Readings: Isaiah 49:3, 5-6; 1 Corinthians 1:1-3; John 1:29-34
“If you see something, say something.”
This is the vaguely Big Brother-ish
post-September 11, 2001 slogan
of various U.S. security agencies,
encouraging Americans to keep
a suspicious eye on each other.
But, in a very different sense,
it might also serve
as the slogan for today’s Gospel:
“John the Baptist saw Jesus
coming toward him and said,
‘Behold, the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world.’”
John saw something
and he said something.
A prophet is someone who is gifted
with a keen eye and a persistent voice.
And John the Baptist—
the last prophet of the Old Covenant—
has a particularly sharp eye.
He reads the signs of the times
in the light of Scripture,
and he keeps his eyes open,
looking not for potential threats,
but for the savior
whom God has promised to his people.
He also speaks out persistently,
crying out in the wilderness of fading hope,
“prepare the way of the Lord,”
unafraid of the religious and political leaders
who would silence him.
The prophet sees something
and he says something
so that others can see what he sees.
And what John the Baptist sees is the Lamb of God.
Others might have seen simply a young man
of undistinguished background
from an unimportant northern village,
who had no particular potential or promise.
But the keen eye of John, the eye of faith,
sees in Jesus the fulfillment of the promise of God.
John sees something and says something
so that we can see what he sees:
“Behold”—look! see!—“the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sin of the world.”
In acclaiming Jesus as the “Lamb of God,”
John evokes a host of images from the Scriptures of Israel:
the Passover lamb whose blood marked the doorposts
of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt,
sheltering them from the angel of death;
the lambs sacrificed every morning and evening
in the Jerusalem temple to offer honor to God;
the servant of the Lord prophesied by Isaiah
who would be “led like a lamb to the slaughter”;
even the scapegoat that symbolically bore
the sins of the Israelites out into the wilderness.
John says what he sees in Jesus
so that we can see it too:
here is one who would bear away
not just the sins of the people Israel,
but the sins of the entire world,
who would rescue us
from the ancient curse of death
that afflicts the human family,
so that, as God says in our first reading,
“my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.”
A prophet has a keen eye and a persistent voice,
and John’s voice persists even today,
in the words of our liturgy:
when we sing the Gloria, John still acclaims Jesus
as “Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father”;
when the bread of Christ’s body is broken,
John still implores the Lamb of God
who takes away the sins of the world
to grant his mercy and his peace
to us and to our troubled world;
when the priest invites us to communion,
John’s words still invite us to see what he saw:
“Behold the Lamb of God.”
Do we see it?
Do we see the Lamb of God,
the bearer of all our sins and sorrows,
present in his gathered people,
present in his word proclaimed,
present in the gift of himself in the Eucharist?
Perhaps it takes the keen eye of the prophet
to be able to see the Lamb here present
within the motley assembly of the Church,
within the often puzzling words of Scripture,
within the simple gifts of bread and wine.
But John tells us that Jesus has come
to baptize us with the same Spirit
that descended on him at his baptism,
to give us the eyes of a prophet,
eyes of faith to glimpse the Lamb
now present here in mystery.
This is what the gift of God’s Spirit does:
makes us able to see the Lamb of God
who is here with us now,
veiled in sacramental signs.
So if we see something,
do we say something?
Do we keep to ourselves
what we see with the eyes of faith,
or do we, like John, speak out,
perhaps at cost to ourselves,
so that others can see what we see?
We, no less than John,
have been given a prophet’s eyes
to see what is hidden
and a prophet’s voice,
to say what we see.
We, no less than John,
are called to be,
in fear and trembling
and with all due humility,
Christ’s heralds to others
so that they too might praise Jesus
as Lord, Lamb, and Son;
so that they too might implore his mercy and peace
on our broken and warring world;
so that they too might know themselves
graciously invited to the banquet of life.
If you see something, say something,
because the world waits to know
what can be seen with the eyes of faith.
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Click here for the video of this homily.
