The Lamb of God

01-14-2018Weekly Reflection

“Behold the Lamb of God!” We hear this phrase every Sunday at Mass, but there’s a good chance that many Roman Catholics do not know who in the Bible originally spoke it. The phrase appears only in the Gospel of John, on the lips of John the Baptist, who utters it twice.

In today’s Gospel reading, John proclaims Jesus as the Lamb of God, and two of John’s own disciples then follow Christ. A little bit later Andrew, who heard John and then followed Jesus, brings his brother Simon to be re-named Cephas, or Peter. A careful look at these Bible verses shows us the mission of everyone baptized into the Body of Christ: we must always proclaim our faith in Christ, so that others will follow him. We may not know how the will of God might work through those we bring to Christ; that is not the point. The point is that our ongoing mission as a church is to bring others to Christ, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.