Currently, we have four lambs running about here. Two of the ewes dropped sets of twins in the last couple of days, and there are two ewes to go. Carey and I took advantage of a sunny patch this afternoon to take a look at them. One of those ewes doesn’t look like she’s pregnant, but it would be her first. Maybe she’s psyching us out. The lambs are, of course, adorable, and their mothers aren’t too bad, either.
The current set sure is more friendly than the set we had at first. Jemima, Goldie, and Cider were old Shropshire ewes used to living pretty much on their own out in the field. They didn’t much like having people around, and they especially didn’t like being handled. Working with them… well, it was certainly made for several memorable experiences, shall we say? It made me much better able to understand that “all we like sheep have gone astray.” I don’t do much with the current set, who would be Lily, Cutie Pie, She-Hulk, and Tiger Lily, but I don’t have to see that they are much more friendly. They don’t back off, stamp a foot, snort, roll their eyes, and defiantly pee when people approach. Instead, I heard much excitement in the baas greeting me. The pigs… er, sheep were hoping for grain. The really hilarious thing is I discovered that Cutie Pie had her own supply in her pen, but she didn’t want it. She expected me to stand there and feed her by hand. I came back with sheep slobber all over one hand.
As I said, the lambs are adorable. They always are. Lambs as a type are my favorite baby. I do apologize to my friends who have had babies – your babies as individuals are all adorable, too. It’s just that lambs in a group are my favorite. They’re long legged, tail waggers full of curiosity and very little fear who play and play and play and eat and sleep and play. They bounce. They spring. They bound. They seem to defy the laws of physics in their action sometimes. They slip through the cracks of the fence to merrily run amok in the yard while their mothers stand anxiously at the fence calling for their wayward offspring. They’re full of (mostly harmless) mischief. They parade about pretending to be big, fierce sheep (mostly an oxymoron) and then freak over a leaf skittering through the middle of their small flock. They make me laugh. I can watch the silly hooligans for hours.
More than one time this afternoon, I smiled thinking about the antics this crop of lambs will probably pull in the next couple of months as they explore. Lambs are great.
And then I got to thinking that Christ is the Lamb of God. He is identified as the Lamb of God by John the Baptist in John 1:29. The book of Revelations also favors that name. Jesus is the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.” When I’ve thought of Jesus as the Lamb of God, I realized today, it’s always been tinged with the color of sacrifice. It’s been white bleeding red running black. Lambs, perfect ones, in the Old Testament were used as sacrifices. They had to be without blemish, without defect, and their deaths were an important part of many of the Temple feasts and ceremonies. I’m sure there is a load of symbolism in it that I don’t fully understand, and I’m not going to try to this day. What I do understand is that we all fall short of the glory of God, and that Christ’s sacrifice somehow took away the sins of the world and made relationship with God possible. That’s a sobering, disarming, heavy with holiness, weeping with joy kind of understanding. I am saved. I’m so grateful for my salvation.
But I wonder. I wonder. Don’t you? Is it only in the sacrifice – in death, in life offered for others – in which Christ is identified with lambs, or does the infectious joy and the delight with which I smile to see lambs living also mark Christ’s living?