John 1:29–42
“Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John the Baptist proclaimed as he saw Jesus coming toward him and his followers. The phrase became central to Christian worship, particularly in the Latin liturgical traditions. The Agnus Dei is part of the Roman Catholic Mass and many of the Protestant traditions whose worship evolved from it. Thousands of mass settings repeat this phrase in prayer and song, usually turning it into an intercession to “grant us peace.”
The Agnus Dei that originates in our Gospel passage for this week contains within it a paradigm of justice frequently unfamiliar to us. In the retributive frame, there are crimes (or sins) for which perpetrators must be punished. The solution to sin is to punish the sinner. Presumably, this retribution should “grant us peace.” The Agnus Dei and John 1:29 present a different form of peacemaking.
Here God’s desire for the world does not come through retribution but through the Lamb of God (the agnus Dei). It is the Lamb of God who takes away sin and brings peace, not the punishment of the wrongdoer. Within the Agnus Dei we obviously do not receive a detailed plan of how justice, peace, and restoration are achieved, but what is clear is that retribution is not at the heart of this reshaping of the world.
John the Baptist invited his disciples to take up the way of life described here when he urged them to follow Jesus. The evangelist John invites us to do the same in this Gospel. How can we claim to be a Gospel people if we place our hope in retribution (the motivating force of the carceral system)? How can we claim to follow Jesus when we hope for a punitive justice system to take away the sin of the world and grant us peace?
As many of the Agnus Dei settings also ask: have mercy on us. God, have mercy on us for putting our faith, hope, and security in the hands of sources other than you. May we keep the Lamb of God at the center of our hope and work, rejecting retributive claims to our peace.
Wesley Spears-Newsome (he/him/his) is a writer and Baptist pastor in North Carolina.