Jesus, Lamb of God
Who is Jesus for us? What is the name for us that would best fit him? The disciple of Isaiah called him the Servant of God. St. Paul calls him Jesus Christ. John the Baptist points him out as the Lamb of God. Jesus is all these. It implies for us what we have to be with him: servants, saviors, if necessary victims. Let us celebrate this Eucharist with Jesus.
Is 49:3,5-6
He said to me, “You’re my dear servant,
Israel, through whom I’ll shine.”
“And now,” God says,
this God who took me in hand
from the moment of birth to be his servant,
To bring Jacob back home to him,
to set a reunion for Israel—
What an honor for me in God’s eyes!
That God should be my strength!
He says, “But that’s not a big enough job for my servant—
just to recover the tribes of Jacob,
merely to round up the strays of Israel.
I’m setting you up as a light for the nations
so that my salvation becomes global!”
1 Cor 1:1-3
I, Paul, have been called and sent by Jesus, the Messiah, according to God’s plan, along with my friend Sosthenes. I send this letter to you in God’s church at Corinth, believers cleaned up by Jesus and set apart for a God-filled life. I include in my greeting all who call out to Jesus, wherever they live. He’s their Master as well as ours! May all the gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ, be yours.
Jn 1:29-34
The very next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and yelled out, “Here he is, God’s Passover Lamb! He forgives the sins of the world! This is the man I’ve been talking about, ‘the One who comes after me but is really ahead of me.’ I knew nothing about who he was—only this: that my task has been to get Israel ready to recognize him as the God-Revealer. That is why I came here baptizing with water, giving you a good bath and scrubbing sins from your life so you can get a fresh start with God.” John clinched his witness with this: “I watched the Spirit, like a dove flying down out of the sky, making himself at home in him. I repeat, I know nothing about him except this: The One who authorized me to baptize with water told me, ‘The One on whom you see the Spirit come down and stay, this One will baptize with the Holy Spirit.’ That’s exactly what I saw happen, and I’m telling you, there’s no question about it: This is the Son of God.”
Prayer
Our God and Father,
we honor Jesus, your Son in our midst,
with wonderful names: Jesus our Lord,
Lamb of God, servant of God and people.
Let these names not merely be
empty titles of honor among us
but words full of meaning
that commit us to become like him.
Help us to live for one another
and to bear each other’s burdens,
that we may be servants with him.
Reflection:
15 January 2023
Isaiah 49:3, 5-6
A vocation to be the ‘Servant of the Lord.’
On the Solemnity of the Baptism of the Lord last Monday, we reflected on the term ‘Servant of the Lord.’ In today’s first reading, Prophet Isaiah speaks of the vocation of Israel to be his Servant. He says, the Lord has chosen Israel as his Servant from the mother’s womb. There are other great personalities in the Bible with the title Servant of God, like Samuel, Jeremiah and John the Baptist. The Prophet Isaiah says, God chooses Israel from his mother’s womb to fulfil a great mission.
The prophet must have been referring to the mission of the small group of Israelites who remained faithful to the precepts of Yahweh – the ‘faithful remnant of Israel.’ They were a small group who resisted and withstood the lure of paganism amid a people distanced from their God.
Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Israelites were exiled to Babylon in the sixth century B.C. They had been humiliated and degraded in a foreign land. They had lost all hopes of returning to their homeland. In this humanly hopeless situation, the message of the Lord comes to the small remnant – the Servant – the faithful Israel. The Lord entrusts them with a two-fold task: to reunite all the children of Israel, bring them into the land of their fathers (v. 5), and to become the light and sign of God’s salvation to the ends of the earth (v. 6).
However, the task entrusted to them requires exceptional skills and resources for its completion. The faithful Israel looks inadequate for the task. But we have a God of surprises: the Lord has decided to manifest “his glory” through the seemingly weak Servant Israel (v. 3).
The figure of the ‘Servant of the Lord’ portrayed by Isaiah is perfectly reproduced in Jesus. Like the ‘Servant,’ Jesus carried out his mission by gathering the lost sheep of the house of Israel (Mt 10:6). He wished that his light would shine above all in Galilee: the people who lived in darkness have seen a great light (Mt 4:15-16), the Gospel proclaims.
The “Servant of the Lord” portrayed by Isaiah seemed inadequate for the job, Jesus also had an apparent failure with an ignominious death, but God intervened. He transformed the defeat into triumph. After Easter, the mission of Christ is extended—like that of the Servant—to the whole world. “Go, therefore—he ordered his disciples—and make disciples of all nations, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. I am with you always, even to the end of this world” (Mt 28:19-20).