I wanted to offer a brief reflection on today’s scripture, January 18th, 2026.
I just heard a sermon about the Passover, linking the Passover lamb in the Old Testament where the Israelites were told to put blood on their blood on their door posts.
And the plague of killing the child in the household would be passed over their homes.
And that was linked to John the Baptist calling Jesus the Lamb of God, the pastor made the point that the phrase Lamb of God would not have had any meaning apart from the context in Exodus.
Now, the thing that I observed in my thinking about this is that the Passover sacrifice in the Old Testament was uniform for all the Jews.
Everybody did the same thing.
And it was a killing of a lamb, a piece of property.
And in the New Testament story, God’s son was not passed over. God himself became the lamb.
So just to repeat the first part of my meditation, today the priest made a connection between the passage of Exodus and readings.
The passage of Exodus where it was the Passover and the Israelites were instructed to put blood from the lamb they needed to kill on their doorposts.
And I see that as the sacrifice that everybody in the community makes.
It’s all the same sacrifice.
There’s a unity and it’s a specific action where they kill their property, their lamb.
The pastor made the point that that story in the Exodus is what gives the context needed to understand what John the Baptist was saying when he said, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
Now for me what that means is that it ups the ante because as we know Christ our Lord told us that a teacher, a student is not above his teacher, that we have to take up our cross. .
We are crucified as well either existentially metaphorically or sometimes literally for some saints.
And so rather than killing a piece of property we’re killing ourselves not in the sense of suicide but we are surrendering our ability to define ourselves and the ability to sustain ourselves.
We’re surrendering to reality and our Lord is joining us in that surrender and in fact showing us what that looks like and what it means to surrender.
And so instead of everybody doing the same thing by killing the same piece of property everybody’s doing the same thing by surrendering their life, surrendering their sense of purpose, their sense of survival.
It’s all being surrendered which plays out in multiple different ways in each life but it’s the same because we’re all giving everything we’re all recognizing that we are dependent and we’re thereby given existential freedom and existential peace rather than just merely a one-time one-and-done pardon or avoidance of killing by putting blood on the doorpost.
We are surrendering our whole life and we are being we are neutralizing the world’s threats, their existential threats because we are surrendered.
Boyd Camak 