Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

I John 2:1-11

“[Jesus] is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.”

Theologian Kathryn Tanner reminds us that sacrifice in the Bible is not first and foremost about wiping away fault or impurity. Instead, a cultic sacrifice most often involved a meal, and was meant to re-establish communion and fellowship between God and God’s people. 

            I find Tanner’s reminder a powerful entry into this passage in I John. Through Jesus, God reaches out to us to re-establish fellowship, to bring the complete storyline of humanity (including loneliness, despair and death) into the healing presence of God. God enters powerfully into our weakness.

            Years ago, I came across this evocative poem of Denise Levertov and revisit it during Holy Week and during the Easter season as one more way to open myself to fellowship with God.

Agnus Dei by Denise Levertov

Given that lambs 
are infant sheep, 
that sheep are afraid and foolish, and lack 
the means of self-protection, having 
neither rage nor claws, 
venom nor cunning, 
what then 
is this ‘Lamb of God’?

This pretty creature, vigorous 
to nuzzle at milky dugs, 
woolbearer, bleater, 
leaper in air for delight of being, who finds in astonishment 
four legs to land on, the grass 
all it knows of the world? 
With whom we would like to play,
whom we’d lead with ribbons, but may not bring 
into our houses because 
it would spoil the floor with its droppings?

What terror lies concealed 
in strangest words, O lamb 
of God that taketh away 
the Sins of the World: an innocence 
smelling of ignorance, 
born in bloody snowdrifts, 
licked by forebearing 
dogs more intelligent than its entire flock put together?

God then, 
encompassing all things, is 
defenceless? Omnipotence 
has been tossed away, 
reduced to a wisp of damp wool?

And we 
frightened, bored, wanting
only to sleep ‘til catastrophe 
has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us, 
wanting then 
to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony,

we who in shamefaced private hope 
had looked to be plucked from fire and given 
a bliss we deserved for having imagined it,

is it implied that we 
must protect this perversely weak 
animal, whose muzzle’s nudgings

suppose there is milk to be found in us?
Must hold in our icy hearts 
a shivering God?

So be it.
Come, rag of pungent 
quiverings, 
dim star. 
Let’s try 
if something human still 
can shield you, 
spark 
of remote light.

- David Shumaker