Transcript
Jesus Says, “Come and See”
Richmond’s First Baptist, January 4, 2026
Second Sunday after Christmas Day
John 1:35-51
When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.”
For twelve years I lived in Kentucky, and for five of those years I lived less than thirty miles from Cane Ridge. Once, when I was in the neighborhood, I stopped by and looked at the historical marker that mentioned “a famous revival attended by pioneers of many faiths.”
Have you heard of it?
There’s a wonderful article by Mark Galli, the former editor of Christianity Today, that tells the whole story. I’ll share some of it here. Galli says that, “In August, 1801, a crowd of people gathered at the Cane Ridge meeting house in Kentucky for an annual communion service, but it soon became much more than that. The year before a fire-and-brimstone preacher named John McGready had stirred up the crowd at a similar communion service. A woman who had “long sought assurance for her salvation began to shout and sing.” A Methodist minister named John McGee exhorted the congregation to “let the Lord God omnipotent reign in their hearts, and to submit to him.” People began to cry and shout. By the end of the service the floor of the meeting house was covered with those who had fainted in a fit of religious ecstasy—“slain in the Spirit”—so to speak.
And so, the next year, people anticipated that something unusual might happen. A crowd of more than 10,000 showed up at Cane Ridge intending to stay for a while. They camped on the grounds, and cooked their meals over open fires. The Saturday morning services had been quiet, but then, “Excitement mounted, and amid smoke and sweat, the camp erupted in noise: the cries and shouts of the penitent, the crying of babies, the shrieking of children, and the neighing of horses. Then the tumultuous bodily ‘exercises’ began. Along with the shouting and crying, some began falling, others began jerking so violently that one witness reported a woman’s long hair “cracking like a whip.”
“As dark descended, campfires cast large shadows against the trees; candles, lamps, and torches illumined the camp as hundreds moved to and fro, ‘like Gideon’s army’; preachers shouted sermons from the tent as people exhorted from the ground; some chanted hymns, others ecstatic hosannas—and always the mournful wailing for sin. ‘The noise was like the roar of Niagara,’ wrote a participant. ‘The vast sea of human beings seemed to be agitated as if by a storm.’”[i] People didn’t know what to make of the experience, but this much is clear: when it was over “religion suddenly became the talk of the region and nation. Traveling to Lexington a year later, one man reported that he heard ‘little else than the great revival of religion.’”[ii] In the succeeding months, revivals spread through Kentucky and Tennessee.
In fact, the revival service became the new model for worship in Baptist churches, as thoughtful, biblical sermons were replaced by spirited evangelistic appeals for personal conversion, often preceded by emotional hymns to soften the heart and followed by lengthy, hand-wringing invitations from the pulpit (as the organist played “Just As I Am”). If that model sounds familiar to you, it’s because it’s the model still used by many if not most Baptist churches, where the slow and tedious work of making disciples (even though it was commanded by Christ himself) has been exchanged for the temporary thrill of “saving souls.” Some of you can still remember week-long revival services in those churches, and if you can then maybe you’ve heard of camp meetings. Here’s the way they are described in the New Georgia Encyclopedia:
Camp meetings lasted up to five days and featured revival preaching day and night. Persons of all denominations took turns exhorting would-be converts. Repentant sinners were asked to approach the “anxious bench,” where they sat with all eyes on them until they were converted to Christ’s cause. Camp meetings induced sensational results: some observers described participants laughing out loud, barking like dogs, falling down as if dead, and experiencing “the jerks.” During the so-called Second Great Awakening, from about 1790 through 1830, camp meetings became one of the most popular ways to preach the revival message.[iii]
Why am I telling you all this? Because I believe that the camp meetings held at that time in history are the closest thing we have to what was happening when John the Baptist was preaching out there in the wilderness. I have been to the place described in John 1, as “Bethany beyond the Jordan,” and I have looked at the historical marker that describes a baptismal site going back to the first century. I have imagined that site crowded with people who were either waiting to be baptized or waiting to see what would happen next. And I have seen in the hills around that site a number of small caves, where people might have stayed for days at a time.
So, when we look at this part of John’s Gospel, let’s keep all that in mind. This was the first-century equivalent of an evangelistic camp meeting, with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in attendance, and lots of things happening.
- First of all, John was preaching and baptizing. According to the other Gospel accounts he was telling people to repent because the Kingdom of God was at hand and they were listening to every word he said. Large crowds were coming out to him from Jerusalem and all that region around the Jordan, confessing their sins, repenting, and being baptized.
- Secondly, word got back to Jerusalem, and the religious authorities sent some priests and Levites to investigate. They asked John, “Who are you, anyway? Are you the Messiah? No. Are you Elijah? No. Are you the Prophet? No. Who are you then? Give us an answer for those who sent us.” And that’s when John quoted the prophet Isaiah, saying, “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’” But they asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you’re not the Messiah, or Elijah, or the Prophet?” And he said, “I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the strap of his sandal.” And that’s when the rumor began to spread that the Messiah himself might show up at this camp meeting. And then he did.
- Unlike the other Gospels, in this one John doesn’t know who Jesus is, but he has been told by God that, “The one on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” So when he saw it—when he saw the Spirit descend and remain on Jesus—he knew he was the one: the Chosen One. He told the crowds later, “I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” It’s as if Jesus had been covered in mud, and only when John washed it off could you see who he really was.
- The next day John was standing with two of his disciples when he saw Jesus walk by and said, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” They heard him say it, and they followed Jesus. When he saw them following he turned and said, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” and he said, “Come and see.” So, they came [to his campsite], and they remained with him for the rest of that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.”
I remember preaching on this text back in 2011, and telling a story about Blythe Taylor, my associate at Wingate Baptist Church, who had led a Bible study on this same passage. I said, When she got to that line about it being “four o’clock in the afternoon” she said something I had never thought of before. It was so fresh and meaningful that when I was getting ready to preach the same text a few years later I couldn’t even look at it in the same way. But I also couldn’t remember exactly what she had said. I thought it was the illustration she had used that impressed me so much, and so I called her into my office and asked her if she remembered it.
She thought for a while and then said, “Nope. I don’t remember.”
“What was it?” I asked. “That wonderful story you told.” I felt it slipping through my fingers, and the Sunday sermon right along with it, but then she said, “I’ll check my notes.” I sat there at my desk with a clean sheet of paper in front of me, pen in hand, just waiting for Blythe to come in and tell me that story. But a few minutes later she came back in, looking a little embarrassed. “It was the Brady Bunch,” she said.
“The Brady Bunch?” (and some of you might not even remember the Brady Brunch. It was a popular television show from the seventies. It was the story of a lovely lady who was bringing up three very lovely girls. All of them had hair of gold, just like their mother, but one of them had a huge crush on Davy Jones, the lead singer for the Monkees. And if you don’t remember the Brady Brunch, then you probably won’t remember the Monkees, either. Anyway) Blythe said, “Do you remember that episode where Marsha is home alone and Davy Jones, the singer, stops by the house?”
“Maybe…”
“Well, she was president of the Davy Jones fan club, and he stops by the house to see her and gives her a kiss on the cheek and she says, ‘I’ll never wash this cheek again.’”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
So, I thought to myself, it must not have been the illustration that impressed me so much. It must have been the idea, and that I could remember. Blythe had said that those significant moments in your life are often marked by a heightened awareness. Everything comes into sharp focus, and you find that years afterward you can still remember minute details of the experience: the precise blue of the sky, the smell of the air, the time of day.
“It was about four o’clock in the afternoon,” John says, when two disciples encountered Jesus for the first time. Years and years later…they still remembered.[iv]
One of those disciples was Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. He went and found his brother (who must have also been at that camp meeting on the banks of the Jordan) and said to him, “We have found the Messiah.” That’s it. That’s all it took. Spending a little time with Jesus had convinced Andrew that he was the one he had been looking for all his life. He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is the Aramaic word for Peter).
And then there’s this closing scene with Nathanael, which seems perfect for the Sunday before Epiphany. Epiphany, as you may know, means “to reveal or make manifest.” The Greek word means, literally, “to shine upon.” It’s like when you hear something rummaging around in your trash can at night and go out there with a flashlight to discover that it’s only a raccoon. “Oh,” you say. “So that’s what it was!” That’s an epiphany: when the light shines on something and reveals it for what it really is. But back to the story:
John tells us that on the next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip (who must have been the other disciple with Andrew the day before) and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael [who was from Cana, the next little town down the road] said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” And did you notice? That’s the second time in this passage that someone has said, “Come and see.” That must be how epiphanies happen.
When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Which surprised Nathanael. He’d never met this man before in his life. He said, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” And I don’t know what Nathanael was doing under that fig tree, if anything, but it was enough to convince him that Jesus was everything Philip had said he was, and more.
Nathanael said, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” It’s one of the highest confessions of faith in the Bible, and Nathanael had only just met Jesus. It tells you something about what it must have been like to stand in his presence. Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
At the beginning of this sermon I told you about the Cane Ridge revival and the camp meetings that followed. I wanted you to have a good feel for what was going on in those gatherings, not only because it reminds me so much of what was going on in this gathering on the banks of the Jordan River, but because those people came looking for a religious experience, or maybe for assurance of their salvation. I think people still do that. But the disciples in this story came looking for a person. And when they found Jesus, their search was over. “What are you looking for?” Jesus asked. It’s a good question, and maybe the perfect question for this New Year. What are you looking for, and is there any chance that it’s not a religious experience or the assurance of your salvation, but a person? And could that person be, as Philip said,
“Jesus the son of Joseph from Nazareth”?
—Jim Somerville © 2026
