Look and See
a sermon by Rev. Rebecca Segers
Isaiah 49:1-7
John 1:35-42
This is such an interesting Scripture passage. When I first read it, I kept thinking, “This is all about vision – about looking and needing to look, seeing and understanding what you see.” These seven short verses use seven words for sight – watched, look, saw, looking, see, saw and looked. Now if I wrote an article for the Bell Ringer that was ten sentences long and used variations of the word “look” three times and of the word “see” three times and threw in a “watched” for good measure, people would accuse me of redundancy at best and bad writing at worst. So if John is not simply a bad writer, what is he trying to tell us? Let’s look a little closer…
We open with John the Baptist watching Jesus as he passes by. As he sees him, he exclaims to his disciples, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” He not only sees Jesus, as you would see anyone who passes you on the street or in the grocery store, as a physical person, a body taking up space in the foreground, he truly sees Jesus. He sees beyond his external appearance and into his soul, his essence, his very being. He sees who and what Jesus really is.
When he makes this observation, he is with some of his own disciples. And what do these disciples do upon hearing his comment? Well, they’re his disciples, so they first of all, they believe him. And believing him, they are curious, so the Bible tells us, they followed Jesus. The Greek verb John uses here is άκολουθέω. As you might suspect, it means “to follow,” which is just how it is translated, but like many words in John’s gospel, it operates on more than one level. There is the literal meaning in the story line: they followed him. They walked behind him going wherever he was going, walking in his physical footsteps. But John also means “they followed him” in the metaphorical sense, for these are their first steps into discipleship. A discipleship that will mean leaving John the Baptist and taking up with Jesus. A discipleship that will mean leaving the Jordan River and all they know and walking out into unknown territory. A discipleship that will often be confusing and scary and uncomfortable, but one that ultimately enrich the lives of these two men beyond belief. Even though much of the time what’s going on around them is pretty incomprehensible to them.
Jesus knows they are following him. Perhaps he feels a little prickle on the back of his neck that tells him he is not alone. Perhaps he hears their footsteps behind him. Perhaps he is sensing it is time for him to take up his ministry and reach out to others beyond himself. At any rate, he turns to them and asks, “What are you looking for?”
Now this is a loaded question. And one that they don’t know how to answer. After all, they were following him. And looking at him. They feel caught out – they were just walking behind him, after all. Who says they were “looking for” anything? Can’t you imagine their dismay and embarrassment? They don’t know what to say, how to answer, so quickly, one of them pipes us, “Rabbi, where are you staying?”
Whew! That was a close one, they think. We really looked stupid for an instant, but now it’s clear that we’re just interested in hospitality, we want to make sure that this guest to our fine village is taken care of, etc. and so on. You realize they didn’t answer his question, but instead responded with asking a question of him. A question that misdirects or redirects the focus of the budding conversation off of them and onto Jesus.
He must have been amused at their paltry attempts to be suave and ingenuous. You know he realized that they hadn’t answered his question. So he answers theirs, “Come and see.” Come and see. Yet another sentence talking about sight, both literal and metaphorical. For he is telling them to come check out the house in which he is staying, but he is also telling them to “come,” to follow him, to be with him, and subsequently to “see,” to have their eyes opened to a new way of life, a new way of being, a new way of seeing. Can’t you almost “see” the amused smile on his face and the crinkling of laugh lines in his eyes? Because once again, seeing has two sides – the literal and metaphorical, or the outside and inside, the external and internal. The disciples do “come and see.” They go with Jesus and literally see the house where he is staying, but the Bible tells us that then they stay all the rest of that day. They don’t just show up and say, “Oh, you’re at Joe the butcher’s or Moses the tailor’s or Rachel the widow’s; he/she is a nice person, tell him/her hello.” They stay. Another word that is used an awful lot in this short passage. They ask Jesus where he is staying - the Greek verb μένω, which is also used in the gospel of John to indicate a permanent, not transitory, relationship between Jesus and his disciples. They saw where he was “staying” and they remain or “stay” with him that day.
An interesting point is that the Bible doesn’t tell us what happens during those many hours that they stay. The hours that they listen to Jesus, are entranced by him, decide to leave their former master and remain with him. The hours that inspire Andrew to go and get his brother Simon and bring him to Jesus, too. The only words that Jesus speaks that the Bible feels are important enough to pass on to us are “Come and see.” Come and see.
Come and see what? We are obsessed with what we see today. Is it appropriate? Is it not? It is my opinion that largely it is not. Media, advertising, television, film are largely passing on societal mores with which I do not – and if you read the newspapers – most of America does not agree. Supposedly. Yet our television sets and movie theaters continue to pump out racy schlock that is extremely well-viewed.
There was an article in the New York Times about the outcry over the Super Bowl commercials and half-time show last year and its effect on this year’s line-up of advertisers and their intentions. In it, David Lubars, chairman and chief creative officer at BBDO North America in New York admits, "When you try to do something that stands out in a game full of advertisers trying to stand out, you have to walk a line. And some people walked over it last year.
However, none of last year’s outcry over commercial content or Janet Jackson’s inappropriate behavior have foreshortened the list of blue-chip advertisers willing to take on the hefty $2.4 million dollar for thirty second price tag for an ad. They’re just going to clean up their acts a little bit. Rick Dudley, president and chief of Octagon Worldwide in New York City said, "This is going to be a big 'G for general rating' Super Bowl." But then he added, "Long term, people will loosen up a little, but short term, they'll pull in their reins." That is the attitude of several Super Bowl sponsors as they plan their ads for this year. Essentially, we’ll clean it up for now, knowing that we’ll be able to mess it up later.
The fact of the matter is, in today’s day and age, the focus about how we look, how we present, what we show. This is how we evaluate and are evaluated in our society. It is all about our outsides.
Shortly after we moved here, when Grace was in third grade, she came home and told me one day that a girl in her class had told her she would never be popular because she didn’t have blond hair, blue eyes and wear clothes from Limited Too. In third grade! The external ideal is so steeped in our communal consciousness that eight-year-old girls are bullying others regarding their looks.
Everything in our Scripture lesson belies that sort of ethos. And also shows our own human tendency to value externals over internals. John the Baptist looks at Jesus and sees the Lamb of God before him. I don’t know about you, but I think it must have taken a pretty enlightened human being to see God’s presence in Jesus. We’ve just watched part 1 of a PBS feature on “What Jesus Looked Like” in our Church Brunch Bunch this past week – we’ll be viewing part 2 on Tuesday, February 22nd at 10:00 a.m.; if you’d like to join us for a light lunch and a fascinating program, simply show up – anyway, we’ve seen many views of how people have perceived Jesus over the ages and talked a bit about our own ideas and with the exception of those portraits that include a big nimbus or halo over his head, it’s kind of hard to know how you would tell Jesus apart from the average Joe of the times. Yet John knows. He looks at him and knows. How many of us have such an advanced sight that we can look inside a person and know who they are?
Later in our same story, Simon, Andrew’s brother, comes to see Jesus. Jesus looks at Peter and knows him, renames him Cephas, meaning the Rock. How does he know the importance that Peter will play in his ministry both during and beyond? He, too, focuses on the insides rather than the outsides.
Then we’ve got the poor disciples. The human beings like us, like you and me, who are doing the best they can, but often don’t get it. The great Rabbi, Jesus, turns to them in our story and asks them a wonderful question: “What are you looking for?” How would you answer that question if he posed it to you today? Why are you here at the Presbyterian Church of Sweet Hollow, sitting in a pew on Sunday morning? What are you looking for? If you don’t know or aren’t sure, don’t feel alone. The disciples are flummoxed, too. When Jesus poses the question to them, they stumble and stammer. When they finally come up with an answer, what do they want to see? Where Jesus is staying. When they finally stutter out a response, their focus is on externals.
Isn’t this true for so many of us. Yet Jesus continues to lead on: “Come and see,” he tells us even today. Come and see.
It is not easy to see God. Sometimes we play a little game that goes like this: If you could meet anyone in history, whom would you choose? If you could have lunch with anyone who ever lived, who would that person be? Of course, right now, your answer might be Jesus, because we are thinking of him. So I’ll give you another. If you could meet any historical person other than Jesus, who would you choose? Would you choose William Shakespeare, that playwright who reached into all the basic stories in our souls and showed the tragedy and comedy of being human in a way that still informs our storytelling today? Would you choose Mahatma Ghandi, a man who managed to lead his people to independence through a commitment to non-violence in a way that had never been done before? Would you choose Emily Bronte, a woman whose life as a spinster in England was incredibly dry and straightforward, yet who brought forth the passions of Heathcliff and Cathy from that same innocent spirit? Would you want to meet the man whose birth we celebrate tomorrow, Martin Luther King, Jr., the African-American preacher and perhaps the greatest of all leaders of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s? The man whose words are as amazingly and wondrously powerful today as they were 40 years ago?
What would we see if we were to meet any of the greats of history who spark our imagination? Would we have the probing eyes of John the Baptist and Jesus the Christ? Would we be able to see beyond the external form? Or would we be disappointed that Will Shakespeare stank from lack of bathing, that Mahatma Ghandi’s clothes were dirty rags, Emily Bronte is not her heroine, Cathy, at all, but a plain and unprepossessing woman? Would we wish Martin Luther King, Jr. were eloquent with every word and disappointed that he is, after all, only human and wearing a suit off the rack?
One of my favorite stories about seeing is told by Palmer Parker about his first meeting with Dorothy Day, the devout Catholic woman who founded the Catholic Worker ministry and spent a great part of her life serving the poor in lower Manhattan. He admired her greatly and went to the Lower East Side with the express purpose of “being received” by this great woman. When he arrived, he was sent to the cafeteria area of the home where Dorothy was engaged in conversation with a woman who was clearly out of it. She appeared to be drunk and was going on and on and on about whatever her problem was. Parker stood for a while quite patiently but began to get annoyed as the woman continued to rant and rave at Dorothy going over the same ground several times and not seeming to get to the point. Dorothy continued to sit with the woman, listening carefully and nodding, giving over her whole self to the task at hand. Eventually, Parker couldn’t take it any more. After all, who was this woman taking up Dorothy’s precious time, but a homeless alcoholic?
He walked over to the two of them and cleared his throat. “Excuse me…” he announced.
Dorothy looked up as though seeing him for the first time. “Certainly,” she replied. “Did you want to speak with one of us?”
Dorothy did not see herself as any more or less important than the woman with whom she was speaking. As she looked at a woman that frankly most of us would cross the street to avoid, she saw the eyes of God. She saw, as John the Baptist saw Jesus and as Jesus saw Peter. She saw the soul inside the human being, rather than the pathetic shell that encased it.
How many of us are able to do the same? How many of us live in the world, and not be of it, as Paul directs us to live? And how many of us simply flail along noticing a good-looking man or woman when we see him or her and ignore the less attractive person beside them? How many of us upon meeting someone evaluate them on what they’re wearing, how their hair is cut, how much they weigh or how they smell or the shape of their glasses or the color of their skin? How many of us secretly enjoy a good underwear ad where we can admire a beautiful body wearing something skimpy without knowing anything about the person beneath the skin? How many of us are just as obsessed with externals as the disciples were 2000 years ago? Or maybe even more so because the temptations today are greater. Our world is filled with pictures, photographs, media that all show us models of the ideal male and female forms over and over and over again. Until we begin to feel that if we don’t live up to that ideal ourselves we are not acceptable. Until we look at others with eyes that evaluate them by air-brushed, unattainable standards, too.
Come and see, Jesus tells the disciples. And they follow him. And they stay. You see, once someone comes into contact with Jesus, three things happen: they follow, they see, they stay. This is where we are today. We have come into contact with Jesus. It is why we are here. We have followed him, to this place and time, this space and moment. We are sitting here together in Christian community in hopes that we will see. That we will be given the eyes of Christ. That we will no longer look at him and stumble and fumble our words, asking, “Where are you staying?” but instead asking, “May we stay?” And the answer Jesus gives us is always “yes.” Yes, my friends, you may stay. Please stay. And I will name you. I will name you Rock, and Hope, and Love, and Doubt. I will name you Faithful, and Searcher, and Tears, and Joy. I will name you Beautiful. I will name you with words that have nothing to do with the physical forms you have been given in this lifetime, but rather with the soul and spirit that fill your heart. I will see you and I will love you and I will help you to open your eyes that you may see, too.
Come and see, my children. Come and stay. Come and be with me now and forever. Amen.