John 1:29-42 "What Do You Want?" Scott Hoezee

The folks in Hollywood love to shower themselves with awards. There are, of course, awards presented in other fields: journalism and literature have the Pulitzer, the sciences and related fields have the Nobel Prize, and even religious folks get in on the action through things like Christianity Today's "Book of the Year Award" and the lucrative "Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion." But no single field has an array of awards like the entertainment industry: the Golden Globe Awards, the People's Choice Awards, the New York Film Critics Awards, the Emmy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival Awards, the Tony Awards, the Grammy Awards, the American Film Institute Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, and of course the Academy Awards.

Now whether you're like me and find some quirky desire to watch who wins these prizes, or whether you find these shows to be a most ludicrous spectacle, you are probably familiar with what often happens before these ceremonies begin. Outside the theater hosting the show, they literally roll out the red carpet. Velvet ropes cordon off the walkway leading to the entrance, and sometimes a few tiers of bleachers are erected for spectators. Hours, and sometimes even days, before the show begins, crowds gather hoping to catch a glimpse of the stars. Then, as the limos begin pulling up and depositing their precious celebrity cargo, cheers and screams emanate from the spectators as the likes of Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney, begin their high-profile trek down the red carpet, stopping frequently to speak into the microphones being shoved their way by eager reporters.

It's amazing how much excitement can be generated by having the right kind of person simply walk past you. That's why there is a kind of delicious contrast provided by John 1. There has never been a more important celebrity on this planet than Jesus. Yet John 1 makes clear that without some extra divine help, you would hardly be able to pick Jesus out of a crowd. Even John the Baptist admits that if God hadn't let him see the Spirit descending onto Jesus like a dove, he himself wouldn't have known who Jesus was.

If you look at it from the right angle, John 1 is almost hilarious in being so understated. Jesus had no red carpet to walk on. He wasn't a George Clooney-type who became the center of attention wherever he went, causing people to crane their necks to see him. In verses 29-34 John declares some amazing things about Jesus. Yet the very next day it looks as though Jesus is still wandering around as just another face in the crowd. Verse 35 tells us that the day after John saw the Spirit descend on Jesus, John is chatting with a couple of his own disciples. Suddenly John notices that Jesus is shuffling past and so he says to his friends, "Well now, look over there: it's the Lamb of God!"

It is so outrageously casual! Imagine you and a friend were sitting at Woodland Mall sipping a cup of coffee while you watched your fellow shoppers walk past. But then suppose you spied Jimmy Carter mixed into the crowd but with no entourage surrounding him, no one paying any attention to him--he's just another face in a rather large crowd of shoppers. "Well there's something you don't see every day," you might quietly say to your coffee-drinking companion, " there goes a former President of the United States!"

"The world was made through him," the apostle John wrote earlier in this chapter, "but when he was in the world, it didn't recognize him." Indeed, it didn't. Jesus existed as just another face in the crowd. Even his own cousin, John the Baptist, almost missed recognizing him. And yet hidden inside that one man was all the power of God. Somewhere under those modest outer trappings shined the light of the world, the light that just is the truest Life of every one of us, if indeed we have true Life at all.

But it took a specially designated person like John to point him out to the world. Verse 32 tells us that John gave a testimony about Jesus. He's like a witness in a courtroom who testifies to something in front of a jury. That's all John the Baptist could do: proffer a testimony, bear witness, tell what he believed was the truth. And so as in any courtroom trial, it is up to others to believe him or not. Do you find John a credible witness? Can you believe him? All we have to go on are his words. And what words they are!

Did you catch how striking John's testimony is? Probably not. I doubt that many of you batted an eye a few minutes ago when you heard the phrase "the lamb of God." You've heard and sung that phrase countless times before. It is one of the most famous pieces of Christian jargon. But did you know that John 1 is the only place in the entire Bible where it is used? No Old Testament prophet ever referred to God's Messiah as "the lamb of God" before John 1 and no New Testament writer will repeat it after John 1, either. Even in the Book of Revelation, where the apostle John often mentions the image of the Lamb, the exact phrase "the lamb of God" is not repeated.

To this day scholars have not come to a consensus as to what John the Baptist meant by this designation for Jesus. The most obvious choice is to connect this to the Passover lamb but even this is disputed by many. But if you do not go that route, the other options are limited to a single verse scattered here or there in the Old Testament, the best known of which is Isaiah 53's passing reference to a lamb being led silently to the slaughter. But how likely would it have been that John the Baptist would generate a whole new title for God's Messiah based on one little obscure verse? And so the discussions and debates go on.

We need not enter into those scholarly arguments today, but I mention this only as a way to say that if even 2,000 years later people are not certain as to what this phrase means, how likely is it that the people on that long ago day understood it!? If, as appears to be the case, this phrase was a novelty, perhaps coined by John the Baptist himself, then how did it strike those around him? The people had long been looking for the Messiah, but in the form of a king, a warrior, a hero. So calling Jesus a lamb would hardly have conjured up the idea of the Messiah. It maybe seemed downright queer or even cruel.

Even today you sometimes hear people described in animal terms, but nine times out of ten such designations are not complimentary. No one wants to be called "a pig" at the dinner table. If a high school boy refers to a girl as a real "dog," it's not kind. Still other times someone may be called "bull-headed," a "bird brain," a "cow," a "scaredy cat," a "barracuda," a "pit bull," and so forth. Each carries with it a certain descriptive connotation but none is very positive.

John calls Jesus "a lamb," which could have been perceived a couple of different ways. Lambs are often a symbol of gentleness, meekness, and vulnerability. In this sense, calling Jesus a lamb could have been a nice thing to say, but it would hardly be the type of description that would fit the Messiah. Certainly the average politician wouldn't be very successful in getting elected if the main way people thought about him was that he was a real lamb of a guy! But, of course, in Jesus' day, because there was that long history in Israel of using lambs as sacrifices, there was another sense in which hearing Jesus called "a lamb" might have struck some people as cruel. Maybe it would be like today calling someone a "turkey" or a "dumb bunny." Calling Jesus a lamb may have sounded like the equivalent of accusing Jesus of being a little dumb, someone easy to gang up on.

But whether this title meant Jesus was very meek or that he was destined for the chopping block, either way it didn't seem to indicate Jesus would be very effective in the long run. Nice guys finish last and sacrificial lambs are just finished eventually. Yet John adds the kicker line that somehow this particular lamb-like Jesus would "take away the sin of the world." So now we have the image of a lamb and the concept of sin in the same sentence. But since the only traditional connection between lambs and sin had always involved the death of the hapless lamb, John is clearly introducing a very dark theme. This isn't the kind of thing you'd say about someone who was on his way to the top of this world's heap. This isn't how you'd describe a celebrity on a red carpet or a politician on his way to the platform where he had just been nominated for president.

John could just as easily have said, "Behold, the one who is going down the tubes! Behold the loser, the victim, the dead man walking." How odd it must have sounded. The next day, though, John repeats it, letting you know that it wasn't some foolish slip-of-the-tongue on John's part. This is central to who this Jesus was. And maybe the oddness of that phrase was itself enough to catch the attention of those two disciples of John. They leave John behind and start trotting along after Jesus, probably curious as to just who it could be that would fit that lamb description John just gave.

And that's when it happens. Jesus hears the crunch of gravel behind him and so turns around. He then asks the most simple of questions, though on the lips of our Lord, it becomes the most profound of questions: "What do you want?" Literally Jesus asks, "What is it you are seeking?" We hear similar questions all the time. You knock on my office door some day and I look up to ask, "Yes? May I help you?" The waitress comes to your table and says, "Do you know what you want?" The telemarketer calls during dinner but you finally cut him off in mid-sentence to ask, "Can you just tell me what you want?"

"What are you looking for? What are you seeking? What do you want," Jesus asks. A simple question, unless the one asking it is the Son of God, the Lamb of God who is here to take away the sin of the world! Two weeks ago during Sunday school I asked eight of our young people to imagine that they had been at Jesus' baptism and then further to imagine what they would have asked Jesus that day had they been there. They came up with some really good stuff, including wanting to ask Jesus why there is suffering in the world, what God is like, how creation came into being. Good, big questions for a good and big Savior.

But today imagine you are one of these two men and Jesus asks you, "What do you want?" Now imagine the answer you'd give Jesus. Surely you'd want to muster something profound like, "I want to know the meaning of life. What's it all about? I want to understand how to square a good God with the bad things that happen in this world. I want to know what my future holds." But these two disciples say no such things. "What do you want?" Jesus asks. Their reply? "We want to know where you're staying."

I don't know about you, but at first blush this looks like a blown opportunity! You've got the Son of the living God, the lamb of God, writing you a blank check, giving you the chance of a lifetime to tell him what you want, and all you can come up with is, "So, where are you hanging your hat these days?"!!! But that's just at first blush. The fact is, these two disciples didn't blow it. They didn't give a bad answer. "What do you want?" Jesus asked. In a way their reply was, "We want you!" What's that line from that old African-American spiritual? "You can have all this world, but give me Jesus!"

They wanted Jesus. They wanted to be where he was, wherever that was. They wanted to follow where he led, even though John's words about a lamb who takes away sin probably tipped them off that where this Jesus would lead wouldn't be up to the top any of this world's pyramids but down into sacrifice and death. Nevertheless, they wanted Jesus.

"Where are you staying?" they said. "Come and you will see," Jesus replies. He didn't issue a bunch of pre-requisites, didn't make them jump through some moral hoops before letting them take what were quite literally their first steps of discipleship. Jesus didn't say, "First you have to see me in full faith and only then may you come along with me."

That's the way we sometimes frame it. Come and talk to us after you have your act together. Come and join our church after we're sure you've got your spiritual and moral vision clear. Jesus says, "Come, and then you will see." So they did. And I don't know just what those two saw that first evening, but for Andrew at least it was enough for him to run at the crack of dawn the next day to find his dear brother Simon. "We've found the Messiah" Andrew impossibly claimed. And so Andrew brought his brother to the Lord. Jesus liked this Simon fellow from the first, which is why he immediately gave him a new nickname, one that would stick forever. "Simon," Jesus said, "I'm going to call you 'Rocky!'" Because even though Jesus could see that this Simon was an impetuous, tempestuous bundle of nerves and energy, this man also had a solid core of love and faithfulness that would make him the Rock on which Jesus could one day build his church.

So began the gospel. So began the church. So began that little clutch of disciples whose devotion to their master would, against all odds, go on to change the whole world. Somehow it all began when two disciples answered the ultimate question, "What do you want?" with the simply profound and profoundly simple answer, "We want you, Jesus."

What do you want? That's not a question from a long-ago day addressed to people we've never met. That's this morning's question, January 20, 2002. What do you want, Calvin Church? What do you want, Scott, Mary, Jerry, Joe, Doris, Betty? In a red-carpet world of celebrity-driven media hype, we often find ourselves surrounded by people who give the wrong answers to that ultimate question. Maybe we, too, sometimes find ourselves looking in the wrong direction to discover what we want.

We want success, a spot in the limelight, our fifteen minutes of fame, a piece of the good life, financial security, to be noticed--we want the kinds of things that someone described as a lamb is unlikely to lead us to. I feel those clutchings of ego the same as most of you. I, too, could start filling in the pages of a legal pad if someone gave me the blanket chance to say just what it is I want in life. And it wouldn't necessarily be all about me but might be things I want for my kids or my wife or you as my congregation and friends. As such, some of those things we might put under the "wanted" category wouldn't be all bad. But the point today is that none of it is the right answer, at least not if it's Jesus who is asking the question. John the Baptist wants to arrest our attention with a phrase to which we've grown altogether too accustomed: the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. He doesn't look like much more than a face in the crowd. He's not glamorous, and so plenty of people then and since have missed noticing him.

Jesus was not much to look at and John's quirky metaphor didn't change that. Still, maybe we, like those two disciples, have been prompted by the grace of God's Spirit to follow after this Jesus to see what this man is all about. And maybe we've heard him ask, as surely he asks afresh right now, "What do you want?" In a way, as with those first two disciples, we maybe don't know what we want until we come to Jesus and see who he is.

And in so seeing this Jesus, we may discover a fathomless desire for nothing else but him. "What do you want?" We want you, Jesus. We want to stay where you're staying. Because somehow by being with you and abiding in you, we just know that we're going to find out just what it is we want, and it will be Jesus. It's been Jesus we've been looking for all along, whether we knew it or not. The good news is that he's here. People of God, behold, the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. It's Jesus. It's the One we want. Come and you will see. You really will! Amen.