Come and see...

Passage for reflection: John 1: 35 - 51

This Sunday, I was due to make my last debut leading worship in my new appointment. St James and The Methodist Church in Grewelthorpe have had to wait until January to have me and now we’ve had to revert to a Zoom service in the lockdown which is a huge disappointment. Hopefully I can make my proper debut in April. 

I think back to the invitation process for this appointment. You are rung up the day after your Chair of District tells you where they’ve matched you to. The Circuit invite you to come and see. The invitation isn’t issued or accepted until we’ve had a good look at each other! The idea is we both show what it is we might offer. 

So we came and saw the village of Grewelthorpe. A group of ladies met us at the church. It was good to see a place up until I got the description I’d never heard of. But the ladies made us welcome which was all we needed on our whistle stop tour of eight communities. 

A few months later we had a holiday in the area and returned to the village for a proper look round. The cafe looked inviting with a welcoming sign outside almost saying come and see. I didn’t let on who I was. We had a lovely lunch, and it was a good experience. We left the village feeling it was inviting and would be a good place to work in and share with. 

I’ve invited the congregation at Grewelthorpe to join me on a computer screen to share a Covenant Service. Zoom has created a different sort of church experience. I often don’t know who is coming onto the screen. I have to be alert to who I see. Sometimes we see people we’ve never met before. I spent an afternoon writing out the annual Methodist membership tickets for the Grewelthorpe congregation this week. Most at the moment are just names. It will be good to see faces and put those names to them. 

The invitation to come and see is an invitation to enter into a relationship, to join a community, to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

The invitation to come and see is at the heart of John’s Gospel and serves as the model of all Christian evangelism.  It all starts on the banks of the Jordan River with a man named John the Baptist, who was sent from God to witness to the light so that all might believe through him. One day, John was standing with two of his disciples when they saw Jesus walking by.  As they watched Jesus pass, John said to his friends, “Look, there goes the Lamb of God!”  Without hesitation, the two left John’s side and began to follow Jesus.  Jesus noticed them and asked, “What are you looking for?”  Not quite sure what to say, they replied, “Rabbi, where are you staying?”  And Jesus said, “Come and see.”

Jesus invited those two men into a relationship with him.  They spent the day together in the place where he was staying.  The Gospel writer doesn’t tell us what they talked about, but we know that they were changed in their encounter with Jesus.  They had answered his call to come and see and their lives would never be the same.  In fact, one of John’s disciples, a man named Andrew, was so excited about what he saw in Jesus that he ran off and found his brother, Simon Peter, to share the Good News and bring him to come and see Jesus.

Our story picks things up the next day.  Jesus was again walking around, this time on his way to Galilee, when he encountered a man named Philip who he called and said “follow me.”  Philip did, and like the two the day before, his encounter with Jesus forever changed his life.  Again, we have no idea what went on while Jesus and Philip were hanging out.  We don’t know what Jesus said other than, “follow me.”  We don’t know if he performed any card tricks or turned water into wine.  All we know is that Philip was so enthusiastic about what he saw in Jesus that he ran off to find his best friend, Nathaniel.  

Breathless, Philip shared with his friend, “We have found the very person Moses and the prophets wrote about! His name is Jesus, the son of Joseph from Nazareth.” 

Philip was soon brought down to earth.

Nathaniel wasn’t convinced that Philip had found what Philip thinks he had found.  He was cautious at best, most likely skeptical, and perhaps even cynical of the whole thing. “This Jesus character is the son of a carpenter from Nazareth? You just met the guy this morning?  Really, Philip?  Think about it.  Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

Nathaniel scoffed at the very idea of Jesus being the Messiah, but notice Philip’s response.  He didn’t get defensive, but he didn’t back down either.  He didn’t start into a long list of reasons why he said what he said.  He didn’t get angry.  Instead, he said three simple words, “Come and see.”  Despite his misgivings, Nathaniel goes off to meet Jesus and his life is changed by the encounter. 

Come and see.

This Gospel passage falls in the season of Epiphany. Someone once said “there can be no Epiphany without searching.” The searching can be as vital spiritually as the destination. 

Jesus encourages us to look for him every day. He gives us an invitation to journey towards him and open our eyes to see new things that he is doing. 

But more than that, he then inspires us to be invitational. Are we there for the sceptical Nathanaels of the world who just aren’t sure and need time? We need to have a something worth seeing. We need a commitment to make the outside of our buildings attractive. I remember a church now closed in Ashton under Lyne. The notice board outside said “no lunchtime service in August.” The trouble was it was about August three years previously, now tatty, irrelevant and out of date. 

I sat by the duck pond in Grewelthorpe in December to record a talk as part of an Advent quiet day. There are quite a lot of ducks in Grewelthorpe and as I started talking, about forty ducks waddled over to me, surrounded me and started quacking very loudly. I was worth finding and seeing — until they realised I hadn’t got any bread! 

Come and see.

I was watching an episode of Winter Walks and it had the Rev Richard Coles walking to Rievaulx Abbey. A friend had asked him what he planned to do in retirement. His reply was - “walk around looking at things.” That’s not a bad Christian lifestyle. For Jesus is ahead of us with more and more of him to discover. If our faith is not about discovering and seeing what’s possible, then our faith surely will die. 

I like this quote. How would it be if we lived this?

“The invitation to “come and see” is an invitation to leave our comfortable vantage points, and dare to believe that just maybe, we have been limited and wrong in our original certainties about each other, about God, and about the world.  To “come and see” is to approach all of life with a grace-filled curiosity.”

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