While I’ve always been fascinated by the many different languages that are spoken around the world, I’ve also always been terrified to learn to speak any of them. Case in point – I was one of 6 people in my high school graduating class that took every level of Latin that was offered. I did largely so I wouldn’t have to speak it, just read it.
In college, when I was required to study a modern language, I took Russian because I figured they’d have to go slowly and hardly anyone would know it. Big mistake at a school where most of my classmates were from suburban Washington DC, where high schools often hired diplomats’ spouses as high school language teachers. Most of my fellow classmates in the 101 class already had a year or two under their belts.
And when I travel I keep notebooks of the vocabulary I’m picking up and any hints about the grammatical structure of the language I’m hearing, but I am very nervous about actually trying to speak the language of the land out loud.
I didn’t feel like I know enough, and I get nervous about making mistakes or sounding like I didn’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I didn’t know enough to try.
I don’t think I’m alone in this tendency to want to be certain before I try something new. There have been plenty times throughout my years as a pastor when I hear people say that they don’t think they can join a Bible study because they don’t know enough to study the Bible.
We humans are a funny bunch, aren’t we? We’re pretty tied to the idea that we need to know everything, that we need to be certain before we are brave enough to try something new. How does that even make sense? How could we know it all before we even learn it?
Certainty is a high prerequisite to set for exploring something new.
Early in the fourth gospel, we hear John the Baptist make quite a declaration, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” I guess that sounds pretty certain. Except it turns out that even John the Baptist isn’t exactly sure who Jesus is. Not just once, but twice, in his very testimony to those who came to Bethany where he was baptizing, even John the Baptist said, “I myself did not know him.”
He knew his role as “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness.” He knew he himself was not the Messiah or Elijah. He knew there was one coming after him who was greater than he was. But right here at the very start of Jesus’ ministry, as John is baptizing him and introducing him to his disciples, to us, and to the world, even this one sent by God with the testimony that starts off the whole story, even he isn’t exactly sure, even he doesn’t fully know, fully comprehend who Jesus is.
That’s kind of a huge relief to me!! This certainty we crave and that we seem to have set up as the price of admission – not even John the Baptist can muster it. And yet even without it, what John has said about Jesus is enough to pique his own disciples’ interest. Maybe certainty isn’t all we’ve built it up to be.
The day after he tells his followers about baptizing Jesus, again he announces to them, “Look, here is the Lamb of God.” It’s an interesting pronouncement because John is actually the first person to even use this title. While there are references to lambs in relation to sacrifices, this title, this designation never appears in the Hebrew Scriptures. It’s not part of the psalms the Jewish people sang. It isn’t a piece of a prophecy. It doesn’t even come from the descriptions of worship in the temple or the tabernacle God’s people worshiped in after fleeing from Pharaoh in Egypt. John, as far as the biblical witness tells us, is the first person to use this for Jesus, and that makes the disciples, well, a bit curious.
Standing with John when he delivers this testimony, they see Jesus walking by and they follow him. In this story we don’t see them dropping their nets or walking away from family and livelihood. (Full disclosure: We will get that story next week with some of the same people in it. That’s the interesting thing about having four different gospels with four different ways of remembering and testifying.) What we see are a couple of curious people. They’ve heard something interesting, testified to them by someone they trust, even if he himself still has some mix of certainty and uncertainty, and, well, as far as we can tell they’re curious. That’s about it.
That’s another huge relief to me!!
They don’t know it all. They don’t make their own profound declarations. They don’t give any hint that they understand everything that’s going on around them, everything about who Jesus is, everything that John the Baptist has said. They just, sort of follow him, and not particularly loudly either, we might notice. (I love the subtle details of this story.) They didn’t run up to Jesus, jump in his face, and scream, “Here we are!” It’s almost like once he walked by they simply stepped in behind him – I don’t want to say stalking him, but well, they didn’t really announce their presence.
It was Jesus who stopped and turned around to address them, asking, “What are you looking for?” This isn’t a “who do you say that I am?” moment. We can be sure, there are going to be some of those later on in their journey. But right now, all Jesus asks them is “What are you looking for?”
I guess I shouldn’t say “all he’s asking” as if it’s an easy question. It may be simple, but it’s probably not be easy. What are you looking for? What are we looking for? How often do we slow down enough to ask ourselves that question? And how often do we ask an important accompanying question – is what we’re looking for what Jesus is offering?
Even in one church family different ones of us are looking for different things. Even one person at different times in their life will be looking for a different experience of Jesus.
We might be looking for comfort. Or we might be looking for companionship. We might be looking to be reassured that we’re pretty good people doing pretty good things in the world. Any of these and more might be where our level of curiosity is and when it is, the gospel story tells us, it can open some doors to discipleship.
But I don’t think that is all that God intends us to be curious about. They may be entry points or places we come back to and pause in our walk with Jesus in times of distress, *and* Jesus invites us into so much more. His call to curiosity can lead us to places of even deeper understanding and commitment.
We can look for the one about whom we have heard bold declarations. We can look for the one who teaches new ways of thinking and living. We can look for something bigger than our own happiness and our own security. We can look for the one we have heard is wise, is graceful, who has power. We can look for companions on the journey who will walk with us to a new place.
Or even deeper—
We can look for the Lamb of God, who John testified will take away the sin of the world – not just our personal sin, not just the things we do or things we leave undone that put distance between us and God – but the sin of the world – everything about this whole culture, society, and global system that runs counter to what God is about. Are we looking for that? Are we looking for directions about what to do when we see injustice in the world around us? Are we looking to be so transformed by Jesus that our names and identities are changed? That our lives go in a different direction? Are we looking for co-conspirators who will participate with us in the work the Son of God is doing on earth, who will strengthen us when speaking the truth is dangerous and following the Messiah is counter-cultural?
“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks, and when John’s disciples can’t quite answer him on any level deeper than inquiring about the place where he is spending the night, all he says next is “Come and see.” “Come and see.”
Jesus doesn’t start with a demand for loyalty to the death. He doesn’t chastise them for not knowing what they want. He doesn’t ask them to make doctrinal declarations with unwavering certainty. Instead he says, “Come and see.” He invites them to walk with him, to witness his day. He invites them to be curious, a curiosity they share with others.
That’s how this whole Jesus movement starts and, I dare to say, that’s how it continues today. Not with forced certainty, not with drawing lines about who is in and who is out, not with everyone having everything all figured out. But it starts (11:00 at a font of welcome) and it continues with shared curiosity, coming and seeing who Jesus is, what he is doing in the world, how we are a part of that, and who we can invite to walk with us.
That last part is more important than we sometimes realize. Who are we going to invite to come with us? Sometimes like with Bible study we think we can’t invite people to join us at church or we can’t talk about our experience of God or we can’t share our journey of discipleship until we have it all figured out, until we are certain. But we don’t need to let certainty be the enemy of faithfulness – not in our own minds and hearts and relationships with Jesus, and not in our calling to share what we are discovering.
Even while we still have questions, even while we’re still figuring it all out (because, guess what, we’ll probably spend our lives figuring it out) we can invite people to walk with us as we walk with Jesus. Actually, this is something I love this about our church’s mission statement, in which we acknowledge we are imperfect people who are striving, not perfect people who meet every mark. We don’t have it all figured out, but still we work to the ideal of love. Still we can invite our children and our parents and our friends to join us, to ask the questions that they are nervous to ask. We can invite our neighbors to be curious about what God is doing in our midst, how Jesus is working in us and through us for the sake of the world.
Come and see, Jesus says to those who are uncertain.
Come and see, he says to those who are curious.
Come and see, he says to us.
Come and see, we can say to the world.
When you consider your faith journey, about what are you curious?