John
1:29-42
Ordinary
2
January
19, 2020
William G. Carter
The next day (John) saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here
is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of
whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before
me.” I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this
reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ And John testified,
‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I
myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to
me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes
with the Holy Spirit.” And I myself have seen and have testified that this
is the Son of God.’
The next day John again was standing with two of his
disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here
is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they
followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them,
‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means
Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They
came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was
about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak
and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his
brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated
Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said,
‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated
Peter).
The
cartoon has made the rounds on the internet. A lady opens the door to see two
earnest visitors in white shirts and neckties. One of them asks earnestly, “Have
you found Jesus?” She doesn’t answer, but behind her, hiding behind a living
room curtain, we see a figure with long hair and a white robe, sandals sticking
out beneath the curtain.
Have you found Jesus? It’s a good giggle, a bit of good
hearted fun at the expense of door-knockers who come to introduce us to their
Lord and ours.
Some years ago, when the local Baptist university was larger,
it was easy to tell when they were running a class on evangelism. A couple of
freshmen might knock on the door and try to initiate a conversation about
Jesus. To the consternation of those in my house, I always invited them in.
If they were Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, I’d offer them a
Coke or a cup of coffee, which often sent them scampering for the door. If they
represented another brand of Christianity, they might agree to the Coke or the
coffee, but pretty soon, they would want to get on to the sales pitch.
One of them might say, “If you were to die tonight, are you
confident that you would wake up with God?” Well, of course I would. Where else
would I wake up?
He would lean forward, press, and say, “Are you sure?” Sure, I’m sure.
“But are you absolutely, positively sure?” he’d say. And I
would look him in the eye, smile, and say, “Is that the only thing you’re concerned
about? You don’t even know my name.” With this, the freshman might look over at
his teammate for some support. The teammate would say, “Well, we’d like you to invite
Jesus into your heart,” to which I’d reply, “That’s not going to work.”
They would look at one another. What’s this? And then I
continued the thought, “Jesus is never going to fit into my heart. He’s too
big. He’s the Savior of the Universe.”
With that, they looked at one another with a bit of terror.
They hadn’t covered responses like this in class. And so, I kept going: “Listen,
kids, we are on the same team. You didn’t know that because you don’t know my
name, and you don’t know my story, so you certainly don’t know that I’m a
Presbyterian minister. If I could ever reduce Jesus somehow and put him into my
heart, I’m certain he would pop right back out again, because that has happened
a thousand times.”
Now, I just made up that last paragraph, because the visitors
would never have stayed long enough to go that far. But just because I made it
up doesn’t mean it’s not true, because it is. Jesus Christ is the Savior of the
Universe. His power and presence are enormous. And a lot of times, it seems
like he is hiding behind the curtains.
Have you ever felt that way?
The Gospel of John says the fundamental human hunger is to
know God. No one has ever seen God, but we are hungry for that. We hear about
God, we talk about God, we even tell jokes about God; but when there is a pause
in all that chatter, there seems to be an absence of the very thing we’re
talking about.
A lot of Christian writers have tried to to say this in a way
others can hear it. I like Flannery O’Connor. She wrote stories about the
people she knew in Georgia, about how they would be so self-assured in matters
of faith, until something would happen to expose how shallow they are. All
their talk about God is aimed at propping up their own faith. In a moment of
crisis, it falls like a house of cards.
In one of her essays, she said, “I think it is safe to say
that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.
The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have
been formed in the image and likeness of God.”[1]
As she says about a character in one of novels, what if Jesus is hiding, not
behind a curtain, but behind every tree, “a wild ragged figure motioning him to
turn around and come off into the dark…” (from Wise Blood)
The point is, you think you’ve got him – and you don’t. You
profess to find him and he slips away. There are many stories like this sprinkled
throughout the New Testament, but nowhere does it become quite so sharp as the
Gospel of John.
The baptizer sees him and says, “Here is the Lamb of God.” He
says it twice, and causes some attention. And twice more he says, “I myself
didn’t know him.” Listen to the paradox of that. He sees him and he doesn’t see
him. This is John the Baptist. Luke’s Gospel says they were related somehow,
but in John’s Gospel he says, “I didn’t know him… I didn’t know him, until the
One who sent me to baptize said, ‘Watch for the Holy Spirit to come down on
Someone and linger. That’s the one.”
How remarkable is that! With all his self-assured faith,
proclaiming “the Messiah is coming,” John the Baptist had to have his eyes
opened, if only for a brief moment. “I didn’t know him,” he says, “and the Holy
Spirit showed me.”
This kind of instantaneous insight is often the way faith ignites
like a spark. It is not something we have within ourselves. It’s a revelation,
a gift from somewhere beyond. Some call it a gift of God’s Holy Spirit. The New
Testament word is “apocalupsis,” the pulling-back of a curtain. Suddenly you
see what is there all the time. And then it’s gone. That doesn’t mean it’s
completely gone, just that for now you can’t see. Then you see it, now you don’t.
Faith has always been like this. Some of the great spiritual
leaders have had their own doubts. Biblically speaking, that seems to be the
way it is. So much so, that sometimes it’s tempting to believe that all we are
going to have are doubts. I think of that line from Ecclesiastes, certainly the
crankiest book in the Bible: “God has set
eternity in our hearts, but we can’t know the beginning or ending of anything.”
(Ecclesiastes 3:11)
That’s a grim view. When he taught
Ecclesiastes, Professor Jim Crenshaw of Duke used to say it’s like an Easter
egg hunt that goes badly. In the morning everybody heads out with baskets and
enthusiasm. During the day, everybody searches frantically, grows discouraged.
Once in a while someone may yell, “I found one!” and the search is renewed. But
in the evening, most go home with empty baskets.
And yet – when you think it’s only
going to be an empty basket, you never know when it might be your turn to
shout, “I found one!” Or in the words of some of the people who populate the
Gospel of John:
- “We
have found the Messiah.”
- “We
have found the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote, and he’s from
Nazareth.”
- “Rabbi,
we know you are a teacher who comes from God, for no one could do the
signs that you do apart from the presence of God . . . but how can this
be?”
- “Come
and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He isn’t the Messiah,
is he?”
Now you see him, now you don’t. This
is a recurring theme in the scriptures of this season, now that Christmas is
over and put away. The Light has come into the darkness; did you see it? We
were given a glimpse that Jesus truly exists; was the curtain pulled back long
enough for you to see?
So we are left with one of two
things: the residue or the search. Either we have the residue of what we’ve
heard, what others have told us, what we ourselves might have said – or we
decide to keep looking for the Christ, to watch with an awakened heart, to perceive
where he is or what he might be doing. And I can tell you first-hand that the
search is a lot more interesting.
If someone knocks at my door to ask,
“If you were to die tonight,” I would want to know how I might live today. How
can I live so completely in the presence of God that I have no need of someone
trying to frighten me into heaven?
If they were to ask, “Have you found
Jesus,” I would rather be prepared to report on the times when he has found me,
and what a difference that has made in how I live and whom I love.
If someone were to press me for
certainty, for absolute certainty, and say “Are you sure,” I would be ready to
say there is something far better than certainty, something not as presumptuous
as certainty, and it’s called “faith.”
And if someone were to dictate where
exactly Jesus should be, and where he should go, I would have to shake my head
and say, “You don’t know him.” Perhaps he does dart behind the trees, on his
way to spend time with the broken-down and the broken-hearted, the disconsolate
and the disconcerted, the overlooked and those otherwise deemed godforsaken. He goes to them. This is where God sends him.
Have you found Jesus? He’s coaching the
kid who stutters. He’s talking to the teenager who is not welcome at his own home.
He’s pulling some blankets over the lady who slept under the bridge last night.
He sits beside the man in the hospice unit who hasn’t had any other visitors. He’s
ladling out baked beans in a church basement.
Want to find him? Look for him
there. Maybe you won’t find him right away. But he will find you. And isn’t
that what we want most of all? Not merely to find, but to be found.
(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.
[1] Flannery O’Connor, “The Grotesque
in Southern Fiction, in Mystery and Manners (New York: Farrar Straus
& Giroux, 1969) p. 44.
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