1 Samuel 3:3b-10,19 1 Corinthians 6:13c-15a, 17-20 John 1:35-42
And
“Rabbi, where are you staying?”
And
one invitation: “Come, and you will see.”
and according to St. John’s Gospel, two followers of John the Baptist,
Andrew and possibly John the Evangelist became the first disciples of Jesus.
I
Let’s look further into these
two questions and one invitation.
1. Jesus asked the two, “What are you looking for?”
John the Baptist had said, referring to Jesus, “Behold the Lamb of God.”
He was saying, “This is the one, the Savior, the Messiah.”
John the Baptist was telling
his disciples to follow along after Jesus,
and two of his disciples were following Him.
Jesus noticed them, but he didn’t ask, “Why are you following me?”
or “What are you looking at?”
He asked them, “WHAT are you
looking FOR?”
Certainly Jesus knew what
they were about,
but He wanted to
hear their answers.
What were they looking for?
I think that they were
looking for something to hold on to.
I think that they were following Jesus, because they were looking for
hope and the Messiah was their hope.
The Baptist had identified Jesus as the fulfillment of their hope.
Notice that they did not answer Jesus’
question,
maybe they were afraid to express their hope for fear of rejection.
A typical way to avoid answering a question is to reply with a question.
They asked Him,“Rabbi, where
are you staying?”
While there is a variety of ways people have interpreted that question,
I prefer to think that they just wanted to know
where they had to go in order to be with
Jesus,
to be His students, to learn whether he was really the fulfillment of their
hope.
They didn’t ask about His
teachings;
they were ready to sample whatever He taught.
There was hope that He was
the Savior, the Messiah.
They may have thought that
where Jesus stayed and His lifestyle
would indicate what it might be like to be His students.
In southwestern Louisiana,
among the Cajun people,
a person might come up to you and say, “Where ya at?”
A person unfamiliar with the
Cajun culture might think,
“Well I’m right here in front of you.”
But when the Cajun asks,
“Where ya at?,”
the local response is, “Fine, and hower you.”
“Where ya at?” is another
way of asking
“How are things going?” which is not far from
“Where are you going?” Close to “Where are you?”
When Jesus was asked where
He was staying
He did not give an answer but He gave an invitation.
“Come and you will see.” An
invitation to follow Him.
It’s not “Come and I will
show you my house.”
It was “Join me and you will
‘see’ that your hope will be fulfilled
and you will see
with the eyes of faith.”
So the original conversation
might be reinterpreted as:
Jesus asking, “Are you
searching for hope?”
The disciples respond, “Teacher, we want to know if you are the Messiah
that will
fulfill our hope and bring us faith.”
And Jesus says, “Join me in
what I do and you will have faith.”
“Follower,”not in the sense of “playing follow the
leader,”
but
here “follower” means placing your faith in Jesus,
doing as Jesus would have us do, living
like Jesus.
No true disciple of Jesus has ever found it to be
easy.
Peter is a prime example.
When he stepped out of the boat on to the water,
his faith
in Jesus was severely tested and it wavered.
When he felt threatened just prior to Jesus’
crucifixion,
he denied more than once that he even knew
Jesus.
And it was only at the end of his life, after he had brought so many to
Jesus, that he fully understood what Jesus had said:
“If you want to follow me, take up your cross.”
Peter was crucified; he really did take up his cross.
No disciple of Jesus has ever found it to be easy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor,
is a
good example of a more modern disciple.
In 1939 he was in
to his
native Germany and was there during World War II,
because he felt that his place was with his struggling fellow countrymen.
Like Peter, he felt the “cost of discipleship.”
He wrote a book with that title – “The Cost of
Discipleship.”
He was imprisoned for his anti-Hitler activities
and was hanged in 1945 at the age of 39 in a Nazi concentration camp
on
the charge of plotting to overthrow Hitler.
No disciple of Jesus has ever found it to be easy.
We have turned to Jesus like those first disciples:
“Look over there, the Lamb of God”
We have faith; we have welcomed Jesus into our lives.
We continue to come and see what it is like to be a disciple.
And why have we turned toward Jesus?
Some would answer: “Because it is what our families did for us.
“Training in the practices of the faith.”
Some turn to Jesus, because He is a protector from harm.
Some turn to Jesus, because He is the great problem solver.
Some turn to Him either having experienced a miracle
or in the process of looking for one.
The genuine disciples keep turning to Jesus
because they have been called.
It begins with a sense of something missing in life.
We feel this sense of “What am I looking for?”
We investigate by asking “Where should I be staying?”
And ultimately we respond to the invitation: “Come and you will see.”
Most of us have been raised Christian, some have converted.
We know that we can find security in Jesus.
We know that Jesus has all the answers.
But none of these explains why we are ready
to face the “Cost of discipleship” for Christ.
The real reason why disciples of Jesus believe in him,
abide in him, seek to bring others to him
AND are ready to suffer for him is that Jesus called them.
And Jesus has called each of us as a disciple,
but not directly by name like Samuel.
We were called at our Baptism.
Most of us were too young to know that,
but we have since learned it.
Certainly we got that call without deserving it.
The question is: Are we living it?
By God’s grace of Bapism, we first turned to Jesus.
That turning, that converson, is not a one-shot affair;
The call to conversion is persistent, ceaseless.
In the words from Godspell:
“Let
me know you more clearly, love you more dearly,
follow you more nearly day by day.”
It’s not that we must always be thinking of Jesus,
but that we must always be thinking like Him.
It’s not that we must be reproducing what Jesus did,
but reproducing the love which he showed for all.
It’s not that we must be crucified like Jesus with nails,
but that we must be crucified with the anguish of the crosses
that we must bear.
No true disciple of Jesus has ever found it to be easy.
Without the call to discipleship,
we would be lost; there would be no hope.
By how we answer the question, “What are you looking for?”
we should learn a good deal about ourselves.
We should get a sense of how convinced and passionate we are
about our roles as disciples.
The question, “What are you looking for?”
is in contrast to the one Jesus asked Peter
after three years of his discipleship: “Do you love me?”
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