The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world

In a previously unpublished 2014 homily by Papa Ratzinger, the Pope Emeritus writes about the importance of the lamb in Scripture: “We find a first hint, a first prediction, in the story of Abraham: the sacrifice of Isaac (cf. Gen 22). God had called Abraham to give his son, who was his future, the relationship between him and the promise, and was therefore his own life. In giving Isaac, he was renouncing the future, renouncing his own life, and this was the call: to give himself in his son. But at the moment he means to kill his son, moving from the fundamental act of the heart to the outward act of sacrifice, God intervenes, prevents him, and Abraham himself finds and sees, entangled in the bush, a lamb, and understands: ‘God himself provides me with the gift.’ God does not want our death, but our life, and we can only give God the gifts that he himself gives, as we say in the first Eucharistic Prayer: God himself gives me what I can give, what I give is always his gift, to God I give himself.””