“The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The verb under “takes away” is αἴρω (airō), and it’s slipperier than the smooth English lets on. Airō has a basic, physical meaning: to lift, to pick up, to raise. When Jesus tells a paralyzed man to take up his mat and walk, that’s airō — lift it, hoist it onto your shoulder. When a stone is removed from the mouth of Lazarus’s tomb, that’s airō — taken away. So already you can feel the two directions the word pulls. It can mean lift up onto yourself, carry, bear — or it can mean take away, carry off, remove. John uses it a couple dozen times across his Gospel in both senses.

In John 1:29, both senses are live, and they point toward two different pictures of what the Lamb does.

If airō here means remove, carry off, take away, then the picture is of sin being lifted off the world and carried away from it, gone, the way you’d haul off something filthy and be rid of it. There’s an old image standing behind that one: the scapegoat of the Day of Atonement in Leviticus 16, the goat that had the people’s sins laid on its head and was then driven out into the wilderness, carrying off the sin into a place where it could never come back. Sin removed. Sin gone.

If airō here means bear, carry, take up onto oneself, then the picture is heavier. Now the Lamb doesn’t just whisk sin away; the Lamb takes it onto himself, shoulders it, carries the weight of it. And behind that one stands the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, of whom it was said, “he bore the sin of many.” The servant who carries sin, and the Lamb who bears the sin of the world — the same picture, widened from the many to the whole world.

Here’s the honest part, the part the English hides: John picked a verb that lets you hear both. He could have used a word that meant only “remove,” or only “bear.” He chose one that does double duty — the Lamb who lifts sin off the world by taking it onto himself, removing it precisely by bearing it. The two senses line up with two different readings of who the Lamb is, and the fact that the word holds both is part of why this little title has never collapsed into a single meaning.

Most English Bibles print “takes away,” and the translators had to pick one direction; the Greek didn’t make them. So if you open John 1:29 in an interlinear and click the word under “takes away,” you’ll find airō swinging between carry and remove — and you’ll have discovered, with your own eyes, that the choice between bearing and removing was made for you, quietly, by whoever put your English Bible together. One verb, two motions, and the Lamb does both at once.