Franco
Zeffirelli’s six-hour miniseries ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ will be forty years old
this year. If you haven’t seen it, I’d highly recommend it; it’s probably the
best movie about the life of Jesus that’s ever been produced.
Not
that everything about it is entirely faithful to the gospel accounts; like many
film makers, Zeffirelli couldn’t resist the temptation to put his own mark on
the story. One change I found particularly intriguing was that Zeffirelli’s
Jesus hardly ever invites people to “follow me”. Instead, he looks at them with
a penetrating gaze, repeats their name, and says, “Stay with us”. “Andrew –
Philip – stay with us”, he says, and the other disciples grin at them and
welcome them into their little group.
That’s
not what the gospel writers said, of course, and yet I can’t help thinking it’s
not a bad way of expressing what Jesus’ invitation was all about. The problem
is, it’s a very counter-cultural way of looking at discipleship today. These
days we’re not very good at ‘staying’ anywhere or ‘staying focused’ on anything.
We’re not very good at working at our computers without clicking on a hyperlink
every five minutes, or stopping regularly to check our email. We’re not good at
committing ourselves long term to a small group at church; we’re so busy, we’ve
got so many other things going on in our lives, we can give Jesus four weeks
max, and then we’ll have to move on to somewhere else.
But
Christian discipleship is a long-term commitment; you can’t get the benefits of
it in a short time. There’s no such thing as an instant prayer life; there’s no
such thing as thirty-day transformation. Eugene Peterson has a phrase he likes
to use: ‘A long obedience in the same direction’. That’s Christian
discipleship: being willing to follow Jesus, and stay with him, day in and day
out, for years and years and years. Staying with him through exciting times and
through dry times. Following him when it’s easy and when it’s difficult. Being
faithful to him when we feel his presence and also when, for long periods of
time, we don’t. “Stay with us”. Don’t be an on-again, off-again Christian.
Don’t be one of those who gives up when the going gets tough or when your
fellow Christians get too annoying. “Stay with us”.
I
can hear echoes of that phrase in the story of Jesus’ invitation to Andrew and
his unnamed friend in today’s gospel. The scene is Judea, down by the Jordan
river, where John the Baptist was carrying out his ministry of preaching and
baptizing. He was announcing the coming of the Kingdom of God, and crowds were
flocking to him from all over the place. Some of them, no doubt, only stayed
for a day or two; they heard John’s message, wanted to be part of his Kingdom
of God movement, and so asked for baptism as a sign of their repentance. They
were sincere, I’m sure, but they had a lot going on, and they had to get back
to their regular lives.
But
some stayed, and became ‘disciples’ of John. Yes: John the Baptist, as well as
Jesus, had disciples. Lots of people did in the ancient world. It was the
standard way of learning – or, I should say, the standard way of experiencing
transformation. You didn’t just go to the professor’s classes and take notes on
his lectures. You hung around with him. You listened hard to every word that
came out of his mouth. If you were lucky, and if he let you, you moved in with
him, so that you could watch how he treated his wife and children, how he
treated the tradespeople who worked for him, how he dealt with stressful
situations. Your goal wasn’t just to learn the things your teacher knew. Your
goal was to become like your teacher.
That’s what it meant to be a disciple.
Andrew
and his friend were disciples of John the Baptist. Perhaps they had been there
at the moment when Jesus had been baptized; perhaps they had seen the Holy
Spirit descending on Jesus like a dove, and heard the voice from heaven saying
“This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well-pleased”. And now, the next
day, they were with John when Jesus walked by again, and they heard their
master say “Look, here is the Lamb of God” (John 1:36). Watch what happens
next:
The
two disciples heard (John) say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned
and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said
to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means ‘Teacher’), “where are you staying?” He
said to them, “Come and see”. They came and saw where he was staying, and they
remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.
“Where
are you staying?” That seems like a strange thing to ask, doesn’t it? I’ve been
rector of this parish for nearly seventeen years, and I’ve rarely been asked
the question, “Where do you live?” People who want my help make an appointment
to come see me in my office. People who want to learn more about the Christian
life sign up for a course at the church. Very few people feel the need to know
my address!
But
in the time of Jesus discipleship was all about personal contact. If these two
men were going to become disciples of Jesus, they had to know where he was
going to be, because they had to be there with him. They needed to be able to
stay with him, to watch him, to listen to him, to pay close attention to all
that he was doing, so that they could imitate him.
Actually,
in John’s Gospel, Jesus is a disciple too. A few chapters later he says to his
disciples,
“Very
truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the
Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father
loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing…” (John 5:19-20a).
So
Jesus, the human being, also needed to model himself on someone. As God the Son
of course, he shared the nature of the Father, but when he accepted the
limitations of our humanity and became one of us, he had to grow and learn just
like we do. But he had such a close relationship with God the Father – he had
learned the secret of listening to him and watching what he was doing – and he
modelled his own actions and words on the things he saw and heard from his
Father. And now he calls us, in our turn, to come close to him, so we can model our actions and words on the things we see and
hear from him.
“Stay
with us”. Don’t be in a hurry. Be willing to take time to watch, time to
listen, time to absorb what Jesus is doing. In Rowan Williams’ beautiful new book
‘Being Disciples’, he says that this is very much like being a birdwatcher. I’m
a bit of a birdwatcher, so this image resonates with me. Listen to what
Williams says:
‘I’ve
always loved that image of prayer as birdwatching. You sit very still because
something is liable to burst into view, and sometimes of course it means a long
day sitting in the rain with nothing very much happening. I suspect that, for
most of us, a lot of our experience of prayer is precisely that. But the odd
occasions when you do see what T.S. Eliot… called “the kingfisher’s wing”
flashing “light to light” make it all worthwhile. And I think that living in
this sort of expectancy – living in awareness, your eyes sufficiently open and
your mind both relaxed and attentive enough to see that when it happens – is
basic to discipleship’.[1]
“Rabbi,
where are you staying?” “Stay with us”. What does that mean for us today? We
can’t ‘stay’ with Jesus in the sense of discovering his address and moving in
with him. So how do we ‘stay’ with him? Let me make three suggestions.
First,
the most fundamental thing is that we stay
with him in prayer. Jesus himself was a person of prayer; that was how he
‘stayed with’ his Father. We’re told in the gospels that it was his regular
custom to get up early in the morning, a great while before day, and go out to
lonely places so he could pray. On at least one occasion those prayer times
lasted all night long; most times, I suspect, they were shorter than that. But
he made a habit of it, and we can be sure those times helped make him the
person he was – the person who did nothing unless he first saw his Father doing
it.
What
did he actually do during those times
of prayer? We aren’t told very much about it, but if we work from the prayer
Jesus gave us as a model, the one we call ‘the Lord’s Prayer’, we can be sure he
wasn’t just presenting his daily shopping list to God. The Lord’s Prayer starts
by focusing on God’s concerns, not ours: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be
your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven’. A person who begins their prayer like that is
a person who has spent a lot of time in silence, listening, watching for ‘the
flash of the kingfisher’s wing’ – paying attention to the silence, because they
know that’s where they’ll sense the presence of God, and perhaps even hear a
quiet word from God in their hearts.
So
our prayers need to leave time for this quiet watching and listening. We can’t
rush them. My own experience is that this seems to get easier with age. When I
was young I seemed to have a lot of things I wanted to say to God. Now that I’m
older, I’m more content just to be with God, to be quiet in God’s presence.
It’s not that I don’t say anything; far from it! But I do enjoy just sitting in
the quiet, or walking in the quiet, trying to pay attention to what’s going on,
so that I don’t miss the signs that God is with me, that God has things he wants
to communicate to me.
All
of us have a lot of demands on our time these days. Many of us have family
responsibilities, especially those of us who care for small children. It’s not
easy to make time for prayer. It wasn’t easy for Jesus either, living as he did
in a world where most houses were small and real privacy was rare. I suspect
that Jesus did a lot of praying together, with others; I don’t think he was
always trying to escape from them. But he felt the need for that alone time
with God, too, and he made it happen. As his disciples, we watch what he does,
and we imitate him.
We
stay with him in prayer, and we also stay
with him in the Scriptures. Jesus, of course, never owned a Bible in his
life. Most people in his world didn’t; the printing press was far in the
future, and handwritten books were only affordable to the very rich. But Jewish
people in the time of Jesus gathered often to hear the scriptures read in
public, and they committed large passages to memory; people without access to
books tend to have better memories for that kind of thing. And we know that
Jesus was familiar with the writings of the prophets and the psalms; they were
the story of his people, of course, and he heard God speaking to him through
them.
Again,
this is something you can’t do in a hurry. Becoming familiar with the story the
Bible tells isn’t something you can accomplish in a short time. We need to make
Bible reading a habit, something we do regularly, either alone or in the
company of someone else. A few years ago our bishop challenged us to read
through the Bible in a year using a daily scheme of readings she provided for
us, and I know that some of you did that. Those kinds of plans can be helpful,
but there’s nothing wrong with reading more slowly, too – savouring every word,
using your imagination to put yourself in the story you’re reading, listening
for what God might want to say to you in what you read.
So
as we think about being disciples of Jesus – of ‘staying’ with him – we need to
think about making time for prayer and for reading the scriptures. And the
third thing I want to remind you of is this: we stay with him by being with the poor and needy. Jesus meets with
us Sunday by Sunday as we gather here to worship God and share the Eucharist,
but he spends his working week among the poor and needy. That’s what he tells
us in Matthew chapter 25; he reminds us that when we feed the hungry, clothe
the naked, welcome the stranger, visit the sick or the prisoner, it’s really
Jesus we’re serving. He’s present everywhere, but most especially among the
poor and marginalized. If we want to meet him – if we want to ‘stay with him’ –
then we need to go and look for him there.
I
don’t need to give you folks lessons about this; some of you are heavily
involved in volunteering with organizations that make a difference in the lives
of the poor. But of course, the needs are enormous and there’s always more we
could do. Generosity with our money, generosity with our time, a willingness to
build real relationships with people, to listen to their stories, to have
genuine human contact with people who are often excluded and ignored – that’s
all part of ‘staying with’ Jesus by ‘staying with’ the poor – with ‘Christ’s
poor’ as they were often known in the Middle Ages.
Let
me close by saying this: most of us are here today because we’re hungry for
God. We know that Jesus is the one who reveals God to us, and he’s the one who
teaches us to know God. So we’ve become his disciples. We’re watching him,
listening for his voice, trying to see what he’s doing, so we can imitate him.
“Rabbi,
where are you staying?” we ask. Where can we find you, Lord Jesus? In
Zeffirelli’s movie, Jesus replies “Stay with us”. As we go into this new year,
as we think about growing as disciples, let’s think about these three ways we
‘stay with him’. Let’s ‘stay with him’ by spending time in prayer, listening as
well as talking. Let’s ‘stay with him’ by spending time in the scriptures, so
that the stories that shaped Jesus can shape us as well. And let’s ‘stay with
him’ by spending time with the people who need our help, the poor and needy,
the downtrodden and the marginalized.
Jesus
is calling us this morning. “Follow me. Stay
with me”. How are you going to answer that call this year?
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