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This Sunday, John the Baptist, the great voice crying out ahead of the Messiah, tells us who Jesus Christ really is at the heart of his identity and mission. He is “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” and he is “the Son of God … who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.”

These things John the Baptist affirms about Jesus are the essence of his identity, and they lead to the essence of our Christian faith.

First, to say that Christ is the “Lamb of God” calls to mind all the meaning of ritual sacrifice in the Old Testament. Before the coming of Christ, the old law commanded the people Israel to offer the lives of animals and portions of the harvest in place of their own lives as acts of praise, repentance, and gratitude, renewing friendship with God and becoming capable of receiving his blessings. Passover required a lamb, in particular, as a sign that the angel of death had spared the people before they made their way across the waters of the Red Sea on the way to the promised land. To call Jesus the “Lamb of God,” means that in this man, God has given the world a sacrificial life, his own, that will make peace between heaven and earth and bring humanity into the true promised land of heaven. Thus, this title calls to mind both baptism, whereby Christians pass through water into supernatural life, and the Eucharist, which is the one sacrifice of Christ for all, and which we hail with the title “Lamb of God” before receiving.

Of course, Jesus of Nazareth is that Lamb of God because he is also the Son of God, and God himself. He longs to repair the relationship between heaven and earth because he comes from the father and loves the father. He knows of the father’s love for us, and out of love for him, wants to return us to the father’s house. Because he loves the father and delights in the father’s love for him, he desires to share that relationship of sonship with as many of us as will receive it. The fact that Christ is the Son gives new and deeper meaning to his sacrifice, which does not seek merely to erase sin and leave humanity free to do what it wishes on earth but seeks to lift forgiven humanity even into God’s own life, to share eternal sonship in a way beyond happiness.

Finally, the Lamb of God, and Son of God, accomplishes this mission of love by baptizing in the Holy Spirit. What does this baptism in the Holy Spirit mean? It is not merely an intense moment of conversion, an experience of inspiration that changes the course of a life. It is, rather, the moment in which Jesus joins us to himself as one living thing in the Holy Spirit, and thus also to the father, as sons in the one Son of God. In other words, we are baptized with the Holy Spirit on the day of our sacramental baptism.

John the Baptist announces Jesus’ identity and mission to us today in a prophetic state. He may not have understood at the time the full implication of his words. We, however, in the age of the church, knowing both baptism and the Eucharist openly, understand what John first preached by the Jordan, and so can take unique comfort and offer unique praise to the Trinity who has loved us so overwhelmingly.