John 1:35-42

09/21/08
John 1:35-42
Hudson UMC

Have you ever asked someone a question only to have them give a completely unexpected answer? It is almost as if they answered the wrong question. I have a tendency of answering questions in a seemingly roundabout way. Alli gives me a hard time about this sometimes, asking me to “speak in a straight line”. Now, sometimes, this odd way of answering questions is because I can be a little scattered and want to say about fifteen things at once, so I trip over myself. There are other times, though, when I have unexpected answers because I am asked questions that are not nearly as simple as they first seem. For example, if you ask me what I think about infant baptism, you are not really asking me about little children and water; you are really asking me about the grace of God and the Divine-human relationship. You might not realize you are asking me that, but that is the underlying core. The famous scientist Carl Sagan has been quoted as saying, “To make an apple pie from scratch, first, you must first create the universe”. Sometimes, I find myself having to summarize the entire history of the church before I can answer a question when the person asking it probably only wanted a “yes” or a “no”. Sometimes, the unexpected answer is due to confusion or miscommunication. However, there are other times, when it seems like the other person is answering the wrong question, that we are actually asking the wrong question. It is the second of these that is in our text for this morning.

I want you to put yourself into the story. Imagine that you have been following John the Baptist for a long time. Now, this other guy walks by and your leader, your pastor, your spiritual guide, points to him and says, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” In fact, this is not the first time he has exclaimed this about the same person. These two disciples, in response to this, react immediately. They drop everything and go. They could have decided that Jesus was just an upstart and that the old way is best and stick with John. After all, he had a dynamic, relevant and established ministry and Jesus hadn’t really done anything yet. These two men show us what it means to listen to a preacher. They had followed John because they hoped that he would show them the truth. When the Truth came walking by, John pointed Him out and they went. We are going to wrestle with why they went next week, but I want to think about what they did. They came to their version of “church” and gave themselves to it, but their real goal was to encounter God. John was declaring, “If you want truth, I can show Him to you, but then you have to follow Him. I can’t force you to do it.”

So the disciples of John leave their spiritual leader and go to follow his spiritual leader. When Jesus turned and saw them following Him, He said, “What are you looking for?” This is a very important question that we need to all ask ourselves from time to time. What are we looking for? When we come to Jesus what are we looking for? Are we looking for health, wealth and prosperity? Are we looking for warm fuzzy feelings? Are we looking for a good lesson in morality? Are we looking for whatever it was that our parents saw in God? We all have our reasons for coming to meet with Jesus; some of them are good and some of them are not so good. The fact of the matter is that Jesus is not a Genie that simply waves his hands and solves all of our perceived problems. The only real reason to come to Jesus is that He is the Truth and we need the Truth. This takes many forms. Sometimes, we are grieving and we need to know where God is in the midst of it. Sometimes, we are fundamentally dissatisfied with life and need to know what will bring us fulfillment. In the end, we need to set aside the things that we think we need and be willing to receive what God has to give us through His Son.

What do the disciples say? When they were asked what they were looking for, they answered, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Speaking of answering the wrong question, I wonder why these two people said this. Did they really just want to know where Jesus was living at the time? Did they really just want to know His address? The odds are pretty good that they actually wanted something more substantial than this. They probably wanted to know what it was about Him that made John speak so highly of Him. They were probably looking for the Truth; after all, they call Him Rabbi, which meant that they were probably hoping to learn from Him. I suppose that I should at least entertain the possibility that they were really only interested in finding out his address. After all, this would not be so unusual when we look at people in our culture today. There are people who don’t go to church, but feel better just to know that one exists that they could go to if they wanted to. It is feasible to imagine that the two disciples wanted to know where Jesus was staying so they point it out to other people. They might have wanted to know where it was so they could store that bit of information away so they could go to visit Him when they wanted to. Maybe it wasn’t convenient for them to go right at that minute, maybe they wanted to talk to John before they made a commitment, to make sure they were doing the right thing. There could be any number of reasons that they might have answered Jesus’ question in this way.

Once again, we have an example of someone answering the wrong question. Jesus had been asked, “Where are you staying?” He answered, “Come and see.” They had asked a “where” question and He gave them a “how” answer. They could have responded by saying, “No, sir, you don’t understand. We don’t care so much about how to get where you are staying as we are about where you are staying”. After all, what if Jesus is staying in the bad part of town? What if they have to go into neighborhoods that they aren’t comfortable going into? Maybe Jesus spends His time living with a bunch of people who aren’t all that good? Maybe He lives with sinners, and drug addicts, and prostitutes, and illegal immigrants? What are these fine, upstanding, eminently pious people to do? They can’t be seen with those sorts of people.

Jesus wants nothing to do with this. Not only is Jesus very aware of the fact that, once they heard where He lived, they could and probably would make up a bunch of excuses why they shouldn’t ever go, He knew something else that they didn’t know. We are never told exactly where Jesus was staying, nor do we know what kind of shelter He had, but we have no reason to assume that it was particularly comfortable because we read elsewhere that, though foxes have holes and birds have nests, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head. We are never told exactly where He lived, but we can be reasonably sure that He was probably living in willful poverty. We can be absolutely sure that He did not have anything nearly as nice as any of our homes.

You know, people have all kinds of romantic, poetic things to say about Jesus during His earthly ministry. People say things like, “If only I was there to see Him, how strong my faith would be”. When we talk like that, it shows us that we have forgotten what it means to be a disciple of Christ. To follow Christ is to be like Him. He wandered from place to place, with no home, no place to settle down, no retirement to enjoy. He pushed the envelope, was loved by some and hated by more; He was deserted by His best friends and yet remained faithful to His Father in heaven. As soon as the day of Pentecost came and the disciples were empowered to preach the good news, they were imprisoned, beaten, and murdered for it. The Holy Spirit came, they were made more faithful than ever before and they knew that they were living like Christ’s disciples because they were being betrayed like Christ and executed like Christ. If Jesus had told them all the information they wanted to know before having them experience the life changing reality that He offered them, they never would have followed. And yet, their testimony throughout the history of the church has been that it was worth it. Every time they were beaten, they praised the Lord that He had conquered sin and death in their lives.

All of this is to say that, when Jesus answered and refused to answer the question that was asked, “Where are you staying” but gave the answer to the question that was not asked, “How can we find where you are staying”, it was not a mistake. We in the Western world have been trained to understand things. We are told that, until we understand something completely, we should not accept it. Even further, we are told that, until we can explain something satisfactorily to anyone who asks, we should not trust it. What this presupposes is that we can understand things before we experience them. I want to direct your attention to an illustration that is famous among philosophers. Most everyone in this room drinks coffee. I am one of the very few that do not. Coffee drinkers often tell me that I am missing out and that, if I would just start drinking coffee, I would love it. However, have you ever tried to describe the taste of coffee to someone who has never had it before? It isn’t very easy to do. You could tell me all about your coffee drinking experience and how much you enjoy it and yet, those descriptions would still fall far short of the reality you were trying to describe and I still wouldn’t really understand. What would it take for me to understand the joys of drinking coffee? Why, I would have to actually drink it myself. Jesus could tell them what they wanted to know, but they would never really understand until they had experienced it.

The disciples wanted to know information, Jesus wanted them to have an experience. Jesus was not content with people just knowing about Him, but knowing Him in a personal way and participating in the lifestyle that He had to give them. Jesus is calling each of us to participate in the realities of God, not just listen to them. I had asked earlier in the sermon what you are looking for when you come to church. You must be looking for something, or else you wouldn’t come. Are you finding it? Has your search been successful? If Jesus were standing in front of you today, asking you what you are looking for, what would you tell Him? You don’t need to worry about whether or not you’ve got the right thing to ask for. After all, these two disciples didn’t. Jesus did not criticize them for not having a clearly thought out theological goal in mind, He gently redirected their misguided desires into something in line with His will.

I want to dig a little deeper into this idea of answering the wrong question. We all need to remember, and this is something that is not easy to do, that God is not obligated to answer our questions how we want Him to. He is perfectly free to answer our questions in whatever way He sees best. Sometimes, this really gets on my nerves. I just want God to spell things out for me, but He knows that, if I learn the answer without struggling for it, I will tend to be impatient and unloving towards anyone who does understand it as easily. God knows that we grow through our struggles and that we don’t really know what true knowledge is until He opens our eyes to His truth. This answering of the wrong question shows us that we not only ask the wrong questions all the time, but that we are not even likely to ever ask the right questions without God Himself guiding us. We want God to give us some kind of theoretical answer to our questions and our problems, but He doesn’t seem to do it, does He? He does not give us a theoretical answer, but a solution that is entirely practical.

How does Christ lead the disciples in this passage? He takes their sincere but imperfect gesture and transforms it into something pleasing to God. He sees the desires that are behind their questions. He knew that they didn’t really just want to know where He was staying, but that they wanted to experience who He was in a deep way. They had heard from John the Baptist that this man could change their lives, but they couldn’t really understand it until they encountered Him for themselves. You might not know the right words to say to God, you might question a lot of things, you might be afraid of looking foolish, but rest assured that our awesome God will not turn you away.

In the end, I want to encourage you to come right up to the Lord. He will notice you following Him and will turn to you and say, “What are you looking for?” I want to encourage you to boldly say to Him, “This is what I’m looking for” without fear of saying the wrong thing. If you do not yet have a dynamic relationship with the Son of God, do not fear, because God does not expect you to have it all together. After all, you do not yet have the Holy Spirit that is sent to believers to guide them into all truth. If you are but a child in the faith and have much to learn and a lot of room to grow, God will have mercy on you like Christ did to those two men. He will take our broken and imperfect acts of devotion and turn them into something beautiful. He will not only tell you where He is staying, but He will take you there. He will lead you into difficult times and He will lead you out of them again. He will allow you to lose everything, so that you can truly gain everything in Him. He will not explain to you why there is evil in the world, but He will send the Holy Spirit so that you might endure in the midst of it. He will empower you to praise His name, even when the world turns against you and you too will be able to sing out praises to God in the face of adversity because He has conquered sin and death in your life.

If you have come here to find the truth and hope to find it in me or in any other person here, I do not want to turn you away, but I want to emulate John the Baptist and point you to someone beyond myself. I want you to behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. I want you to know that there is truth to be had and it is to be had in Jesus. Come to Him with all your heart and with all your soul and He will take you to where He is staying and you will be changed forever. Let us pray.

AMEN