Enough For Me: Befriending the Lamb of God
by Paulist Fr. Rich Andre
January 15, 2017

Second Sunday of Ordinary Time – Year A
(Isaiah 49:3, 5-6; Psalm 40; 1 Corinthians 1:1-3; John 1:29-34)
14/15 January 2017 – St. Austin Parish, Austin, TX



We’re back in Ordinary Time, but let’s remember: the word “ordinary” does not mean “boring”! We’re in the ordered, or counted weeks of the year… where we work our way chronologically through one of the gospels. This year, we will be working our way through the Gospel of Matthew. I’m not sure if I’ve told you this, but Matthew is my favorite gospel. It’s the teaching gospel, the gospel that has most prominently informed our Christian faith.  

But every year, for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, we hear from the Gospel of John. I’m not sure if I’ve told you this, but John is my favorite gospel. It has the highest christology, illustrating Jesus’ unique relationship with the Father. Why John, and why now? On this Second Sunday, we always hear a story from John about how somebody came to recognize Jesus as the Christ.

John writes like Picasso paints. In the glorious prologue to this gospel, here’s what he has to say about John the Baptist: “He came for testimony, to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.  He was not the light, but came to testify to the light.” 

The Baptist’s job is no different than ours: to witness to the light. Even if we’ve strayed into the darkness, let us ask God to give us the grace to return to being children of the light!


As a musician growing up in Pittsburgh, I had many opportunities to sing and play in Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, and Lutheran churches. When I was a hospital chaplain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, I offered prayers for Hindus, Jews, Unitarians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, members of the United Church of Christ, and agnostics. As a Paulist seminarian, I went out of my way to attend prayer services in other religious traditions, including Quaker and Orthodox services, Mennonite and Holiness gatherings, Ruthenian and Anglo-Catholic liturgies, and Muslim and Sikh prayers.  

Each of these experiences has enriched me. Not only have I been reassured by the commonalities of our beliefs, but also the differences have challenged me to question if there are gifts from these other traditions that can enhance my own spirituality.

When I moved to East Tennessee, I had a lot more opportunities to pray with our evangelical brothers and sisters. It’s been both enriching and challenging. I guess the most noticeable characteristic of evangelical prayer is how – as some people would say – “Jesus-tastic” the prayers are. And sometimes I’m dismissive about those differences. Some of our evangelical brothers and sisters seem so focused on Jesus, they attribute all aspects of God to him – things that I feel belong more properly to God under the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit. The prayers of the Catholic liturgy are mostly offered to the FATHER, through the Son and with the Holy Spirit.

But on the other hand, our evangelical brothers and sisters are so open and emotional about their relationship with Jesus. As they repeatedly ask all of us, do you have a personal relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ? It’s easy to dismiss evangelical faith as an earlier stage of faith… a stage that we’ve transcended, but I think that’s just a cop-out for me. To be a Christian, I need to continually nurture my relationship with Jesus, the Christ.

And that’s the point of our gospel passage today. The Gospel of John begins with a masterful, vivid, poetic, 18-verse prologue. You know how it starts: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.”

But then, after that masterful prologue, the gospel jumps to John the Baptist foretelling that Jesus was coming. And then we immediately jump to this passage, where John tells us that he knows Jesus is the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” because he saw the Holy Spirit come down upon him. This is so weird, because we don’t actually have the story in John of Jesus being baptized.

What is the gospel telling us with this strange story? To be Christian disciples, we must each have an ongoing, intimate, personal relationship with Jesus. Here, in the very first chapter of John, John the Baptist and some of the other early disciples address Jesus by eleven different titles. And yet there are another twenty chapters to this gospel, many stories that help us to grow in understanding who Jesus is, to help us grow in relationship with Jesus.  

That’s the ongoing challenge in any relationship. If you ever get to a point where you think you completely understand your best friend, your boyfriend, your girlfriend, or your spouse, that’s not a very deep relationship. It’s the same in our relationship with Jesus Christ. We can always know him better. We must continue to spend time with him, continue to relate to him, continue to grow with him, continue to grow into him.

It’s the same reason why Catholics baptize infants. Just as we expose our children to the alphabet before they decide to become novelists, and we teach them their numbers before they decide to be accountants, we ask God to give them the grace to know Jesus at the very beginning of their lives!

You may not have noticed it, but one of our staff members, Marylynn Wesson, has implemented a quiet revolution this year. We no longer call the parish programs for either children or adults “Religious Education” but “Faith Formation.” Marylynn’s doctoral research is abundantly clear: children are unlikely to develop an ongoing relationship with Jesus Christ unless their parents are also continuing to develop an intimate relationship with Jesus. So, for eight weeks this fall, the parents of our second graders were required to attend a program called “Building a Firm Foundation,” inviting them to deepen their desire to know Jesus. Well, it must have worked. A number of parents who initially begrudged going to this program are now clamoring for ongoing discipleship formation opportunities. Check the bulletin this weekend for what’s starting up next Sunday at 10 am – space is limited!

At the end of his 30 days of Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius teaches us a prayer that sums up our task as Christians. It’s one of those prayers that’s simple and beautiful, but it calls us to share an intimacy with Jesus that seems to be beyond human capacity. And yet we should strive to live this more and more, every day of our lives:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, 

my memory, my understanding

and my entire will,

All I have and call my own.

 

You have given all to me.

To you, Lord, I return it.

 

Everything is yours; do with it what you will.

Give me only your love and your grace.

That is enough for me.