This morning during Mass, as news of the escalating violence in the Middle East continues to fill our screens, a thought struck me like a flash of light.
It came at that quiet moment in the liturgy when we pray:
“Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world… grant us peace.”
I wondered: Could this be the age-old formula for peace that humanity keeps forgetting?
Just before that prayer, the priest lifts what we believe to be the Body and Blood of the crucified one—in the bread broken, wine poured out. A life offered, like a lamb.
Not a lamb that destroys its enemies but a lamb that allows itself to be broken for broken people like you and me.
Christ does not redeem the world by crushing sinners but by offering himself for them. The Lamb of God takes away the sin that breeds hatred, vengeance, domination, and war.
And yet the world continues to believe in another formula for peace: preemptive strikes, “neutralizing” the enemy, calculated retaliation, proportional destruction—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
History keeps proving that this formula only multiplies graves. The Gospel proposes another path: not the destruction of the enemy, but the conversion of the human heart.
At our baptism we were taught whom to renounce—not other human beings, but Satan, and all his works, and all his empty promises. The real enemy is the evil that takes hold of the human heart.
In the Gospel we learn to distinguish between sin and sinner, between the evil act and the human person. The Lamb of God does not come to condemn the sinner but to take away the sin that turns us against one another.
And so in every Mass we beg for mercy from the Lamb who does not demand blood for our sins, but offers his own blood for the redemption of sinners. Perhaps that is why the Church never tires of repeating the same prayer:
“Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on u, …. have mercy on us…grant us peace.”
For peace will never be secured by shedding the blood of the other, but only by receiving the mercy of the Lamb who shed his blood for us all.
As long as humanity believes that peace can be secured by killing the other, the world will remain at war.
Only the Lamb of God can make peace.
