. But on this day, John’s disciples don’t leave their nets – they leave John.
We hear in the Synoptic gospels that, undeterred by his blunt manner, or perhaps attracted by it, crowds of people have flocked to John. In an echo of his own situation, they don’t know who he is, and they don’t know to whom he’s pointing, but they find him compelling. He has his own following. And here, in this scene, on this day, he reveals to us all at once what seeing Jesus entails: that all those things which, if they are held tight, will cloud our vision, must be relinquished. He has already let go of his preconceptions, and now, he must let go of his fanbase: ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me, because he was before me’. It is onwards, to him, that they must go.
The kind of seeing which John shows us doesn’t just stop at the recognition of Jesus: that recognition enables John to see what his own preconceptions and false securities might be, and to be clear-sighted enough to abandon them.
So what about ours.
Much of the time, we live comfortably with preconceptions, without realising that we even have them: they are part of our interior life, just as surely as that cobweb in the corner of the sitting room which you don’t notice until you’ve been away and come back again. The sudden recognition of a flawed perception can sometimes be overwhelming: one person of my acquaintance recalled how he was meditating on his image of God, soon after the death of his mother. God, to him, was spiky, judgmental, condemnatory. He, to this God, was never adequate. He had just taken this image for granted, for as long as he could remember, until this moment, when he realised that it was not an image of God at all. It was an image of his mother.
I wonder what your preconceptions about God are – we all have them! One of the issues which confronts us when we think about seeing and feeling the Truth, is that even if our image of God isn’t particularly pleasant, it’s still our image, and so we’re in control of it. It’s similar to being in a bad relationship which you’re reluctant to leave: you don’t much care for it, but at least it’s known, whereas relinquishing it would leave you at the mercy of the unknown. To see Jesus with new eyes, as John shows us how to do, can be disorienting and uncomfortable. And surely it is what Epiphany is for.
So much for our preconceptions. What about our securities – the things that can seem to bolster us against the vicissitudes of life? Because of the way he sees, John the Baptist is able to let go of his disciples so that they can leave him and follow Jesus’s invitation to new vision, for themselves. This kind of letting go is really hard to do. We are all, to some extent, possessive creatures. We like to have our people and our things around us: they reinforce our sense of identity and importance; they help us to know who and where we are. So who or what are your disciples? They might be actual people whom you would like to mould into your image. Or perhaps it is more nebulous than this: it might be a cherished project, a protected space, a particular way of doing things, which you hold tightly. It takes immense courage, overwhelming grace, to be prepared to let these things go. And yet that is what seeing Jesus entails. Because projects, spaces, ways of doing things, people – they all belong, not to you, but to him. To us, they provide false security, because we should look, not to them, but to the security which lies beyond them. And surely this too is what Epiphany is for.
Before he meets him, John does not know the Messiah. But he knows his own calling, which predated not only Jesus’s birth, but his own, and it is this knowledge which enables him to see, and to keep clearing away all that might keep him from seeing. Today’s reading from Second Isaiah shines a light on this. It is the second of Isaiah’s so-called ‘Servant Songs’. This servant makes an appearance in Ch. 42 of Isaiah, in which the Lord says, ‘Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations’. The servant is interpreted through New Testament eyes as Jesus Christ, and in this second song, he too talks about how he was called before his birth: called to lead Israel and all the nations. We find out in the Fourth Song that this servant will suffer and be rejected and despised, oppressed and afflicted ‘like a lamb that is led to the slaughter’. The calling of the servant – the Lamb of God - lies in obedience to God’s will, and in this way, says the prophet, ‘out of his anguish he shall see light’. The calling of the Lamb of God is the pattern for John’s calling, and it is the pattern for ours, too, as we learn to recognise that in all seasons and situations, ‘surely my cause is with the Lord and my reward with my God’.
Surely all this is what Epiphany is for. And yet, this recognition is slow work. It starts before we are born, it keeps going through our lives, and like a new year’s resolution, for this to be real seeing, real feeling, real seeking after truth, it needs to be renewed every day. Just as the freshly dusted cobweb will mysteriously creep back into that corner, so our preconceptions and cherished securities will steal back into our mental furnishings, and wrap themselves around us. And so, today, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, we need to reorient our line of vision.
It’s slow work, but it needn’t be hard, because it belongs, not to us, but to him: to the One who gazes on us with such love that he invites us every day to come and see.
Amen.