The Lamb Slain From the Foundation of the World: The Crucifixion as Revelation of the Kenotic Core of Reality

The NT writers named Jesus "the lamb slain from the foundation of the world." What does it mean that Jesus is a lamb? What does it mean that Jesus is slain at the beginning of time? Was this not an event that simply occured 2,000 years ago at Golgotha?

The icon of a slain lamb is pulled from the Paschal motif of the Exodus event that inaugurates Israel's narrative of liberation. The Paschal lamb is an icon of redemptive suffering: a creature who suffers and dies to protect a family from the messenger of death. The family is then able to flee an oppressive nation that is paralyzed by fear by crossing a parted sea by the hand of YHWH. The lamb here is a like a martyr, absorbing the force of death that passes over. Jesus as a lamb absorbs the death that threatens humanity, and his blood is smeared over the doorposts of the universe as a sign against the evil that always hangs over us as we exit the houses of our temporal existence to find immortality and resurrection. But what does this all mean? And how does this happen at the beginning of time?

I believe that the crucifixion here is a fundamental symbol of the God-world relation. That is, at the beginning of time God limited Godself in order to create a world of free agency and process--in order to allow the process of evolution to begin within set parameters toward an open-ended future. Thus God committed an act of kenosis or self-empyting in which God emptied Godself out into the freedom of open-ended creativity and process. Symbolized by crucifixion and resurrection, there is a recurring event of death and rebirth in the evolutionary process by which God suffers in, under, and with the creation. In this paradigm death is not the enemy of life but the very mode by which life renews itself and evolves. Thus the angel of death and the slain lamb are one. The lamb, in giving itself over to the angel of death, ensures the birth of new life (exodus). According to the writer of Hebrews, the life of the creature is in the blood. So when the lamb's blood is smeared over the door (gateway) to the house of temporal life, it's continuity is present in the transition from mortality to immortality. The lamb's body was consumed by the family, carried into a transformed existence as they crossed the sea. So as we leave the house of mortality and cross the chaotic sea of death, our existence is transformed into a different mode of being.

In this paradigm, the God-world relation is predicated on God's self-limitation as a work of love--a creative work that enables the alterity (or "otherness") that constitutes the intersubjective relation of love--in order that creatures may act freely and yet experience absolute dependency in the evolutionary process as they accept their death as necessary and unavoidable. The cross then is a victory over death because it is the acceptance of death as a doorway into a new kind of existence.

Similarly, the death of God at the beginning of creation is the entrance of God into a new kind of existence which enables others to exist freely. Even so death is for us a transition into a new kind of existence for the sake of an Other's freedom. When an animal dies, a tree is born. When a tree dies, an animal is born. The cycle of life requires the transition of death. Thus death is the enabler of new life, the source of resurrection. Our death is a resurrection. The event of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection is a historical affirmation of this primordial and timeless reality, inaugurated in the primeval kenosis of God at the creation of the world. In this way we can affirm with the author of Hebrews that in the cross, Christ has conquered humanity's fear of death. This author also writes that the cross occurs at "the culmination of the ages." In other words, the telos of creation's natural processes manifests itself most definitively and concretely in the symbol of Christ's historical crucifixion and resurrection, so that in this visible sacrament of crucifixion-resurrection we can catch a glimpse of the teleological pattern in creation's evolutionary fabric through which death and life become two sides of one event.