In a world shaped by global empires, Isaiah and John the Baptist train our eyes to see differently – to notice where God’s light truly shines for all nations. This sermon for the Second Sunday of Epiphany (Year A) reflects on Isaiah 49:1-7 and John 1:29-42.
John doesn’t argue.
He doesn’t explain.
He points.
“Look,” he says.
“There.”
We follow his eye.
We follow his finger.
This is the beginning of John’s gospel — the first chapter.
This is what John the Evangelist wants us to see first.
He wants us to follow John the Baptist’s trained finger, his trained eye.
“Look, the Lamb of God.”
He wants the people around him to see what he sees,
the person he’s pointing to.
“Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”
His finger is not trained on a figure of strength or certainty,
but on a lamb.
Many of you know what lambs are like:
how easily they are lost,
how dependent they are,
how little control they have over their lives.
Their vulnerability is well known.
The proverb “like lambs to the slaughter” captures not just their vulnerability,
but the vulnerability of the powerless —
those whose lives are shaped by decisions made elsewhere.
And slaughtered this lamb would have been,
had Joseph not been warned in a dream
to flee Bethlehem
and escape Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.
Our eldest son gave us vouchers for the RSC in Stratford.
We used them to see the Shakespeare Theatre production of The BFG.
The giants loomed over us as enormous puppets,
their movements controlled by visible operators pulling the strings.
They were noisy, careless — care-less — devouring powers.
They eat children for breakfast.
You could name the giants of scripture,
the ones who devour children.
There is Herod slaughtering the innocents,
and Pharaoh ordering the death of Hebrew babies.
It is the giants who make our news,
who make our wars,
who force people to flee for their lives,
who devour the lives of children
in Gaza, in Ukraine,
in gas chambers and killing fields,
who threaten to gobble up nations.
All except the BFG — the Big Friendly Giant —
despised by the other giants
because he would rather eat snodcumber
than eat children.
His eye is trained on Sophie,
a small, overlooked orphan girl,
without the protection of parents,
trying to survive inside a giant institution.
Isaiah has the same trained eye.
He looks at the world honestly —
at kings and rulers and empires.
He knows who makes the news.
He knows who decides who lives safely
and who must flee.
And then he looks again.
And what he hears
is not God addressing the giants,
but God speaking to the one
they have already decided does not matter:
“Thus says the Lord…
to one deeply despised,
abhorred by the nations,
the servant of rulers.”
In the train of their eyes
and the direction of their fingers,
both Isaiah and John the Baptist
are training our eyes.
They train us to look again —
to see as God sees,
to behold the Lamb,
to honour the despised,
refusing to let ridicule decide
where we look.
Because most of us have been trained —
almost without noticing —
to look first at the giants.
to follow the headlines.
to measure importance
by size, certainty, and control.
The giants have trained our eyes.
They ridicule the way John looks,
and Isaiah looks,
and the way we look
when we dare to notice the damage they cause.
They want us to look another way.
They want us to look their way.
Giants don’t just dominate by force.
They dominate by shaping
what is respectable to notice.
That is why they battle for control of attention
and of the media.
They hate it when people see
what they would rather keep hidden.
They accuse those who honour the despised
of being over-sensitive, unrealistic,
ideological, divisive — woke.
They want us to look stupid.
Classic giant behaviour
is to make compassion look naïve,
attentiveness look hysterical,
listening look weak,
and those who point to the crushed
look ridiculous.
The giants are not afraid of anger
as much as they are afraid of people who are awake —
awake enough to notice who is being crushed,
and awake enough not to look away.
They despise and abhor them.
This is how the giants train our eyes,
but the church is the place
where eyes are trained differently.
Not because we are braver,
or purer,
or better informed —
but because we have learned
where to look.
Week by week,
we are gathered and retrained.
We are taught to say,
not “Look how big the giants are,”
but “Look, the Lamb of God.”
And when we do,
our eyes change.
We begin to see differently —
to see the ones the giants have already dismissed,
the ones they ridicule,
the ones they despise and abhor.
And we discover that these are the ones
who are the apple of God’s eye.
This is how the church becomes light for the nations —
not by speaking louder than the world,
not by competing with the giants,
not by being big, or even successful
(that is the giants’ way),
but by honouring the very ones the giants ignore:
the lambs,
the small voices,
the ones whose lives are shaped by decisions made elsewhere.
By seeing them.
By standing with them.
By refusing to look away.
The trained eye looks away from giants
to the overlooked.
Look, the Lamb of God —
the one they despised, abhorred, and crucified,
and in him,
all the lambs
upon whom the world piles its sin.
Grits and Grains 