Sermon — January 18, 2026
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings

“They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” (John 1:39)

I have to admit that four o’clock in the afternoon is not my favorite time of day.

It’s not that beautiful moment when I first wake up and get to reward myself for climbing out of bed by making a cup of coffee and then climbing back in. It’s not five o’clock, when it’s time to head home and start cooking dinner, with most of the day’s work in the rearview mirror. By four o’clock, lunch was long enough ago that I’ve started getting cranky. I’ve used up most of my mental energy for the day, but my to-do list isn’t done. Four o’clock comes every day, I suppose; I don’t think I’ve ever once looked forward to it.

But four o’clock is when Jesus comes and changes your life. Or at least—four o’clock was when Jesus came and changed their lives, these two disciples: Andrew and the one who isn’t named, but who some of the Church Fathers identify with John, the Beloved Disciple and author of the Gospel. It’s an ordinary afternoon, and they’re just hanging around with their teacher John the Baptist, when he exclaims, “Look! Here is the Lamb of God!” And they’re so intrigued by this that they follow Jesus as he walks by. Eventually he turns, and sees them there, and asks—

Well, there are two versions of what he asks. It depends on how you read his tone. If you imagine Jesus as a profound spiritual teacher in this moment—the incarnate Word of God, the Love of God made flesh among us—then you’d probably say that he asks these two disciples-to-be, “What are you looking for?” (John 1:38 NRSV) or even “What are you seeking?” (ESV) If you remind yourself that Jesus was fully divine and fully human; that it was, after all, about four o’clock in the afternoon, and that he’d just seen two strange man following behind him, you might say that he asks them, “What do you want?” (NIV)

Same words, three translations, two very different tones. But in any case, they ask him where he’s staying, and he simply answers, “Come and see.” (1:39) And they come with him, and the Gospel doesn’t tell us what it is that they see, but it’s so compelling that they prepare to leave everything behind, and follow him. And Simon Peter, brother of Andrew, and Andrew himself, and the unnamed disciple who is probably John become three of the Twelve who are at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry.

It was about four o’clock in an ordinary day. And by about 4:01, their lives had changed.

Returning for a moment to the topic of translation—“What are you looking for?” or “What are you seeking?” or “What do you want?” The translation of this particular verse isn’t that important, but the topic of translation itself seems to matter to the Gospel of John. Three times in these last few verses, John translates something for us, from the Hebrew and Aramaic that Jesus and his disciples spoke, into the Greek in which the Gospel is written; and our translators translate for us, from Greek into English. They say to him, “Rabbi,” which means “Teacher.” They tell Simon that they’ve found the “Messiah,” which means “Anointed” (in Greek, that’s “Christ.”) Jesus calls Simon “Cephas,” which is translated “Peter,” but that’s really the Greek form of the name; in English it should be translated, “Rock.”

Already, by the end of the first century or so, only a few decades after Jesus’ death, the traditions of the faith needed to be translated. Already the Gospel of John is written for an audience who spoke Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic; for an audience who were likely mostly Gentiles, rather than mostly Jews. And there were things they didn’t know, things that needed to be explained: What’s “Rabbi” mean? What’s the “Messiah”? Why do some people call Peter “Cephas” and others “Peter,” the Rock? If you were a Jew who spoke Hebrew or Aramaic, this would all be self-explanatory; if you were a Gentile who spoke Greek, maybe not so much.

Christianity is always in need of translation. None of us speak ancient Greek as our first tongue. But even this translation isn’t enough. You can understand every word in a sentence, and still not know what it means. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, and John the Baptist says, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” Which translated means… What exactly?

John talks about Jesus with symbolic language and philosophical claims. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” he tells us. “This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’” (John 1:29-30) These words are in English; that doesn’t mean that we know what they mean. There’s a second layer of translation that adds context and interpretation. This second layer might tell us, for example, that in the first sentence, the image of the “Lamb of God” evokes the Passover ritual of the sacrifice of lambs, which itself refers back to the story of the Exodus, and the lambs whose blood spread on the doorframes turned away the Angel of Death, such that Jesus is Lamb of God whose death at Passover will turn away the power of death from us; and that in the second sentence, John the Baptist reveals that Jesus is not only a man who was born a few months after John, he is also the incarnate Word of God, who existed before all time.

And all of that is interesting enough, at a theological level. But we still need a third layer of translation, from theology to life. John talks about Jesus in an elevated way, with winding syntax and complex ideas; we live at four o’clock in the afternoon, with growling stomachs and unfinished to-dos. It’s not that ideas don’t matter, and it’s not that anything John says is wrong; ideas do matter, and everything he says is true. But being told true ideas isn’t usually what changes people’s lives.

For that, you have to come and see.

Jesus wasn’t born to explain something to us. He was born to do something for us. He didn’t come to tell us that he was the Lamb of God, who would take away the sin of the world, he came to be the Lamb of God, and to take away the sin of the world. He didn’t come to explain the philosophical mechanism by which giving his own life for us would set us free from the power of death; he came to give his life for us, and to actually set us free from the power of death.

Translation is important. Interpretation is important. I’ve spent years of my life studying these things, because it matters what Jesus thought and what he said. But the foundation of our faith is what he did, and what he’s doing now.

Jesus comes to us in the four o’clock moments of our lives. He comes to us when we are distracted or tired, lonely or grieving. He comes, as well, when we are filled with joy or gratitude or praise. He meets us where we are and invites us to come and stay with him. He invites us to meet him in the Eucharist, or to sit with him in silence or in prayer. He invites us to see him in the faces of the people around us, and especially in those who are hungry, or in prison, or sick. If we stay with him a while, we’ll begin to learn more. There will be time for moral instruction and theological explanation. There will be endless hours of sermons to sit through on the way to his Body and Blood. There will always be another book to read, or another form of prayer to try, on the way deeper into a life of faith.

But life with Christ always begins with the simple question that Jesus asked those first disciples two thousand years ago, and which he asks each one of us: “What are you looking for?” And whatever we say in response, however vague or specific we may be, it turns out that his answer is the same. He invites us to come and stay with him; to search for what we’re looking for in his presence, and maybe even to find it there. He offers us an invitation that can come at the most ordinary time, but can change the rest of our lives: “Come and see.”