Come and See

The day after John the Baptist shouted about Jesus, he was standing by the Jordan River again with two of his followers. One of them was a fisherman named Andrew.

Jesus came walking along the bank.

"Look!" said John. "The Lamb of God!"

Andrew and his friend heard that, and their feet started moving. They left John and set off after Jesus, a few steps behind, trying to look as if they just happened to be going the same way.

Jesus turned around. "What are you looking for?"

They had not planned anything to say. "Rabbi," they blurted, "where are you staying?" (Rabbi means Teacher. "Where do you live?" is a funny thing to ask the one you have waited for your whole life, but it was all they could think of.)

"Come and see," said Jesus.

So they went with him and stayed the rest of that day. Many people think Andrew's friend was another John (not John the Baptist), a fisherman who later wrote this story down, because he still remembered the exact hour: about four o'clock in the afternoon.

Then Andrew ran to find his brother Simon. "We have found the Messiah!" he panted. That was the King God had promised to send. Andrew brought Simon straight to Jesus.

Jesus looked hard at him. "You are Simon, son of John," he said. "You will be called Peter." Peter means Rock.

(Simon was not very rocklike yet. He would argue with Jesus, sink in the sea, and one night say three times that he did not even know him. Jesus named him for the man he was going to become.)

The next day Jesus set out for Galilee, and on the way he found a man named Philip. "Follow me," Jesus said, and Philip did.

Philip hurried off to his friend Nathanael. "We have found the one Moses wrote about, and the prophets too! It's Jesus, Joseph's son, from Nazareth!"

Nathanael wrinkled his nose. "Nazareth? Can anything good come from Nazareth?" (Nathanael lived in Cana, just over the hills, and neighbors are always the hardest people to impress.)

Philip did not argue. "Come and see."

So Nathanael came. Before he was close enough to say hello, Jesus called out, "Here is a true Israelite, with nothing false in him!"

Nathanael stopped in the road. "How do you know me?"

"Before Philip called you," said Jesus, "I saw you under the fig tree."

A fig tree's broad leaves make a shady green room, and Nathanael had thought no one could see him in it. His mouth fell open. "Teacher, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"

"You believe because I said I saw you under a fig tree?" said Jesus. "You will see greater things than that. You will see heaven open, and the angels of God going up and coming down on the Son of Man."

Nathanael knew that picture. Every child in Israel did. Jacob, running away from home, once slept in the wild with a stone for a pillow and dreamed of a stairway reaching from the ground to heaven, with God's angels climbing up and down it. "This is the gate of heaven!" Jacob said when he woke. But in the morning there was only the stone, and Jacob had to walk on.

Son of Man was the name Jesus used most for himself. So he was saying that he himself was that stairway: a man in dusty sandals, come down from heaven to look for people. One by one they had come to him: Andrew, then Simon, then Philip, then a grumpy man from under a fig tree. The gate of heaven that Jacob saw in his dream was walking beside them on the road to Galilee.