Atlantic District Publications

Letters from the President - Worthy Is the Lamb Who Was Slain

April 6, 2009 at 10:19 PM

The Brooklyn Circuit, north division, has its own way of doing things. Rather than having pastors switch pulpits during Lent, the people switch parishes. So for five weeks Missouri Synod Lutherans make pilgrimage up and down Bushwick Avenue, gathering for worship, prayer, penitence, healing and of course food. This year the theme was “Behold, the Lamb of God.”

What a privilege it has been to hear the Gospel proclaimed, sung and prayed around the exclamation made at the exact beginning of Christ’s pilgrimage by His forerunner. As Holy Week and the eventual arrival of the season of the Resurrection take our attention in April, what a comfort to know that Christ was, and is, and shall ever be, the Lamb of God.

Sitting with a parishioner in another part of the Atlantic District recently, I heard the results of Lenten meditation on the realization of Christ, the Lamb of God. “It’s got to be more than the physical suffering that commands our attention,” she said. “Because he was bearing the sin of the world on the cross – not just the marks of physical suffering, but the marks of the sin that exists from the Fall until the end of the age.”

There it is. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself,” Paul states it. Not all the blood of all the lambs ever slain on sacrificial altars can compare in the least to the gift of the Lamb slain for us. The world, in debt up to its eyeballs for eternity, has been bought back by the redemption of the Lamb. Luther personalizes in his catechesis on the Second Article – “Jesus…my Lord….has redeemed ME, a lost and condemned creature, purchased and won me from all sins, from death and from the power of the devil, not with gold or silver, but with His holy precious blood and innocent suffering and death.” The Lamb – FOR ME. FOR US.

Finally, In the words of Gerald Patrick Coleman, we enter the passion and resurrection of the Lamb together:

He sighs, he dies, he takes my sin and wretchedness/
He lives, forgives, He gives me his own righteousness/
Worthy is the Lamb whose death makes me his own!
The Lamb is reigning on his throne.

He rose, he rose, my heart with thanks now overflows/
His song prolong till ev’ry heart to him belong/
Worthy is the Lamb whose death makes me his own!
The Lamb is reigning on his throne!