Two of the most common things Jesus said were, “Follow me!” and “Come and see!”
And that’s our story for this week. Of all the thousands of people who came into the wilderness to see John the Baptist, only four saw Jesus and followed him.
I can hear someone say when Jesus walked up, “Who is that?” And his friend says, “I don’t know; we came to see John baptize!”
In 2007, The Washington Post organized an experiment to see if people would recognize “beauty in a banal setting at an inconvenient time.”
They set Joshua Bell up at the top of an escalator at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington, D.C. He was dressed in a long-sleeved T-shirt and a baseball cap, and for 45 minutes he played six complex selections on a 1713 Stradivarius violin worth $3.5 million. Just three days earlier, he’d played to a sold-out crowd in a Boston theater where tickets averaged $100.
A total of 1,097 people walked past him while he played, but only seven stopped to listen for at least a minute. Every child who walked past tried to stop and listen, but they all were hurried along by a parent.
Bell collected $32.17, but $20 of that came from the one person who actually recognized him. Gene Weingarten won a Pulitzer Prize for the story about how we often miss the extraordinary because we’re busy with the ordinary. And now we need to get back to two of those four, who John the Baptist addressed:
“He said to them, ‘Come, and you will see.’ So, they came and saw where He was staying, and they stayed with Him that day; it was about the tenth hour. One of the two who heard John speak, and followed Him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his own brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah.” (which translated means “the Christ.”) — John 1: 39-41 see WHATLEY, Page 7 Andrew was the quiet disciple of John the Baptist, but when John the Baptist pointed to Jesus as the Lamb of God, he left to follow Jesus. He doesn’t preach, or debate, or question. He finds Simon Peter and says, “Come and see for yourself!”
He’s a great example of what it means to be a road sign for Jesus! History will forever remember Peter as the preacher at Pentecost, but most will forget Andrew who first brought him to Jesus.
We all should remember Andrew.
Charles “Buddy” Whatley is a retired United Methodist pastor serving Dawson Street Methodist Church in Thomasville, Ga.
