Epiphany 2 : “Where are you staying?”

 Isaiah 49.1-9, John 1.29-42

Two disciples of John the Baptist follow Jesus, directed to him by John. John has been preaching that God’s Messiah is coming, the one who will bring in the new kingdom of God they have been longing for in the midst of a time of oppression and occupation. Here he is, says John. Follow him. And so they do. They tag along after Jesus, unobtrusively, or so they think, just to see what’s going to happen. But Jesus knows they are there, and he turns to them and says “What are you looking for?”

They could have answered, “the meaning of life” or “the secret of happiness” or “world peace”… but no, all they can come up with is “where are you staying?” 

For many years I thought that answer was completely inane. To be honest, I wrote it off as the kind of thing that comes into your head in a moment of panic when you are put on the spot, when you want to impress someone –  the new boss, the VIP visitor, someone you really fancied – only to find that, when the moment comes you spout gibberish and forever afterwards you cringe at the memory of it. Or maybe that’s just me! 

That’s what I thought these disciples had done. “Where are you staying?” What kind of stupid question is that? But I have come to realise that actually, it is a really vital question, the thing that they really do most need to know.

Think about it. You meet someone randomly – on a train, let’s say. They sit down opposite you and you fall into conversation, and, as the conversation develops you realise that this person is a soul mate, someone with whom you feel a deep connection, maybe the love of your life. What’s the one thing you absolutely must remember to do before they get off at their station and you go your separate ways? Swap phone numbers, or email addresses, or something that will enable you to find one another again. How many beautiful friendships or even romances have been snuffed out at birth because people realised, as the train pulled out of the station that they had no way of contacting the other person again…? What a tragedy!

At the time of Jesus, there were no phones or email or Whatsapp or Snapchat or whatever. If you wanted to keep in contact with someone you needed to know where they lived, or where they hung out regularly. So, when these two disciples ask that apparently trivial question “Where are you staying?” what they are actually saying is “We want to know more. We want to get to know you better. We want to be part of what you are doing, and we can only do that if we know where to find you again.”  They don’t want this just to be a fleeting encounter, something to tell their grandchildren about one day – “we actually met that Jesus of Nazareth – just the once, but it made our day”. They realise that this man isn’t just going to make their day. He’s going to make their lives, so long as they know where to find him. 

Fortunately, Jesus hears what lies beneath their simple question, and, wonderfully, he doesn’t just give them his address and tell them that he might be able to fit them in a week on Thursday. He says “Come and see” – right here, right now.

And the story tells us that they went with Jesus and they “saw where he was staying. And they remained with him that day.”  What did they talk about? What did they do through all those long hours together. We have no idea. The Bible doesn’t tell us.

I love that about this story because it gives us the space to imagine ourselves in that situation. What would we talk about? What would we do? What would it be like for us? What difference might it make to us if we got to “stay with Jesus” like they did?

Staying. Remaining. Abiding. Dwelling. These are all very significant words in John’s Gospel – often the same word, actually, translated in different ways. The Gospel begins by telling us that “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and later on, at the Last Supper, Jesus talks at length about abiding. He tells us we need to be like a branch grafted onto a grape vine. “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me….”(15.4) He talks about the need to “abide” in his love, just as he “abides” in his Father’s love, so that “my joy may be in you” and  “your joy may be complete”.

We live in a world, and at a time, where not much seems to abide for long, where certainties seem to be crumbling. We wake up every morning thinking “What? Really?” as one shocking thing after another happens, as a world order that has remained relatively stable for as long as most of us can remember seems to be collapsing around us. There is rapid technological change to deal with too and the climate crisis. It’s not surprising if we feel unmoored, anxious about the future. What’s going to happen next? No one knows.

How shall we survive these times? Only by finding a place where we can abide, stay, remain, put down deep roots into good soil. I wonder what that means, what that looks like for me and for you? Those first disciples discovered their security in Jesus, the one who stayed with them, who stuck with them, even to death on a cross. They learned to trust the abiding love of God, and to abide in it themselves. What about us? We’re invited to come and see, just as they were, to find that “abiding place” for ourselves.

Amen