A few weeks ago, one of our pastor’s church members gave him and his family a sheep as a gift. Pastor Moses had told us, all along, that we would slaughter the sheep on the last day and eat it as part of a feast to celebrate our month together. So, for almost three weeks, we would wake up every morning to the sound of the sheep bahh-ing, and pass by it on our way to ministry, either tethered to a tree by our house or roaming free under the watchful eye of the family’s hired shepherd.
Yesterday, though, the day finally came to slaughter the sheep. Though we had been making light of its short life throughout the month (we had even given it a nickname and started countdowns), there was something sobering about the anticipation of its death that made it difficult to joke within the final hour. For Kenyans, the slaughtering of a sheep is merely a part of life as animals are bought, sold, traded, and killed on a regular basis, but for us suburban North Americans, it was certainly shocking. Though I’m no vegan, it was a bit eerie as well.
It was 4:30 in the afternoon when a man came to kill the sheep. Though the experience certainly offered a lot for me to observe, my mind was consumed with the haunting parallels between the slaughtering of this sheep and the slaughtering of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.
Nothing and no one is created without a purpose. From the highest mind in science to the waving blade of grass on the Nebraska prairie, every created entity under the sun (as well as those beyond it), execute, in lock-step, their diverse functions as means to the same ultimate end—the display of God’s glory. I do not claim to understand the plethora of unique ways in which God has ordered his created entities to lift his name high, as his thoughts are higher than my own (Isaiah 55:8-9). No sooner will I claim that God has only one way in which he has planned to use each of his created entities—as African Acacia trees serve a twofold purpose in displaying his creative beauty and providing oxygen to those beings created in his image. But, I doknow that nothing he has made is purposeless.
Monumental to our understanding of this idea of purposefulness, however, is the idea that God’s purposes and God’s concepts were created before his creation itself. For example, God uses, through Jesus, the image of a tree and its fruit (Matthew 7) to demonstrate the complex theological concepts of sanctification and assurance of salvation. However, God knew how he was going to save and sanctify his children before the first actual tree existed. Jesus commands us to have faith like a child, but “child-like faith” (Luke 18:17)—the way God desires us to approach him—was a concept in God’s mind before the first human child ever existed.
Furthermore, to suggest that God created trees and children before he created sanctification and child-like faith would be to suggest that God, at some later point, realized what good examples trees and children—and sheep—would make of his concepts, and would also suggest that God realized something he hadn’t known all along or that he surprised himself—both of which are logical impossibilities when dealing with a self-existent, all-knowing God. The sheep-as-Christ connection is anything but far-fetched, as even Biblical writers themselves drew this connection explicitly (Hebrews 10, for example).
All of this goes to say that my likening of this sheep to Jesus Christ was not a product of my tendency to over-spiritualize, but of God’s tendency to teach. With this in mind, my internal dialogue came not in the voice of mocking doubter— “It’s only a sheep, Ben,” but rather in the voice, gentle yet firm, of a loving father, zealous for his son to appreciate the depth of his gift— “Ben, don’t you see?”
I felt sick to the stomach as the slaughterer and his assistant pinned the sheep’s tethered feet to the ground behind our house and as our team’s chatty demeanor turned silent. We avoided the same jokes and puns that were funny fifteen minutes prior as if to avoid poisoning the sanctity of the moment—and by extension, the sanctity of the animal’s life. Pastor Moses, as if discerning our unease, broke the anticipatory silence. “This animal is fulfilling its purpose. It is doing what it was born to do.”
It was only a few small translations of thought, if that, between this sheep and the Lamb of God. Thick, white, wool could have just as easily been thick, brown hair and a beard, as was the case less than 2,000 years ago. When Jesus of Nazareth approached his own slaughter, he was doing exactly what he was born to do. He lived, taught, encouraged, and healed, but he was born to die.
“And what shall I say?” Jesus said, just hours before his death, “Father, save me from this hour? But for this purpose I come to this hour.” (John 12:27-28).
The slaughterer held the sheep’s mouth firmly to its nose so that it couldn’t make a sound. Even if it could, it seemed as if the sheep knew its life was about to end. Silence and death are an awkward couple. “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. Like a lamb led to the slaughter and like a sheep silent before her shearers, He did not open his mouth.” Isaiah 53:7.
As the slaughterer gripped his shiny machete, a few of us muttered jokes under our breath. I don’t think this is necessarily because we are sick human beings, but because it was our nervous souls’ only response to the somber situation we were wholly unprepared for. Some people laugh at funerals for this same reason. When the incredibly deep truths of life itself intersect with the comparably shallow nature of our daily activities, it’s emotional fight or flight—and we usually choose flight. Such was the emotional response of the mockers who crucified Jesus. “Above His head they put up the (facetious) charge against Him in writing: This is Jesus, The King of The Jews.” (Matthew 27:37). “In the same way the chief priests, with the scribes and elders, mocked him and said ‘He saved others, but he cannot save himself!’” (Matthew 27:41).
The mockers around the cross are not impersonal examples of who we should avoid being, but rather humbling examples of who we already are. “Ashamed I hear my mocking voice, call out among the scoffers…” ring the convicting words of the timeless hymn.
They slit the sheep’s throat with only a few strokes of the blade, though the death wasn’t immediate. As the sheep’s blood ran out of its neck and quickly coagulated, it offered its final gasping pleas, with its mouth now unclenched. “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27: 46). It was unclear, to me, whether the sheep died first from the incision itself or from choking on its own blood. Hopefully, this is as disturbing for you as it was for me. To put things in perspective, however, Jesus Christ hung on the cross for considerably longer than it took this sheep to die. “He said ‘It is finished!’ Then bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.” (John 19:30).
It took an extreme effort of the will to restrain from vomiting, and by the grace of God I did not. As they skinned the sheep and removed its limbs, I don’t think there was a single one of the six of us, in that moment, that really felt like eating the sheep for dinner any longer. “You know we have to eat this now,” Taryn said, after five minutes of silence, “They had it slaughtered for us.” And she was so right. The sheep’s body and its flesh were provided for our life and for our joy that night. There would be no greater way to disgrace its very existence than to throw it away and leave it unused.
The sheep was given as a gift. In Africa, we were told, it was an incredibly high honor to receive a sheep as a gift. Chickens and produce were commonplace, but sheep were something special. It was an even greater honor to us that our pastor counted the six of us worthy of slaughtering a sheep for—just ten days before Christmas, mind you— a holiday which, in Kenya, is set aside as the one time in a year when families eat unseasonably well.
We feasted and laughed yesterday evening until the late hours of the night. The sheep fulfilled its purpose in full—namely, our enjoyment of it and praise of the one who donated it. We lifted high the name of the Father as we celebrated life and life abundant. Had we thrown the sheep away, or left it’s meat—its free meet—to rot on the serving plate, we would have been spitting on the testimony of its short life.
As much as I would enjoy drawing the connections to Christ, I assume the Holy Spirit will do that for you. Let us not spit in the face of the gift God has given us in Christ crucified. Christ died, like the sheep, so that we could enjoy him and make much of him. Let us not turn our backs on the Lamb of God, and let us feast on the one who came to die for us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that all who believe in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16).”
