Come and See
John 1:29-42
January 19, 2014
The gospel of
John begins, famously, with the wordy, philosophical, decidedly Greek prologue:
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was
God.” But before you can even begin to digest what this reference to the divine
logos might possibly mean, John jumps straight into the story of the Baptist
and his voice crying out in the wilderness, “prepare the way!”
No sooner does
John cry out, than he starts pointing out: “look, there! It’s Jesus, the lamb
of God.”
And that’s
apparently all it took, the only testimony necessary, for immediately two
disciples start to follow Jesus, even though it’s readily apparent from their
questions that they don’t know where Jesus is heading.
All he says is:
“come and see.”
Those words, and
this passage, have a deep resonance for me, and a special place in my own
story. This text from John was preached the morning, about 20 years ago, when
Cheryl and I decided to attend a “perspective new members” gathering at a
Presbyterian church in Lexington, Ky.
I grew up in the
Presbyterian church – an oddity among Presbyterian clergy my age or younger.
And I ran hard from it as a young adult – a very common path among young adults
raised in Mainline Protestant denominations during the past 50 years. Despite
the fact that beginning when I was in high school I felt drawn to ministry, and
despite the fact that before I was 25 I had a masters degree from the
University of Chicago Divinity School, by the time I was 25 I had “come and
seen” and “turned and fled.”
Yet there we
were, a decade later, sitting in the pews, listening to this strange little
story: “come and see, come and see.”
You see, there’s
something about Jesus and his call that is just hard to ignore, and that
changes the script you imagine for your life.
You know the
script. We all know it. We are, all of us, socialized into it from the moment
of our birth. Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls the social script
of our society “technological, therapeutic, consumer militarism.”[1]
Marcus Borg names the fundamental values – he calls them idols – of this
script: achievement, appearance and affluence.[2] Walter
Wink speaks of the powers that be within what he calls a system of domination.[3]
Other theologians offer other, but fundamentally similar, descriptions of
contemporary social norms and expectations, and the power of their allure – or,
perhaps, the allure of their power.
I lived out the
script working in the state government arena, with a modicum of achievement and
a modicum of affluence, and, well, I looked good doing it! But something was
missing – something of wholeness, mutual well-being, authentic community,
something of communion.
Brueggemann, in
describing the dominate script of our culture, argues that the script fails in
its fundamental promises because it ultimately does not deliver either security
or happiness. I tend to agree in terms of security – the vast majority of us
live paycheck to paycheck often one serious illness or job loss from
bankruptcy, and all of us live in a society so filled with guns that going to
the movies or to a burger joint might turn out to be a fatal decision.
The one piece of
Brueggemann's description that I would question is his notion that "we may
be the unhappiest society in the world." By most measures of well being
(including self-reported "life satisfaction" questions) North
Americans are not particularly "unhappy." It’s not that we’re
unhappy, but rather that we’re blissful – and blissfully unaware of how much
the material sources of our happiness rest upon massive injustice, inequality,
and violence.
In other words,
if I want folks to question the dominant script, saying "you're not
happy" is a nonstarter because most folks who walk through our doors (and
most of the ones who don't walk through our doors, but walk in and out of the
shops and businesses nearby) may feel stressed and stretched and often hungry
for deeper meaning, but we don't usually describe ourselves as
"unhappy."
The dominant
script does "work" for some of us, but it does so on the backs of
many more. Almost all of us Mainline Protestants in North America are part,
globally speaking, of the one percent. We wrote the script. We benefit from it.
It makes many of us happy. And it is massively unjust and unsustainable because
it depends upon environmental destruction, abusive labor conditions, child
labor, and a huge and growing gap between rich and poor. It depends,
ultimately, on dividing the world into “us” and “them,” and building
militarized walls to sustain the division.
When Jesus says,
“come and see,” he is inviting the disciples into a community that insists upon
the recognition of a fundamental relationship: we are all children of the same
God; we are all the beloved; there is no “us” and “them.”
The cultural
script in Jesus’ time insisted upon the primacy of tribe, of kinship ties, of
blood relationship. When Jesus poured the cup and said, “this cup is the new
covenant in my blood,” he inaugurated an entirely new script: you are not bound
by the blood of kinship but by the love that courses through my veins for
everyone.
Jesus invites us
into a story marked by particular blessings: not mere happiness, but rather
blessedness; not the kingdom of wealth but, instead, the commonwealth of the
beloved; not the false security of weapons of war, but, in their place, the
invitation to be called the children of God.
In The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich
Bonhoeffer’s monumental reflection on the Sermon on the Mount, he observes that
“we could understand and interpret the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand
different ways. Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and
obedience, not interpreting it or applying it, but doing and obeying it. … But
again he does not mean that it is to be discussed as an ideal, he really means
us to get on with it.”[4]
·
Be
salt and light for the world.
·
Let
your “yes” be “yes” and your “no” be “no.”
·
Love
your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
·
Serve
God rather than wealth because you cannot serve both.
Interpreting all
that, and so much more, is so much easier than living it. The alternative
script of the gospel is not easy, the way Jesus invites us to walk with him is
narrow.
But knock and
the door will be opened to you, seek and you shall find.
This is the
alternative story, the counter narrative, the other path of the gospel
entrusted to the church. When Jesus says, “come and see,” he is inviting us to
travel this path and to share this story with a world that needs it even more
desperately today than it did 2,000 years ago.
The alternative
story that the church offers to the world does not promise that following Jesus
will make you happier or healthier or safer or richer. Instead, in this story
we we are invited into a relationship that binds us all – all of us – to one
another. In this story we are bound together, and in that binding we find
wholeness, mutual well-being, authentic community, deep communion. In other
words, when Jesus says, “come and see,” he is inviting us to experience
salvation.
Come and see.
Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
8:46 AM
<< Home