John
1:29-42
There’s an odd little
linguistic tic in this passage from John [1:38-42]. Like the rest of the New Testament, it was
written in Greek, which was the common language of the eastern Mediterranean in
that day. But it contains these scraps
of Aramaic, which was the dialect that Jesus and the disciples probably would
have spoken at home or with one another.
Andrew calls Jesus, “Rabbi,”
and John adds, “(which translated means
Teacher)”. He tells his brother
Simon, “We
have found the Messiah,” and John
comments, “(which is translated
Anointed)”. Simon goes to meet him and is greeted, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be
called Cephas,” and John adds, “(which
is translated Peter).” At
this point maybe I should explain that the Greek “Petros” is a translation of the Aramaic
“Cephas”, which means “Rock”. “Peter” is really a nickname whose equivalent
in our terms would be “Rocky”.
Now,
notice: here we are, not much more than a minute or two into the sermon, and
I’m explaining in English how John explained Aramaic to Greek speakers and eyes
are beginning to glaze over already. Am
I just talking about the Bible instead of passing on the message that the
gospel writer set down?
Not
really, because this passage is all about the way that people tell each other
about Jesus. John encountered Jesus and
told two of his followers. They met
Jesus for themselves, and then one went and got his brother. The brother went and met Jesus there in
Galilee, and eventually became one of the major spreaders of the good news as
far away as Rome, where he died as a witness to his faith.
All too often,
we think we cannot share our own faith the way that they did. Whatever barriers there are between us and
someone else, we think that will inevitably mean that they will never
understand us, or what Jesus means in our lives. What John did, what the disciples did, really
was just to say, “There he goes. See for
yourself.” When that happens, it isn’t
on us anymore, because Jesus takes over for himself.
We concentrate
way too much on the differences that make it hard for us to understand one
another. That’s not to say they aren’t
real. I’ve already mentioned
language. What about politics? What about age? What about economic status? What about culture? (One time when I was in England visiting friends,
I tried to explain why nobody I know in the United States would ever name their
son Nigel. You just could not send a kid
to school with a name like that and expect him to grow up without a deep
resentment toward you. They didn’t get
it, and there was no way to make it clear except to say that we are odd.) If you cannot explain something like that
fully, how can you expect to speak fully of what it means to have a
Savior? So we don’t try.
What if,
however, we concentrated on the things that we have in common simply because of
who we are as human beings? Take a Maori
tribesman from New Zealand and a Sherpa from Nepal and anyone you want to pick
from Chester or Montgomery County. When
it comes to the deepest aspects of life, they each have to face the same
challenges. They each have to earn a
living, and want to do it in a way that is satisfying. They will each care about their family. They each will know what a broken heart feels
like, and each will enjoy a good laugh.
None of them will be without fears or hopes. Surely those similarities are richer than
differences like tattoos or mullets.
Those deep, human needs, are the ones that are met by Jesus.
John the
Baptist called him “the Lamb of God”. That title alone, easily intelligible by the
first hearers yet so strange to our ears, says a lot in itself. The lamb was then, as now, a symbol of
innocence and gentleness and purity. A
teacher might say of two students, “This one’s a terror, but that one’s a
lamb.” That innocence, however, puts a
lamb into danger. Jesus was the absolute
example of the innocent and spotless person, sent out into the middle of a
cruel and hungry world, and he knew what he was in for. He warned his disciples when he gave them
their mission,
“I am sending you out like lambs into the midst
of wolves.” [Luke
10:3]
Lambs sometimes get eaten up. The world has never been able to tolerate
those whose simple statements of right and wrong call into question the
compromises that most of us make every day.
Such people are an embarrassment, and if they speak too loudly or are
heard too clearly, they can count on being silenced one way or another. Who does not understand that?
In
another sense, too, he was “the Lamb of
God”. The people of Israel had for
centuries followed the rituals of the Law that provided for the sacrifice of a
lamb as a sign of the re-establishment of proper relations between people and
God. It wasn’t so much, as has sometimes
been described, that God’s anger was put off with a gift. God cannot be bribed. It was more a recognition that God asks our
best of us, which involves the purity and gentleness a lamb shows, and the
sacrifice of the animal enacted the giving of life itself back to God. Jesus, the Lamb living in the midst of us
wolves, was at the same time offering himself freely to God in a way that
represented us all. There is no one who
cannot understand the love that steps in for another, that takes the fall for
somebody else, that steps in front of the moving bus to push a child out of the
way, that gives its last piece of bread to someone else who is hungry, too. Anyone, anywhere can understand that.
It isn’t
for us to do anything but bear witness to that self-giving love as we have
known it, and to do it in the most direct and simple ways that we can. Kathleen Norris speaks of the need for that
direct approach in her book Amazing Grace
where she says,
“When I began attending church again
after twenty years away, I felt bombarded by the vocabulary of the Christian
church. Words such as ‘Christ,’
‘heresy,’ ‘repentance,’ and ‘salvation’ seemed dauntingly abstract to me, even
threatening.”[1]
She goes on to talk about what she
calls “rebuilding” her “religious vocabulary”.
So far, so good. But then one day
she was on a book tour, giving a reading from the book where she said this, and
afterward a woman came up to her.
“‘I don’t mean to be offensive,’ she
said, ‘but I just don’t understand how you can get so much comfort from a
religion whose language does so much harm.’”
Norris continues,
“I had spent too many years outside
the Christian religion to be offended by her comment. I know very well that faith can seem strange,
and even impenetrable, to those who do not share it. I understood all too well where that question
was coming from. But how to respond,
there and then, to this woman’s evident bafflement, and even anguish? I took a deep breath, and blessed clarity
came. …Look, I said to her, as a rush of
words came to me. As far as I’m
concerned, this religion has saved my life, my husband’s life, and our
marriage. So it’s not comfort that I’m
talking about here but salvation.”[2]
“Look!” said John the Baptist long
ago. “Look,
here is the Lamb of God.” [John 1:36]
“Look,” said Kathleen Norris to the woman whom she met on her book
tour. “Come and see,” [John 1:39] Jesus invited long ago. “Come
and see,” he invites today.
Hey! Look!
There he goes!
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