Epiphany 2, Year A | John 1:29-42
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
January 15, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“Jesus…said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’” – John 1:38a[1]
We all have different ideas about Jesus—what he looked like, his overall demeanor, how he behaved, etc. We all have different expectations about the role we think he ought to play in our lives. A lot of those come from the way people have presented Bible stories to us or different artistic impressions we’ve seen of events from our Savior’s life. There’s the consistently portrayed Storybook Jesus, who we see calmly teaching or healing or carrying lambs around on his shoulders. There’s the Sorrowful Jesus, often appearing in a garden with blood running down his face or nearly naked hanging on a cross. The Resurrected or Ascended Jesus shines with the light of a thousand suns while the Baby Jesus naps under the soft glow of a star.
I’ve run into some more unusual expressions of Jesus, too. A church I visited on a vacation had a sanctuary wall with a prominently placed portrait of a blond, blue-eyed Jesus glaring into the congregation, a finger held to his lips—someone Shannon and I refer to as the Shushing Jesus. I attended another congregation where the pastor liked to preach about a hypermasculine Jesus. In contrast with the “long haired hippie, Cabriolet-driving, flip-flop wearing” Jesus he projected on other churches, he combined images from the Book of Revelation and the Cleansing of the Temple to offer a tattooed, sword- and whip-wielding Savior, basically a Macho Jesus.[2]
As a church that follows the Lectionary, we get to explore a slightly different portrayal of Jesus over the course of each year in a three year cycle. We’ll be spending most of 2023 with Matthew’s Jesus, who always feels a little more uptight to me than Mark’s action-heavy Jesus or Luke’s more social justice Jesus. However, the differences are subtle, and throughout the three Synoptic Gospels you have someone consistently recognizable even if the witnesses are watching from different viewpoints.
But interspersed throughout the entire Lectionary cycle we occasionally run into John’s Jesus, who often doesn’t feel like the same guy at all. He’s more laid back than Matthew’s while being far more chatty than Mark’s. And his heavenly emphasis bears only a passing resemblance to who we see proclaiming the Kingdom among us in Luke. With his tendency to present Jesus as secret-revealer, John’s writing frequently feels like it’s drawing in flavors or aspects of other mystery religions from the First and early Second Century Rome. John gives us a much more mystical Jesus, offering rambling responses to simple questions and relying heavily on signs and symbolism to make his point.
The author includes a number of different stories from what the other Gospels record, and when the same events do come up, they don’t quite look familiar. Even his introduction of Jesus is slightly off. Each Gospel first presents the adult Jesus alongside John the Baptist. But where Matthew, Mark, and Luke have Jesus physically interacting with John, in the Book of John, Jesus is more John-the-Baptist-adjacent, where John’s John sees and points out Jesus, but Jesus doesn’t appear to acknowledge or even notice John. For all the book tells us they might have been hanging out at the mall or passing each other on a crowded street when John describes him as the Lamb of God.
The calling of the Apostles probably looks a little different from what you remember as well. We’ll hear the more traditional version with boats and nets in next Sunday’s readings, but today we simply have Andrew and an unnamed associate leaving John the Baptist to tag along behind an as-yet-unknown Jesus. And rather than a pronouncement of God’s Kingdom or a quoting of Scripture or an admonition about “fulfil[ling] all righteousness,” [3] Jesus’ first words in this Gospel are a simple question: “What are you looking for?”
The author clearly enjoys having his characters answer questions with questions of their own—you’ll find that happening throughout the book. Unfortunately, those response questions often don’t make much sense to us, and that’s certainly the case here when the apostles respond to Jesus’ “What do you want?” with “Where do you live?”
I suspect this might be one of those cases where we’ve accidentally white-washed the Bible and its people. It’s hard to remember that Jesus wasn’t steeped in modern Western culture, and I’d guess that if we look further East this part of the scene makes a little more sense. We think of disciples as students or learners—people gathering at a location to listen to a particular teacher for a certain amount of time but spending most of their lives independently outside of class. However, I’m guessing that discipleship in Jesus’ setting looked a lot more like what you might find under the great Chinese sages than an American classroom. Older stories from Far Eastern cultures frequently present us with people who don’t simply listen to a particular Teacher’s lectures and then go home; they live with and serve them. It would look more like what we think of as a traditional monastery, where the adherents spend most of their time cleaning the buildings and tending the crops and cooking the food. But instead of heading to worship services or the Daily Office between chores, they gather to hear their chosen Master answer questions or expound on different topics.
Looking at it that way, the two disciples’ response is less confusing. They aren’t so much answering a question with a question as subtly and politely asking if they might become Jesus’ apprentices. It would have been easy for Jesus to dismiss them by saying something like, “I have no home” or “my house is too small for such a crowd.” But instead he says to “come and see,” formally inviting them to practice beside and emulate him—to pattern their days and lives after his, not just by absorbing information but by becoming like him in habit and activity.
Epiphany is a time set aside to explore the revelation of the Christ, God incarnate in human existence. It’s also a good time to turn Jesus’ question to Andrew and his unnamed friend back on ourselves. What are we looking for? What is it we want or expect from Jesus? We all have different ideas about him—what he looked like, his overall demeanor, how he behaved, etc. We all have different expectations about the role he might play in our lives. But try as we might, we don’t get to pick and choose. We can’t actually trade in the Storybook Jesus for the Sorrowful Jesus or the Shushing Jesus whenever we feel like it. We don’t get to choose a Jesus who fits our own lifestyle, who’s willing to fulfill our desires and work within our expectations.
As Christians we often pride ourselves on knowing about Jesus, but it’s much harder to consider whether or not we actually want to follow Jesus. Too frequently we drag him along behind us, assured that he supports and approves of all our assumptions and biases, but that’s not the way discipleship works. Jesus doesn’t hide in our shadows, cheering us on from the obscurity we cast upon him. Will we accept the challenge to change, to adopt his habits and way of thinking? Are we willing to set aside our own passions, to modify our being to fall in line with his? Do we dare to respond to his question with our own? Do we really want to know “where [he is] staying?” If we are, we might discover that no matter the pictures we carry around of him, the real Jesus is still happy to invite us to “come and see.”
“Jesus…said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Despite that preacher’s attempt to emphasize the Macho Jesus’ deep love and loyalty to his family—us—when you think about it, both his presentation and the Shushing Jesus actually carry the same overall message, especially to those who haven’t met him: sit down and shut up.
[3] Matthew 3:15