JOHN 1:35-42
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
January 18, 2026
John the Baptist was a great man. Jesus called him a prophet of God and “more than a prophet”. Yet, John was not stuck on his own greatness but spent his life sending people on to someone greater than himself, Jesus whom he proclaimed as “the Son of God”. Why, John even sent Andrew and another unnamed disciple of his own to Jesus that they’d transfer their prime allegiance to Him. John let them go with his blessing to fulfill His priority mission of bringing people to Jesus.
So the two men started to follow Jesus, at a safe distance. Though I’m reading between the lines, the two strike me as shy and hesitant about following Someone to whom they’d not yet been properly introduced. At any rate – and this is very like Jesus – Jesus noticed them, reached out to them and met them more than half way. He broke the ice by initiating conversation with them. In striking up the conversation, He immediately cut to the chase and asked a crucial question, “What are looking for?” He recognized He couldn’t help those who were, say, seeking from Him a life of ease, security, worldly success, political power or prestige. But if they were looking for a life of purpose, righteousness and love, He was their man.
The two responded to Jesus’ question with their own question, and it might seem an odd one, “Where are you staying?” Surely, they weren’t at that moment interested in what home or inn He’d be sleeping that night. I suspect it was their modest, indirect way of asking whether they could hang out with Him day and night. They were hoping to linger constantly in His presence a long while.
By the way, the Greek word translated there as “staying” is menein, an important word throughout John’s Gospel. The word connotes staying connected, engaged and interacting with someone. It’s the word used to describe spending time with a person and relating with them so as to get to know them and discover more fully who they are, by listening to them and working with them in collaborative projects. It’s the word used when Jesus commanded His followers to “abide in me as I abide in you”.
Jesus is God in human flesh, God come down to our level, God getting eyeball to eyeball with us. So we should not be surprised that Jesus replied to the question of these two by inviting them to “come and see!” He proposed that they hang out with Him, open their eyes and take in His reality.
Yes, the two knew some things about Jesus, because John had spoken about Him; but, if He were as John said the Son of God, there’d be so much they didn’t yet know about Him and could never know about Him. While they could know Him better, they could never know Him completely. For God is greater than the human mind can conceive, and will always surprise and baffle us. A human is unable to come to the end of discovering more dimensions and degrees of God’s greatness.
In his book Deeper, Dane Ortlund notes that when Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, he named the inhabitants “Indians” because he thought he’d reached what Europeans of the time called “the Indies” (that is, India, China and Japan). In fact, Columbus was nowhere near South or East Asia. Ahead of him were vast regions of land, unexplored and uncharted by anyone he knew. Columbus had assumed the world was smaller than it in fact was.
Ortlund asks, “Have we made a similar mistake with regard to Jesus Christ? Are there vast tracts of who He is…that are unexplored? Have we unintentionally reduced Him to manageable, predictable proportions? Have we been looking at a junior varsity, decaffeinated, one-dimensional Jesus of our own making, thinking we’re looking at the real Jesus? Are we snorkeling in the shallows thinking we’ve hit the bottom of the Pacific?”
The Son of God is always greater than we think or say, but we can always discover new depths and heights of His magnificence by spending time with Him and seeing His glory more fully. We can do that in the solitude of prayer, scriptural meditation and devotional reflection. We can also do that in the interpersonal efforts of reaching out to others to help them get to know His friendship.
Andrew was all about doing that as if he’d somehow quickly discovered the vastness and the strength of Jesus’ passion to make friends with everyone. The Bible says little about Andrew; but every time it speaks of his doing something, he’s trying to introduce someone to Jesus. Here Andrew brought his brother Simon to Jesus; later he brought to Jesus a little boy with five scraps of bread and two fish for a hungry crowd of 5,000; and still later he brought to Jesus some Greek seekers who wanted to check out this intriguing Man.
For us to be like Andrew and bring folks to Jesus, we don’t need to develop a sales pitch. We can just bring someone with us to worship or a church activity, or bring church to them by listening to them in, say, a coffee shop or a living room, to learn what they’re looking for in life. The occasion may then arise they’ll want to “come and see” for themselves whether Jesus is worth the knowing.
Church doesn’t exist only for its members. Church exists for non-members just as much. May we, like Andrew give others the chance to discover Jesus for the very first time and ourselves the chance to discover Him as never before!
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