1 Come and See: John 1:35–51
A sermon preached at Geraldton Anglican Cathedral 6th February 2022
When you’re on holidays and relaxing—when days consist of eating, sleeping, reading, and sitting out admiring the view, it is hard to think that life can be anything else but good, and that God is to be thanked for such a beautiful world. But your mind knows that there is more to it than that: there is much suffering, and if you are not experiencing it now, others are, and you will. I think the whole world will be in mourning today for the little Moroccan boy whose death we have just learned of. Also, there is the past and the future, and, if you are a Christian, you know there is a story, and you are caught up in it; we belong to a people with a history and a future. Ignore this, and you miss the meaning of life; however sophisticated your life may be, you are living the life of an animal, and will die like one.
What if you are uncertain: perhaps there is no future, maybe sucking all you can from the sauce bottle of life while you can is the sensible thing. I suggest the place to begin an enquiry is with Jesus. Is God real? Here is a man who says he came from God; check him out. If you think Islam might be the answer, by all means check out Muhammad; but Muhammad believed in Jesus, so sooner or later you will have to investigate Jesus. If you regard yourself as a Christian, ask yourself how much you know about him.
From now until Easter I propose to investigate Jesus. There are four accounts of his life, the fourth written by an eyewitness. Inevitably, since we are studying John’s account, we will be thinking also about John. I will not start with his introduction; that would take up the whole term. Rather, we will make reference to it along the way.
In his introduction John makes this statement: “To all who received him—who believed in his name—he gave authority to become children of God …” This makes our investigation urgent—urgent for all of us. To be a child of God in the way John understands it means to be part of the family which will survive into the coming new world—the kingdom of God. Jesus taught that those who believed in him would inherit the earth. But what does it mean to be given authority to become a child of God? This weekend for the first time I was asked to produce proof of vaccination – or I would not be allowed in. It took me twenty minutes to find it on my phone, but once I showed it I had authority to enter; no one could stop me. A passport, a visa, a vaccination certificate— an authority— these are things you need to get into any country. What about God’s new world? No one will not get in without Jesus’ authority! “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave authority to become the children of God.”
But believing is not so easy; you need to be convinced. Many people have heard a few stories about Jesus, and nothing else except Christmas, and it all gets mixed up with the fairy tales of their childhood. How can you believe unless as an adult you look again and become convinced by the hard evidence?
I begin with the Gospel-writer’s first encounter with Jesus. It took place when John the Baptist was preaching up a storm down at the Jordan River; I’ll call him “the Baptizer” so as not to confuse him with this other John who wrote the Gospel. At that time Jews were suffering under the boot of Rome; the Baptizer announced that God’s king was coming to sort things out. People from all over the country headed for the Jordan in their tens of thousands to check it out for themselves.
The Baptizer was impressive. People believed. He warned them to make their peace with God, because the sinners would be destroyed. People took him seriously and came forward to be baptized. Young men from all over the country gathered around him, ready to do whatever he said; in their minds the coming of Messiah meant war. Among them were the young men we meet in today’s reading.
We take up the story in John 1.35: the Baptist is standing with two of his disciples when Jesus approaches. He points to Jesus and says, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” One of the two who heard him is identified: Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. The other, is certainly our author, John, a fisherman from the Lake of Galilee, who also did the selling for his family’s business; he identifies himself later as “the disciple Jesus loved.”.
But is this for real? Here is where we need to pause for a moment and ask whether we are reading serious history or a piece of fiction. This argument has raged over the past two hundred years. The successes of modern science led in the nineteenth-century in the universities to a movement to make history a scientific discipline. At the time “the Church” was not popular, and the four Gospels came under special scrutiny. They are the foundation documents of Christianity; if they could be shown to be false, then Christianity could no longer claim to be true. John’s Gospel got hammered hardest: it was the last to be written, is different to the other three, has more interpretation, and most suspicious has Jesus claiming to be God. So, many scholars concluded it was from a century later—a theological reflection written not by one of Jesus’ helpers, but by a Greek, and has no historical value. Of course, there were many who disagreed, but this is what most scholars were saying in the universities and many of the church training colleges when I did my training: you couldn’t regard the Fourth Gospel as a credible historical record.
Then, in 1934 a fragment of John dated early in the second century was found in Egypt. This was sensational; it is the oldest piece of the New Testament ever found. If copies of John were circulating in Egypt that early, then the original writing must come from the first century, not the second.
Then in 1948 the library of an ancient Jewish community was discovered in Israel at a place called Qumran, near the Dead Sea. This community was operating at the time of Jesus. Suddenly scholars had Jewish writings a thousand years older than what they had before—scrolls from the time of Jesus and the Baptizer. Its language and symbols were soon seen to be very like John’s Gospel. There were other discoveries. John is now studied as a first-century Jewish writing with every claim to be the work of one of Jesus’ original disciples, as indeed it claims.
“Look: the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” says the Baptizer to his two disciples. How might they have heard him? Surely the Baptizer didn’t know the coming king would die as a sacrifice for sin! He was coming to judge the world. Well, there is an old Jewish legend about Moses which Andrew and John would have heard in synagogue. Pharoah has a dream: Egypt with all its wealth and power is stacked on one side of the scales; on the other is a lamb, and the lamb was heavier than Egypt. Pharoah demanded an interpretation and was told that a child had been born who would sweep away the power of Egypt. I think the Baptizer was saying that a new Moses had come, who would face the world’s power and succeed in removing all its evil. The Messiah was not coming to start a new religion, but to liberate the world from injustice and suffering. This is what the two disciples heard, and naturally they decided to check out Jesus for themselves. And so should we. They tailed Jesus. Jesus turned around and saw them following him and said, “What do you want?”
Now here is a dramatic moment; the first words we hear from Jesus in this Gospel: a question, “What do you seek?” It is the chance for these young revolutionaries to ask the burning question of the day, or the author’s opportunity to have Jesus answer the number one theological question of his day. But they fumble the question, and can think of nothing else to say than, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” How wet is that! Jesus said to them,
“Come and see?” So they went and saw where he was staying and spent the rest of the day with him—it was 10 o’clock in the morning.
Disappointing as this may seem, it is a sign of the living memory of an eyewitness; it is what actually happened. But it is more. Reading between the lines, John sees in Jesus’ simple reply a word to us today: “Come and see!” “You want to know who Jesus is, you want to know the way to God, and life? Come and see! Come and see for yourself!” It is an invitation to us to make up our own mind.
John doesn’t tell us all that went on that day, but clearly it convinced them that Jesus was the real deal. Andrew finds his brother Simon and says, “We have found the Messiah.” Then Jesus invites Philip to come with them to Galilee. Philip finds Nathaniel: “We have found the one that Moses wrote about in the Law—also the Prophets—Jesus, the Son of Joseph from Nazareth.”
Nathaniel’s knee-jerk response is to question whether the Messiah could come from Nazareth: “Can anything good come from Nazareth? This is not meant to be rude, or a put-down of Nazareth. These men think Jesus may be the promised deliverer. But Nathaniel knows his Bible, and there is nothing in it about the Saviour coming from Nazareth—Bethlehem maybe, but not Nazareth. Philip answers, “Come and see!” Once again, if I hear John right, he is inviting you and me to come and see for ourselves.
Jesus saw Nathaniel coming towards him and says, “Look, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Nathaniel is taken aback. If he was a Bible student, as many think, he would have known at once that Jesus was comparing him with the original Israelite, Jacob, the deceitful one (that was the meaning of his name), who was so eager for the promise God had made to his grandfather that he twice cheated his brother Esau to get it for himself. In the end he got the promise, and God changed his name to Israel, “the one who wrestles with God and wins.” These young revolutionary “wrestlers” are eager for that same promise. Nathaniel is identified as a true Israelite, without the guile that dogged to life of his forebear.
Jesus’ words obviously rang bells for Nathaniel. “How do you know me?” he says. Jesus replied, “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree I saw you.” Jesus knows more about Nathaniel than he should. If you go any way with him—with Jesus, that is—you will discover he knows about you too—more than you know yourself. It was enough to convince Nathaniel: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the king of Israel!”
Do you see what John is doing here? He is telling us who Jesus is. He is the lamb of God—the new Moses—the one who will sweep all evil from the world. He is the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed One. He is the one promised in the Scriptures by Moses and the prophets. And now he is the Son of God and the King of Israel. Later he will add that he is “the Son of Man.”
We should pause and reflect that if Jesus really is all these things, he must be alive today, controlling all the events of history—even the Covid plague, the massed army on the border of Ukraine, the escalation of tension between the USA and China, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, the military crackdown in Burma—all this and more—driving the world forward to a conclusion where there will be no more evil, no more suffering, and where he will head up God’s government on earth and rule forever. This is a big ask to believe. The second thing John is saying is what Jesus said to him and Andrew at that first meeting, and what Philip said to Nathaniel: “Come and see!”
Jesus answered Nathaniel, “You believe all this just because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these. Yes, indeed, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
Jesus is continuing to weave this link with Jacob. Jacob fled from the brother he has just cheated (Genesis 28). He comes to Luz and sleeps in the open. In a dream he sees angels going up and down a ladder linking earth with heaven. God is showing him that the place where heaven and earth are to meet is the land he promised Abraham and his descendants—the land Jacob is about to leave, and to which he will one day return. Jacob names the place Bethel, the House of God, and ever since people have been building temples, churches, cathedrals, shrines, hoping that there they will be able to meet with God. But Jesus is saying the place where heaven will meet is not in any human sanctuary, but in him; he is the one and only mediator between God and humans, the God-man, the Messiah, the Promised One, the Son of God, the Son of Man, the King of Israel. He is the one who if you come to him and believe will give you the authority to become a child of God, and open to you the gate to everlasting life.
I don’t know what was going on with Nathaniel that all this resonated with him so powerfully. John doesn’t tell us. What he wants us to hear is the invitation to come and see for ourselves, and know that we will see wonderful things. Whatever may be your own experience of Jesus to this point of time—whatever understanding you may have, whatever doubts may still trouble you—come and see! Travel with John for a while and see Jesus through his eyes. He will go on to show us many things: in the end angels, and an empty tomb, and a resurrection from the dead. But even more: I promise you that, whether you believe or not, one day you will see Jesus return to this world in glory with all the angels of heaven attending on him.