It seemed like such an innocent question. “So where are you staying Jesus?” Andrew and I had been with John’s group for several months. I had gotten used to tramping around with him in the wilderness. It was an amazing thing to watch. People would come from everywhere out into the middle of nowhere, just to hear John.

  I don’t know what attracted them, or us, to the message. It was nothing like Jesus. John was all hellfire and brimstone, and Jesus had a much gentler side to him. But we came out there to see John by the thousands and some of us just couldn’t go back.

  I don’t know how many people I helped climb down into the river, but it was more than I could probably count, anyway. John said Jesus even came one day. I wasn’t there. John had sent me into some village to get some food. But John never stopped talking about it. He said as soon as Jesus came up out of the water God’s Spirit came to Jesus and stayed with him.

  But it wasn’t until later that I finally saw Jesus for myself. We were just standing there with John one day and all the sudden he starts shouting, “There he is. The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And the next day, he passed along the road and John started it all up again.

  I’ve got to be truthful. When I first started going out into the wilderness to hear John I thought he might be the one, the one all of Israel was waiting for. But he kept saying no, it was someone else, and he was just getting things ready for him. He said he had no idea who it was, until Jesus came out to be baptized. ‘He’s The One, I know it,’ he kept saying.

  So when Jesus walked by that day, Andrew and I were standing there and suddenly Andrew said, ‘Let’s go check him out and see if the Baptizer could be right.’ I thought it was a crazy idea then, but that was nothing compared to how crazy it was going to get.

  I can’t say that I really meant to go with Andrew but suddenly there we were trying to catch up with Jesus when he stopped, looked back over his shoulder, and said “What are you after?”

  I didn’t know what to say, but Andrew just said, ‘Where are you staying.’ ‘Come along and see for yourself,’ he said.  And we have been seeing for ourselves ever since.

  I don’t know sometimes if I want to curse Andrew or bless him. Sometimes I think he was too curious for our own good. But we ended us staying at Jesus’s place for a day and then Andrew went and got his brother Simon Peter. Jesus called him Rock.

  By then we were in too deep. I mean I had always meant to stay with the Baptizer, but now I was with Andrew and Rock and the others with Jesus. And it seemed it was what John wanted. But I still felt guilty at first. I couldn’t stop talking about the Baptizer. I guess I wanted to make sure Jesus knew that I wouldn’t have gone to where he was staying, and stayed with him, if it hadn’t been for John.

   I thought I understood at first what the Baptizer meant when he saw Jesus coming down the road and said, ‘There he is, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ I’m no worse a Jew than any other of the lot, so I knew about all the sacrifices that took place in the temple. I knew the stories from the scriptures about the scapegoats that were sent out into the wilderness to carry away the sins of the people.

  So when the religious rulers turned Jesus in to the Romans, and those most civilized of barbarians stripped him naked and hung him up on one of their crosses, I though there he is, ‘The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’ As time went on and we talked all this stuff through some of us thought that it was necessary that Jesus become a sacrificial offering. God offered him as a sacrifice, putting our sin on his back, so we could be forgiven. It’s like we ran up the debt and Jesus paid the bill.

  It was some of the women who first started claiming that was crazy. It wasn’t God they said who stood there in Pilate’s courtyard shouting ‘Crucify him, crucify him.’ It was human beings, people like us. It was humanity, some of them said, who was offering Jesus as a sacrifice to appease the gods of this world because we didn’t know what to do with him. His message was too radical. He turned too many things upside down and inside out. He called too much into question for us to let him live. That’s why we make our human sacrifices, anyway, they argued, to convince the gods to keep things the way they are.

  They just wouldn’t buy this sacrificial atonement business. ‘Let me get this right,’ one of them said, ‘you say God was angry at our sins and ready to punish us for them. In a strange, sort-of-gymnastic move, God became human in order to take the rap. Or that the Son took it for God, and for us.’

  And besides, they said, what about that story where Abraham thinks he is supposed to offer his son Isaac as a human sacrifice to God. God said no. And in the old stories in the scriptures human sacrifice is never seen as something acceptable to God. So why would you imagine God would want to make Jesus a human sacrifice?

  They obviously had been thinking about this a lot more than I had. It all seemed so obvious to me. So I asked them what they thought John meant when he said Jesus was the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world? It sounds pretty sacrificial to me.

  Their response was maybe the Baptizer was saying God offered Jesus to us not as a sacrificial victim but as a gift showing us a new way of living. Jesus, they said, might not be the one that sin was supposed to be piled on, but the one who showed us how to get out from under the pile of sin.

  And they reminded me that John said he took away the sin of the world, not the sins of the world. We can think, they said, about all the greed, and envy, and faithlessness, and prejudice, and immorality, and racism, and nationalism and all the other sins that haunt us and this world. We can make the cross into some kind of machine where our sins become the righteousness of Jesus without anyone, save Jesus, having to take seriously the results of sin. And people don’t seem to be sinning a whole lot less.

   But just maybe the sin of the world that Jesus took on was this whole bloody system that alienates us from one another and God, they said, and leads to cross after cross after cross. Could he be The One God sent to us to break that cycle of sin and violence by his willingness to let it all fall on him,  become our sacrificial victim, and not God’s?

  The conversation is not done. And I’m not sure what I think. This is what I do know. We went that day to see where Jesus was staying and we kept on staying. And I remember John saying how when Jesus was baptized, the Holy Spirit came and stayed with Jesus. And I have seen the Spirit at work.

  There is more than just a handful of us now. We thought it was all over that awful Friday. But then Sunday morning came, and as Rock says in one of his sermons, “We saw it, saw it all, everything he did in Israel and in Jerusalem where they killed him, hung him on a cross. But in three days God had him up and alive, and out where he could be seen. We are his witnesses.”   
 
I’ve seen so much since that day. All we wanted to know was where he was staying. And it turns out he is staying with us. All of us, just like the Spirit was staying with him.

  One of the gang, Paul, says all of us together are the body of Christ. Jesus is seen and known and alive in us, all these little churches now spread all over the place. That’s where he is staying now. Maybe they’re right. The Lamb of God has changed this world. I see sins all over the place, some a bit too close to home, as they say. And I am glad that there is such a thing as forgiveness.

  But when I’m with the brothers and sisters, I realize there is a power of death that has been broken, that we can live in a new way in this world because of Jesus. And we are living in new ways. Some of us share our income and homes. We don’t fight Caesar’s wars or pretend he is some kind of god. We try to live as if there is no difference between Jew and Gentile, master and slave, men or women, though we aren’t always good at it. It’s because of Jesus we are living in radically new ways.

  And I don’t think Jesus just wants to stay with us. He was God’s offering to the whole world.

 If we remain curious about Jesus, willing to ask questions about where he is staying, what he is doing, where he is going, why he wants to stay with us, then maybe we will keep going, staying with him as he stays with us. If we bring what we can of ourselves to the body of Christ, maybe we will figure out what John meant about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Time will tell.