The Lion and the Lamb
“Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat;
The calf and the young lion shall browse together,
with a little child to guide them.”
The Lion of Judah.
The Lamb of God.
Christ has many titles, and these two are particularly tied together for me. Reading and watching The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe as a kid growing up solidified this imagery of Jesus as a roaring lion who gives himself for others. After seeing Aslan’s heroic sacrifice and feeling his aura of mystery over and over in C.S. Lewis’ masterful authorship, the characteristics we typically apply to lions seem to necessarily carry over to the person of Jesus: loyal, just, dignified, strong.
And yet at the same time, we sing the Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, at every Mass. The Lamb, a humble, meek, innocent, small creature, who is offered up as a pure sacrifice for the sins of others.
I aimed to capture the duality of these two titles here in this paper-pieced mini quilt. Christ is neither just the lion nor just the lamb—both reveal crucial pieces of Jesus’ personhood. Christ’s love for us is both overwhelmingly fierce as of a lion while also being deeply humble to the point of death as of an innocent lamb’s.
In working on this piece, I reflected on this article written by Rozann Lee and published through Word on Fire. It is an elegant piece about Konstantin Korobov’s Agnus painting that depicts a lamb about to be torn a part by ravenous wolves. A 5-minute read well worth the time!
