Fr. Simon Sleeman: ‘Look’, here is the lamb of God, John the Baptist calls out. At communion, I will say, ‘Behold’ ‘Look’, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world – twice I’ll say it. There we have an image of the lamb on the front of the altar. In the OT people bitten by snakes are told to look at a bronze serpent and be healed…Looking, looking, looking….it seems to be key. Yet it seems an easy, uncomplicated task.
But it is not simple – this capacity to look has taken 3.5 billion years to become the superpower it is today.
How we ‘look’ is unclear … it is a problem that has bedevilled scientists, philosophers and engineers for a long time and especially the last fifty years…It is the BIG issue for AI. Teaching a ‘robot’ to look.
The old idea was that the world is made of objects, we look at an object, the chair. Evaluate the object and then act. I sit on the chair.
When I look down the church, what do I see? and what determines what I see? I can’t look at everything…and there is an infinite number of things I could look at….
Six people were in a gym – three dressed in white bibs and three in black ones. Their task was to pass a basketball and to count the number of passes made to a person in a white bib. In the middle of the game a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the group, stops, thumps its chest and moves away. You can see it on tube only 45 seconds. Most of the group never saw the gorilla!
Looking is not that simple it turns out. When we look, what we see is in accordance with our aim. What I look at, what I see, reflects my aim. ‘Look’ there is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Sin means my aim is off.
Our culture tempts us to aim low. ‘Look’ it says – at stuff that brings your aim down – do things that bring your aim down – in some ways, our culture, doesn’t want us with any aim at all – just blind, confused and distracted, consuming in desperation, accumulating. Fulfilling every desire and whim – the secret to happiness and the economy growing…and our aim dragged down into the mud.
The readings today, in contrast, challenge us to aim high. Look, there is the Lamb of God. ‘Oh Christian be aware of your nobility’: become a light to the world, saints of God. Aiming at the highest.
It is no accident that the cross hangs, high, above the altar inviting us to ‘look up’… to aim high. ‘Look up’ at the fulfilment of the highest possible aim, behold the lamb of God, crucified, in an act of sacrificial love, inviting you and me to do the same – to die and to rise from the dead.
At this time of the year it is easy to for our aim to be off ….and thus to look down – it takes great courage and fortitude to live to the highest aim, to take on the responsibility of your life and live to your highest calling. And we fail but we come each week to urge each other to ‘look’ up again, to check our aim. You might say, that we don’t do it very well and that may be true but what happens doesn’t depend on you and me alone – you are, we are, the one on whom the Holy Spirit descends, nudging us upwards. The Cross hangs there, a challenge, right in front of us. Beckoning.