In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night (Gen. 1:1-5).
Last week we saw, in the waters of baptism, the way the Incarnate Son stepped into the base materials of creation in his quest to remake us. In the beginning was water—for creation itself, for us, and for the new life of Christ’s Church. What follows the water is light.
From the face of the waters the word of the Lord says, “Let there be light.” And from the waters of the Jordan emerges, countless ages later, the one who will say, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12).
We don’t see that particular claim in our Gospel for the day, though in this season after the Epiphany that theme remains in constantly in mind, following our proper preface, which speaks of how the “mystery of the Word made flesh” has “caused a new light to shine in our hearts.” That is, in older forms of the Roman Rite, the preface of Christmas, where at Epiphany we hear further of how the revelation of Christ in the substance of our nature has “restored us by the light of his own immortality” (nova nos immortalitatis suæ luce reparavit). The newer ordinary form of the preface shifts the light language to emphasize that Christ is the “light of the nations.” (The mixing and matching of these different prefaces in different missals over time is a subject for another day!) And this time after the Epiphany, when the Lord’s identity and purpose was first revealed to the Gentiles, is filled with stories of light, if we’re willing to see it, culminating in another few weeks at Candlemas, when Simeon prophetically names Christ the “light to lighten the Gentiles” and “the glory of thy people, Israel.”
In today’s Gospel, one of the themes that John begins to unravel is exactly the importance of seeing. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” It’s not that often that we say “behold” in modern English—it does seem a little dramatic for everyday conversation—but I think that is exactly what John the Baptist has in mind. Making dramatic statements is very much the goal of John the Baptist.
Why is he so insistent that we “behold” Jesus? To answer this, we might pose the question on another level, which is, why does St. John the Evangelist, our Gospel writer, want us to “behold” Jesus? None of the other Gospels puts this word in the Baptist’s mouth. It is, in fact, a very Johannine thing to say. The Greek word is ide, and, though it is not an uncommon word in the New Testament, John seems to have a special fondness for it. He uses it nineteen times—more than the entire rest of the New Testament combined. “Behold the lamb of God.”
The “sight” theme continues later in John with the instruction, which is repeated a few times (showing upon this Sunday next year), to “come and see.” This instruction comes first from the mouth of Jesus and later from one of the disciples. The meaning is the same: it’s seeing Jesus that communicates something, not just knowing information about him.
What do we see when we look? John’s proclamation is an invitation to see something more than a rabbi with a following on the rise, more even than just “the Son of God.” Behold, John says, the Lamb of God. Behold the one who takes away the sins of the world.
What John invites us to see is not, surprisingly, the light of the world—not the Son of God in all his glory. John invites us to behold Jesus in his darkest and most disturbing aspect, to see him as the sacrificial victim whose blood will wash away sin.
It’s interesting that this description of Jesus comes very near the beginning of John’s Gospel, only a few short verses after John’s wonderful opening passage on the incarnation of the Word, what we know well as the Last Gospel, on the way that the light has shined in the darkness, showing us the glory of the only-begotten Son of the Father.
Already, before John has even shown us the Passion, he asks us to think about it. This Jesus, being the light, also reveals darkness. Bright light, in the natural world, makes the shadows deeper, and so it is in the Gospel story, and in the liturgical year, where the bright light of the Epiphany already starts to show us things we’d rather not think about.
So it is also in the creation story. The creation of light means that the absence of light now has a name: night. And the night, because it has no positive definition apart from the day, is always waiting for the day, always leaning toward it.
Sin and evil are, in the classic definition, nothing. That is, evil is always a corruption or an absence of the good. Even if this absence or corruption has a palpable presence and reality, its being is entirely derivative, entirely dependent on the good from which it is distinguished.
And so what we are meant to see in the Lamb of God, in this man Jesus, is the one who takes nothingness and converts it to substance, who takes corruption and turns it to health, who takes absence and transforms it to presence. “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” This means that for a little while, the darkness thickens, but come the dawn, darkness will remain only a memory made more beautiful by its shining with the true light.
In other words, it gets darker before it gets lighter.
That is a sobering thought. I say it to suggest not anxiety or panic, but hope. Jesus is the Lamb of God, and our hope is that his light will overcome the darkness of a world ruled by sin. This hope has a firm basis in his resurrection from the dead and his ascension to glory, not to mention the countless witnesses of his resurrection that history has known in the saints. The light of the world went out, it seemed, on the cross. But the darkness did not understand it; the darkness could not overcome it, and so, behold, light springs again from darkness, because the darkness could not overcome it.
Whatever our darkness today, in this long night of history before the final dawn, whatever our wounded dreams, corrupted bodies, and fractured souls, whatever darkness we have inflicted on others—the light of the world can overcome it, because the light of the world is the Lamb of God whose death is not defeat, but triumph; not an end, but a beginning for all.
Let us then behold that light of the world, that Lamb of God, in his body the Church, in his body the Blessed Sacrament, in the hope of his future kingdom. Let us behold him and open our eyes to his presence, so that we can say to others, like those first disciples, “Come and see.” And so we will pass the night until the dawn.