‘I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain ….’ Those strikingly negative words stand out for me from our readings today. We heard them read as the words of God’s servant in Isaiah’s 49th chapter, after the Lord’s claim that he formed and shaped him ‘from the womb’, and in response to the Lord’s call to glorify him. They are words that suggest unworthiness, or even despair; I gather that the Hebrew word translated as ‘nought’ can also mean chaos, implying that this individual might feel he has wasted his energies in empty and futile pursuits. That pessimistic outburst makes stark contrast to all the rest of today’s scriptures, whose overwhelming theme (even in Isaiah) is God’s call to us – both to his light, and to bring his light to others. Jesus’ penetrating question to those two disciples of John the Baptist who start following him at a distance – “what seek ye?”, and his tantalising reply when they ask him ‘where dwellest thou?’ -“Come and see”, are brimming with invitation and possibility. His words speak to people’s deepest longing in any age.
It seems that there was much civil unrest – not unlike the unrest seen in so many parts of our contemporary world – during the years of Jesus’s ministry, with many Jewish zealots acting and campaigning against the occupying Romans. The Romans were so unsettled by this that the Jewish historian Josephus recounts that they crushed one violent uprising which started in Galilee with such force that they crucified 2,000 Galileans. In that region, many hopes were being pinned on a future Messiah who would throw out the Romans and restore the dignity of the Hebrew race, and in some popular literature the image of a ‘lamb’, who would come to destroy evil, was prevalent. This may have been what initially came to the minds of John the Baptist’s disciples when he referred to Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God’ as he came towards them. But Christian understanding of this term would of course come to be shaped by a later chapter of Isaiah, which refers to a ‘servant’ who would bear the sins of the people ‘like a lamb to the slaughter’; not a warrior, but a servant Son of God who would take the consequences of human greed and hatred upon himself, to place us in a different relationship with Him and with one another. In his famous writing, ‘The City of God’, this shift of relationship was summed-up by St Augustine in vivid terms which are perhaps controversial and provocative, but seem to speak into the chaos, disorder and anxiety we are seeing just now:-
There exist in this world two cities created by two kinds of love: the earthly city created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, and the heavenly city created by the love of God. The earthly city glories in itself, whereas the heavenly city glories only in its Lord. In the former, the lust for power controls its functionaries and determines the fate of the nations it subjugates; in the city of God those in authority and those under them serve one another in love.
If you prefer a slightly more nuanced expression of the Christian response to God’s call now, you only need to look to today’s Collect, which simply acknowledges that ‘in Christ’, Almighty God makes ‘all things new’, and which asks God to ‘transform the poverty of our nature by the riches of [his] grace’. Perhaps Jesus’ question, ‘what seek ye?’, is at heart an invitation to know ourselves. It is God’s grace that gives answer to the despair of imagining that our lives are unworthy and that all our efforts for good are futile. This is what the Collect asks God for: ‘by the renewal of our lives make known thy heavenly glory’. This is what happens in this morning’s Gospel after Andrew and the other disciple ‘come and see’, have their first encounter with Jesus, and then Andrew immediately brings his brother Simon Peter to him. And John the Baptist should not be ignored as one who demonstrates to us this Grace of God as Jesus himself was now emerging to prominence. Here was a man who had disciples of his own, who would dramatically call people to repent, and was used to being at the very centre of all the high theatre of that repentance, with people flocking to him for baptism in the River Jordan. And yet here he is, now ‘reduced’ (in the eyes of the ‘earthly city’) to pointing people onwards to ‘the Lamb of God’ who is, in his words, “a man which is preferred before me”, and who will baptize with the Holy Ghost – stepping aside, to recede into the background. He offers a salutary reflection, not just for those of us in the more obviously self-advertising world of the arts, media and business, but equally for those who exercise office or ministry in the church, whose unity we pray for this week.
God’s servant in Isaiah, having protested ‘I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity….’, then relents: ‘yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God’. John’s cause, his orientation, his reward was similarly ‘with the Lord’. May ours be, also.