What are you looking for? [Epiphany 2A - John 1:29-42]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

John 1:29-42

What are you looking for?

Something gave them away.  Perhaps it was the persistent crunch of the sand beneath their feet, the slap of their well-worn sandals, the untimely snap of a stick.  Today it would be because one of them forgot to silence their cell phone; but this story takes place in a much older world.  They stalked him like a pair of eager bounty hunters, tracking his every sanctified step, until something gave them away.  And Jesus turned and he saw them.  And they found themselves in the crosshairs of a question that turned them to stone before shattering them completely, a question that changed their lives for good: “What are you looking for?”

Following Jesus was not exactly their idea.  They pursued this mysterious stranger at the prompting of their chosen master.  It was John, John the Baptist, who piqued their curiosity – a curiosity that set them on their quest.  It was John who identified this Jesus by a most compelling designation: the Lamb of God.

Lamb of God: it is one of many titles ascribed to Jesus in this first chapter of John’s Gospel.  He is first named the Word, the Word that becomes flesh and dwells among us.  That is how John’s Gospel begins.  But he is not just Word.  He is also Life.  And Light.  And Lord.  He is Son of God, Rabbi (which means Teacher), Messiah (which means Anointed), King of Israel, Son of Man.  And, of course, Lamb of God.  Jesus is known by all of these names – each a unique glimpse into his infinite identity – all in just one chapter of one Gospel. 

It is just one of these titles, Lamb of God, that first intrigues these two spiritual seekers.  For us, Lamb of God is the song we sing as we approach the altar; for these young Jewish men, this title would harken back to the Exodus story – a story in which God heard the desperate cry of desperate souls and responded with salvation.  It was, of course, an old story – even two-thousand years ago.  But also it was a story these two Jewish men rehearsed and relived.  It was an old story but also it was their story.  Andrew and his unnamed friend were desperately looking for something, some kind of salvation.  And on this day, standing by the Jordan, the watched as the Lamb of God walked right by them.

You see, you don’t end up the disciple of a locust-eating wilderness prophet, without a little desperation to fuel you.  Andrew and his friend, they were looking for something – even if they weren’t sure exactly what that something was.  And so when they found John, and his fiery message and his watery work, they became his disciples.  They were driven by a spiritual longing as old as the breath of God.  It was two-thousand years ago that these two young men searched the Galilean hills hoping to find something or someone who would help them quench their parched souls.  They settled in with John because they hoped that he might point them in the right direction.

And he did.  They followed the Baptist until he pointed them in the direction of something greater, of Jesus.  They followed Jesus because someone they trusted recommended him.  John was like their Yelp!  But a recommendation is not the same as an experience.  They needed to see for themselves.

And so, they left John to follow John’s Lamb.  But to them, to Andrew and his traveling companion, Jesus was something else.  They didn’t call him Lamb.  That was how John talked about Jesus.  But when they looked at Jesus they saw something else.  They called him Messiah, the Christ, the one anointed by God to deliver them.  Maybe that’s what they saw because maybe that was what they were looking for: a Messiah.     

These disciples never answered Jesus’ question – at least not directly.  Perhaps that is because we cannot really know what exactly we will find until we encounter Jesus for ourselves.  John sent them after the Lamb.  They found the Christ.  In the next story of John’s Gospel, these disciples inform their friend Nathanael that they have found the Christ.  Nathanael sees Jesus and calls him the Son of God.  All are true.  But perhaps we find in Jesus what we are looking for, what we need to see.

It is never enough to hear about Jesus from someone else, never enough to simply read about him in a book.  In this Epiphany season, we are reminded by John the Baptist that we come to know Jesus in the encounter.  The revelation for which our souls long can never come through second-hand testimony; it comes through a personal experience of the living Christ.  Twice John says, in today’s Gospel, referring to the days before he encountered Jesus, “I myself did not know him.”  He heard the rumors.  He stood in the River waiting to meet Jesus, to meet someone he did not even know.  He had heard things about Jesus.  But it was only when John met Jesus in the water that he was finally able to say, “I myself have seen him and now I know.”

The late Marcus Borg captures this beautifully when he writes, “For those of us who grew up in the church, believing in Jesus was important. For me, what that phrase used to mean, in my childhood and into my early adulthood, was ‘believing things about Jesus.’ To believe in Jesus meant to believe what the gospels said about Jesus. That was easy when I was a child, and became more and more difficult as I grew older.

But I now see that believing in Jesus can (and does) mean something very
different from that. The change is pointed to by the root meaning of the word
believe. Believe did not originally mean believing a set of doctrines or teachings; in both Greek and Latin its roots mean ‘to give one’s heart to.’ The ‘heart’ is the self at its deepest level. Believing, therefore, does not consist of giving one’s mental assent to something, but involves a much deeper level of one’s self.

Believing in Jesus does not mean believing doctrines about him. Rather, it means to give one’s heart, one’s self at its deepest level, to the post-Easter Jesus who is the living Lord, the side of God turned toward us, the face of God….

Believing in Jesus in the sense of giving one’s heart to Jesus is the movement from second-hand religion to first-hand religion, from having heard about Jesus with the hearing of the ear to being in relationship with the Spirit of Christ. For ultimately Jesus is not simply a figure of the past, but a figure of the present.”[1]

And it is this living Christ who wants your heart, who wants your soul, who wants you.  He wants you to give yourself away, to stand as still as a stone before the fire of his gaze, to allow him to break through your defenses and get into your heart, to allow him to turn and see you.  It is not enough to follow Jesus at a distance.  He wants more than that.  Jesus longs to invite you into his life.  So that you can get to truly know him.  So that you will finally find what your soul is looking for.

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[1] Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, p.136-7.