Jesus The Lamb of God, pt. 3

02-02-2025Weekly ReflectionBishop Robert Barron

We see it in a number of Gospel scenes where Jesus is tired out after his contact with the sick, the lost, the sinful. At the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, we find an account of a typical day in the ministry of Jesus. The people press on him from all sides, compelling him to find refuge in a boat lest he be crushed by the crowd, and at one point there are so many supplicants surrounding him that he couldn’t even eat. Mark tells us that Jesus went off to a secluded place to pray, but even there they sought him out, coming at him from all sides. In the magnificent narrative of the woman at the well in the Gospel of John, we hear that Jesus sat down by Jacob’s well, “tired out by his journey.”

This description is straightforward enough on the literal level: Who wouldn’t be tired after a morning’s march through dry country? But as Augustine and others have reminded us, it has another sense on the mystical level. Jesus is tired from his incarnational journey into human sin and dysfunction, signified by the well. “Everyone who drinks of this well will be thirsty again,” Jesus says to the woman, indicating that the well is emblematic of errant desire, her tendency to fill up her longing for God with the transient goods of creation: money, pleasure, power, honor. In order to effect a change in her, the Lamb of God had to be willing to enter into her dysfunctional world and to share the spiritual weariness of it. J.R.R. Tolkien keenly appreciated the sacrificial dynamic that we’ve been exploring. His great Christ-figure, Frodo the hobbit, brought about the salvation of Middle-earth precisely through his entry into the heart of the land of Mordor, disempowering that terrible place through his humble willingness to bear the full weight of its burden. All of this was, however, but an anticipation of the ultimate sacrifice of the Lamb of God. The final enemy had to be defeated, if God and his human family could once again sit down in the easy fellowship of a festive meal, was death itself. In a very real sense, death (and the fear of death) stands behind all sin, and hence Jesus had to journey into the realm of death and, through sacrifice, twist it back to life. Innumerable heroes in the course of human history had tried to conquer that realm by using its weapons, fighting violence with violence and hatred with hatred. But this strategy was (and still is) hopeless. The battle plan of the Lamb of God was paradoxical in the extreme: he would conquer death precisely by dying. From Jesus' first appearance, the world (biblical shorthand for the arena of death) opposed him. Herod sought to stamp him out, even when he was an infant; the scribes and Pharisees plotted against him and hunted him down; the temple establishment feared him; the Romans saw him as a threat to right order. At the climax of his life and ministry, Jesus came into Jerusalem, David’s city, the site of the temple, riding not on a fine charger in the manner of a worldly warrior, but on a humble donkey. He arrived in the place where his enemies were most concentrated, and he had every intention of fighting, but his weapon would be the very instrument on which his opponents would put him to death. On the cross, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” Dying on a Roman instrument of torture, he allowed the full force of the world’s hatred and dysfunction to wash over him, to spend itself on him. And he responded, not with an answering violence or resentment, but with forgiveness. He therefore took away the sin of the world, swallowing it up in the divine mercy.

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