For Christmas, my sister-in-law gave me a copy of Doonesbury at 40. This cartoon strip, started by Gary Trudeau when he was a student at Yale, has reflected the political and social milestones of Joanie, Mike, Duke, BD and Zonker and their children over the past 4 decades. In a recent interview, Trudeau said that the unique visual style and voice of Doonesbury began in a drawing class he took, expecting an easy A. “I was pretty happy with the drawings I was doing in class, and yet they were sort of the visual equivalent of Muzak…they were sort of charcoal stylings and they were very facile.
“And one day the professor came over and looked at my drawing, and he ripped it off my drawing board and proceeded to tear it into pieces in front of the rest of the class. And he looked at me and said, ‘Yes, I know you can draw. What I’d really like to know is whether you can see.'”
Any fan of Doonesbury would agree that Gary Trudeau learned his lesson that day; he went on to really see what is going on to the people and things around him. That is the challenge which John the Baptist leaves us with in today’s gospel. Can we see what he means when he tells us to behold the Lamb of God?
Twice in today’s gospel, John the Baptist makes the point that for much of his life, he did not know who Jesus really was. That’s a surprising admission when we consider that he and Jesus were cousins born only six months apart.
Most of us, like John the Baptist, have known Jesus since childhood. We have seen pictures of Jesus, we learned about him from our parents and in religion classes. We listened to his stories told in scripture and explained in homilies. For many of us, Jesus remains a kind person whose birth we celebrate at Christmas and whose resurrection we celebrate at Easter. But do we see him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world?
One of my seminary professors, Fr. Kilian McDonnell observed, “No man will celebrate the mystery of Christ in joy if he does not first recognize in sorrow that he is a sinner who needs a savior.”
Few of us have been blest with a vision like the one John the Baptist saw after he baptized his cousin in the Jordan River. However, we have dealt with the blinders that impede us from fully seeing God, namely the reality of sin in our lives. Looking at recent headlines, such as the massacre that occurred in Tucson last Saturday, we cannot deny that sin is very much a part of our human nature but do we see sin as the primary reason why Jesus is in our midst?
Can we see that God is calling us to be holy people in the midst of such violence? Can we see that God wants his salvation to reach to the ends of the earth? Can we see that whatever anger and hostility we cling to undermines the mission of the Lamb of God? We become holy when we see that we are sinners in need of God’s mercy, which is why before receiving communion, we implore, “Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world, have mercy on us.”
When we say that, we are remembering what Jesus did for us on the cross, empowering us to forgive others just as he forgives us. We see that his sacrifice makes God’s love real on earth and we see that joining Jesus in sacrificial love is the only way we can be his followers and do what we can to take away the sin of the world.
Just as Gary Trudeau’s teacher challenged him to see, John the Baptist is challenging us to see the Lamb of God in our midst, to see and hear the compassion of God in our lives, to uncover and lift up God’s grace that goes largely unnoticed in the simplest acts of forgiveness and justice. We often find ourselves rushing through the day too busy to see the love of God illuminating even our darkest nights.
Last week in Tucson, President Obama used the moment to invite us to see that reality in the midst of tragedy. He said, “I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us. That’s what I believe, in part because that’s what a child like Christina Taylor Green believed. I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us, we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations.”
However imperfect we are, we have to keep our hearts and eyes open so that we will see who Jesus has been all along. We can see him as our Savior, the Lamb of God who takes away our sins, inviting us by our example to make a difference in the lives of those around us, helping to create the country we want our children to inherit.
There is nothing greater that any of us can do in our lives than point Christ out to others. May we see this new year with new eyes, enabling us to transform the Jordans we cross into flowing rivers of God’s reconciliation and justice.