17/01/2026
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time - January 18th
HOMILY by Richard Leonard
Some of us remember the provocative and frightening 1991 film Silence of the Lambs.
The image in the title refers to a childhood memory of CIA agent, Clarice Starling. In her interviews with the psychopath Dr Lecter, he gets her to talk about how she still wakes at night hearing the cry of the lambs as they were led to slaughter on her uncle’s farm. This is a pivotal moment in Thomas Harris’ book and the film. It is the leverage Dr Lecter needs to unsettle and unravel Clarice’s well-formed defences. Clarice is revealed as vulnerable, because of the grief she carries from the violent deaths she has seen.
I remember empathising with Clarice’s memory of the lambs. When I was a child I saw many sheep slaughtered on my family’s properties. I can still see my uncle selecting one of them, holding it in the pen before its ex*****on and then watching him do the deed. The scene should have been enough to turn me into a vegetarian! Alas, I got over my pity for the animal and enjoyed roast lamb a few nights later.
John’s use of the metaphor of the sacrificial lamb in reference to Jesus in today’s Gospel is meant to engender a similar empathy to that of the childhood memories of Clarice Starling. While there are many jokes about the stupidity of sheep, lambs still claim a spot in the hardest heart. They are pure, white, fluffy and defenceless. They demand nurture. And like their parents they don’t seem able to smell danger very easily. They follow where they’re led, even to ex*****on.
For the agrarian Jews of Jesus’ time the sacrifice of a lamb demonstrated how serious they were about atoning for their sins. Jewish law dictated that a lamb had to be killed at least once a year, at Passover. Such a sacrifice cost the shepherd big time. Lambs were currency. This was tithing writ large.
Saying Jesus is the Lamb of God is a shorthand way of telling us two things. The first is that Jesus is God’s most precious gift; God’s own self, given to the world that we might know how serious God is about us. God can give us nothing more than Jesus. As a result of Jesus’ innocent suffering and death there is no need for any lambs to be religiously slaughtered ever again. We need to keep hearing this message because some Christians get caught into glorifying Jesus’ suffering so much they get trapped in their own world of pain and go looking for more. Jesus never sought out suffering. He bore what came his way. And the same must be true for us. Christians are not meant to be smiling masochists. Most of us don’t need to look for more suffering in our lives because we share in the Lamb of God’s sacrifice in the ordinary downs of our lives.
Secondly, John would have known that ‘talya’, the Aramaic word for sheep, is the same word used for servant. The first hearers of this Gospel would have known it too. Jesus, then, is the servant who brings us the truth we need for life, who answers our deepest desires to know that our existence has meaning and purpose and he opens up for us the life beyond this one, where there will be no more weeping or sadness.
Jesus shows us that when we are baptised into his death and enter his service we also share in his resurrection and glory because he bears, and bears away, the sins of the world.
© Richard Leonard SJ
Richard Leonard SJ is the Director of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting, is a member of the Australian Catholic Media Council and a film critic for all the major Australian Catholic newspapers. He completed a PhD in cinema studies at the University of Melbourne. He lectures in cinema and theology at the Jesuit College of Spirituality and has been a visiting lecturer in Australian cinema at the University of Melbourne, a visiting scholar within the School of Theatre, Film and Television at UCLA and is visiting professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Catholic University, has lectured widely and is the author of numerous books.
