Who Carries The Lamb

Wesley was nine the April he tried to carry the whole thing up the hill by himself.

His grandfather ran ewes on a place with a long ridge behind it, and in lambing season the old man walked that ridge at first light, every morning, in whatever the weather was doing. Wesley had been allowed to come along twice and had spent both mornings watching, which is a hard assignment for a nine year old with something to prove.

That Tuesday the old man came in off the porch pulling his coat on and said one of the ewes on the ridge had twinned in the night and one of the pair was not up yet.

"Go on ahead if you want," he said. "I will bring what we need."

Wesley heard the first half of that sentence and did not hear the second half at all.

He went to the barn instead of the gate. He got the feed bucket and put the bottle in it, and then the funnel, and then a coil of baling rope because he had seen his grandfather use rope once for something else entirely. He got the good flashlight. He went back in the house, quiet as he could, and pulled the wool blanket off his own bed, because the lamb would be cold, and it was his blanket and giving it felt like the biggest thing he had.

Then he started up the hill road with all of it.

It is not a long road. It is a mile with three switchbacks in it and a soft place at the second one where the runoff comes across. Wesley knows every foot of it. He had never once walked it loaded.

By the first switchback the bucket handle had made a red line across his fingers and he had to keep changing hands. By the second the blanket had come off his shoulder and was dragging behind him through the wet, picking up half the mud on that hill, and he could not get it back up without setting the bucket down, and he would not set the bucket down. The flashlight rolled out somewhere and he did not go back for it. He was crying by then, partly from the effort and partly from something worse: a nine year old doing arithmetic about whether he was going to get there in time, and whether it was going to be his fault.

He came up over the last rise at about a quarter past six with the sun coming up behind the far treeline.

His grandfather was sitting on the flat rock at the top with his coat open and the weak lamb inside it, against his chest, its head out at the collar, already warm and already nursing at a bottle the old man had brought up in his own pocket. The ewe stood off a few feet with the other twin under her, unbothered, chewing. There was hay in the old man's beard and hay on his shoulder where he had lain down in the grass beside her.

He had been up there since before Wesley ever reached the barn.

Wesley stood at the edge of that rock with a bucket in one hand, twenty feet of rope over his arm and his own blanket in the mud behind him.

"I brought stuff," he said.

His grandfather looked at all of it. Not one bit of amusement in his face, which Wesley thought about for years afterward.

"I know you did, son," he said. "Come here and see him."

And that was the trouble. There was no way to put a hand on that lamb without putting everything down first.

Somebody was on that hill before you started up

The oldest question in the whole book was asked by a boy walking up a hill with wood on his back.

Isaac is carrying the fuel. His father is carrying the fire and the knife. And partway up he says the thing that sits under every religious impulse anybody has ever had: here is the wood and here is the fire, but where is the lamb? Abraham says God will provide Himself a lamb. And when they get to the top, there is a ram already caught in the thicket, and it had been there while they were still climbing.

Hold on to that shape, because Scripture repeats it deliberately for the next two thousand years.

On the night God brought a nation out of slavery, He did not ask them to bring anything up a hill. He told every household to take a lamb, and to put the blood of it on the two side posts and the upper post of the door, and then to stay inside and eat. That is all. The people in that house were not assessed. The house was not inspected. Something died in the place of that household and the mark of it was on the outside where the household could not even see it while they ate.

And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are: and when I see the blood, I will pass over you.Exodus 12:13

When I see the blood. Not when I see the family's record. You have never once been the exhibit in that doorway, and the same Spirit who moved Moses to write Exodus 12:13 is in the room with you now, pressing the sentence in where the anxiety lives.

Then look at how an offering actually worked, because most of us have it backward. When a man brought an offering, he laid his hand on the head of it before it went to the altar. That hand is the whole ceremony. It says: this one goes in my place, what happens to it counts as happening to me. The offerer walked home. The offering did not. What was accepted at that altar was never the man's week.

So when John saw Jesus coming toward him at the Jordan, he did not say here is a teacher, or here is a standard. He said behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world. He used the Passover word, and every person listening knew exactly what he meant by it.

You have a place in that doorway that was bought with a life that was not yours, and it is written into Isaiah 53 where He is led as a lamb to the slaughter, and the Spirit who put that chapter down seven hundred years early has never once let the church lose it. Nothing in your hands was ever the token on the doorpost.

And then the hill again, and this time it is His. John 19 has Him going out bearing His own cross, and the Spirit who carried that eyewitness account into the written word has never once let the church soften it.

He carried the wood Himself. He went up loaded because you were not going to be. He was killed at the Passover, at the hour those lambs were being killed, and He was buried in a borrowed tomb behind a stone that took several men to move.

Three days later the stone was rolled back, not so He could get out, but so the world could see in, and the linen was lying there flat and folded and the young man in white said the sentence this whole site is a response to: he is not here, for he is risen.

That empty tomb is not a happy ending pasted onto a sad story. It is a verdict. It is the Father saying out loud, in front of every power that had voted the other way, that He accepted the offering and He is satisfied with His Son. Romans 4:25 says He was delivered for our offenses and raised again for our justification, and the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead is the same Spirit at work in you, which is Paul's own point in Romans 8.

And here is the part that undoes a person, in the best way. At the Jordan the Father had already said it out loud over Him. This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. He said it again on the mountain. He said it before one miracle was done and He said it while nothing had yet been proved.

It is already settled, and it was settled over Him, not over your climb. What is written is that you are in Christ, so the verdict spoken over the Son is the verdict standing over you today. His Spirit takes that out of the category of religious information and makes it the thing you know at two in the morning.