Wednesday 28 March 2018

The Lamb and Flag


I've noted before the Lamb and Flag as a badge of Jesus' death and resurrection, one of a number of religious symbols which came to badge medieval hostelries and thus become a pub sign of today.  This example is at the top of the Jonah window in St James', Cross Roads.  There is another at the very top of the East Window in St Michael's, Haworth which I've failed to capture. 

'Christ our passover lamb has been sacrificed for us' (1 Corinthians 5.7) we shall sing on Easter Day, but Matins this morning brought us to Jeremiah's non-passover awareness that he himself 'was like a gentle lamb led to the slaughter not knowing it was against me they devised schemes' (Jeremiah 11.19) which pre-echoes our Good Friday service's 'like a lamb led to the slaughter, and like a sheep before its shearers, is silent, so he did not open his mouth' (Isaiah 53.7).

I think I'd negligently always thought the 'servant songs' of this part of Isaiah were a unique development, so I'm weighing up what I should never have missed which is that this similar concept is in his contemporary Jeremiah.  Jeremiah's human predicament is universalised by Isaiah before it feeds Jesus' self-identity (Maundy Thursday is in the mix now) and is taken by the first Christians to reveal things to us about Christ?

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