The Lamb Who Will Not Be Fleeced

A woman once described stepping out of a long winter of grief and noticing, for the first time in months, the ordinary brilliance of things — the shape of a bare tree against the sky, the shine of morning on a sidewalk. “I thought something had changed out there,” she said later, “but it was me. I had forgotten what unfiltered beauty felt like.”

Faith has moments like that—when something of Christ’s truth or mercy breaks through with such clarity that it overwhelms. Today’s Gospel invites such a gaze. It asks us not simply to hear about Christ, but to behold Him.

In today’s Gospel Lesson, John the Baptist sees Jesus approaching across the dusty ground near the Jordan and utters a single sentence that gathers up centuries of longing: “Look, there is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29). To the casual ear, it may sound poetic but obscure. Yet for Israel, “the lamb” was the thread…