Come and see

The gist

Two men follow Him without being asked. He turns around and puts a question to them instead of a claim. They answer with a question of their own — an oddly practical one — and He does not answer it either. He invites them to an afternoon. That is how the whole thing starts.

Going deeper

Notice what the first words of Christ in this Gospel actually are. Not a doctrine, not a summons, not an announcement. A question: What do you want? The Greek is ti zēteite — what do you seek. In the Fourth Gospel, the first thing Jesus of Nazareth says to anybody is a question about desire, put to two men who have started walking after Him without permission.

It is worth sitting with how exposing that question is. He does not ask what they believe or what they know. He asks what they are after. Most of us could answer the first two much faster than the third.

Their reply looks like a dodge, and it is not. Rabbi, where are You staying? The Greek verb is meneis — from menō, to remain, to stay, to abide. It is the same verb that will carry the weight of everything later: remain in Me, and I will remain in you. On the first afternoon, before anyone knows anything, the disciples’ opening question is already the Gospel’s central word. They are asking where He abides. Three years later He will tell them to abide in Him.

And the passage does not stop there. Verse 39: they went, they saw, and emeinan — they remained with Him that day. Same root again. The pattern of the entire Christian life is present in five verses, in the order it actually happens: you ask where He stays, you are told to come, and then you stay.

There is one textual detail worth knowing, and it matters to this book in particular. The interlinear built on the critical Greek text reads opsesthe here — a future: come, and you will see. The Byzantine Majority Text, which the translation used throughout these volumes follows, gives the imperative — come and see. The difference is small and neither reading changes the sense much. But it is the reason this book is called what it is called.

St John Chrysostom, preaching through John, draws out what Christ does not do. He does not put them off, does not make an appointment, does not send them away to prepare. “For this reason He did not say anything of this kind to them, ‘It is an unseasonable time now for you to enter into the house, tomorrow you shall hear if you have any wish, return home now’; but converses with them as with friends, and those who had long been with Him.”

Chrysostom also finds the mechanism of the whole encounter in the fact that they moved first: “Hence we are taught, that God does not prevent our wills by His gifts, but that when we begin, when we provide the being willing, then He gives us many opportunities of salvation.” They walked before they were called. That is the order in this story, and it is not an accident.

One more thing that is easy to skate past. These are John the Baptist’s own disciples, and John is the one who points them away from himself. Look, the Lamb of God — and two of his men immediately leave him to walk after somebody else. He does not stop them. A man who had built something and then aimed it at the door.

In the modern world

The question they ask is a question about a location, and He does not answer it. He answers with an afternoon.

We are built the other way round. Faced with something we are not sure about, the modern instinct is to resolve it by information — read another book, listen to another argument, get the objections settled first, and then decide whether to go. It feels like diligence. Often it is a way of never having to be in the room.

He offers no argument here. He offers proximity, at four in the afternoon, for the rest of the day. Whatever happened in those hours was enough that one of the two went straight out and got his brother.

There is a version of this in ordinary life that anyone who has hired, or married, or joined anything will recognise. You cannot research your way to knowing what a person is like. At some point you spend a day.

The tidbit

It was about the tenth hour — around four in the afternoon.

Somebody remembered the time of day. This Gospel was set down decades after the fact, and the man telling it still knew what o’clock it was when he met Him. Nobody records the hour of an ordinary afternoon. You only know the time if the afternoon turned out to be the one that split your life in two.

The second disciple is never named in this passage. Andrew is named in the next verse; the tradition of the Church has long taken the unnamed one to be John himself, which would explain the clock.

This week

They ask Him for an address and He does not give them one. He gives them an afternoon — and the verb underneath their question, meneis, is the verb for staying that the whole Gospel will turn on. So this week cannot be more reading. Reading is the thing we do instead of being in the room. The practice is time spent with nothing to show for it, because that is exactly what those two were given, and it was enough.

This is the first week of a three-year road, and the practice for it is deliberately small.

Each day this week, give Him one unhurried stretch of time rather than one more thing read about Him. Twenty minutes will do. No book, no podcast, no argument to settle — the same twenty minutes each day, at roughly the same hour, doing nothing that produces a result.

You will find it harder than reading, and you will feel the pull to make it productive by about the third day. That pull is the thing worth noticing. They asked where He was staying, and were not given directions. They were given an afternoon.

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