Last Sunday, we stated that the primary goal of Jesus’ public ministry is aimed at our eternal salvation. Nevertheless, His ministry shapes our vocation and mission as disciples.
Firstly, how to live our vocation is already convincingly demonstrated by John the Baptist. He remained the perfect Best Man who knew his place in the larger scheme of things. If you take a moment to imagine that grand gesture. Here is someone whose role was no more than to point in a certain direction. There was no second thoughts or hesitation. In an age of personality cult, John the Baptist should be the Man of the Year only because he excelled at being “a nobody”.
Secondly, while this self-effacing action of the Baptist is important in framing our Christian vocation, the encounter between Jesus and the two can better deepen our appreciation of our mission as disciples. Our vocation like John is always to be Christ-centred. In everything we do, He must increase while we decrease. When Christ is at the centre, then the conversation between Jesus and the two soon-to-be disciples will shine a light on our mission. “What do you want?”, “Rabbi, where do you live?”, “Come and see.” and “We have found the Messiah”.
Just after the Baptist’s last words, “Look, there is the Lamb of God!”, both Andrew and John left even without a goodbye and went toward Jesus proving that built into our human nature is this search or a hunger for the Divine. Both the question, “What do you want?” and the answer “Rabbi, where do you live?” correspond to this instinctive drive of Man—he yearns for the Divine.
According to the Catechism, “The desire for God is written on the human heart because we have been created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw us to Himself. Only in God will we find the truth and happiness we never stop searching for” (CCC, 27).
The two faculties of the soul, the intellect, and the will, are on this never-ending quest for what is true and good. We want to know the truth and we desire the good. We saw an example of that in the Magi who came looking for the true God. They willingly sacrificed their comfort for Him. The same longing is detected in both Andrew and John. Every respectable Jew waits for the promised Messiah and when the Baptist pointed Him out, they jumped at the chance to follow Him. They may not know fully the nature of His Messiahship but that did not deter them.
It is good to know that our desire is not a one-way street. It made sense that Jesus invited them to “Come and see”. God may have created us to search for Him, but He does not leave us in a mindless pursuit. He takes the initiative to reach out to us because “God, as the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason. Without this capacity, humanity would not be able to welcome God's revelation. Human beings have this capacity because they are created in the image of God” (CCC 36). So, right at the beginning of time, even in Genesis already, after Adam’s fall, God went searching for him. God has never ceased in His search for us and the point is, we would not know that He is searching for us if He did not put it there in the first place.
Thus, the invitation to “Come and see” represents the initiative of Jesus in meeting both Andrew and John. To stay with God expresses the inherent desire to “escape” this passing world. Our Advent liturgy kept reminding us that amid passing things we should hold on to things that endure. We seek a permanence that is absent from this world or a permanence which temporality cannot fulfil. Whether we realise it or not, we long to contemplate the face of God and be taken up by Him so as to draw life from Him. We recognise the same thirst to contemplate in the sisterly “quarrel” between Mary and Martha. Mary had discovered the joy of contemplating the Lord whom Martha and many of us “doers” cannot comprehend. In other words, Mary had caught the beatific vision in which God alone suffices.
God, the subject of our search, is the reason for our sufficiency, not our material progress or accumulation. The Greek word “enthusiasm” possibly captures the experience of having tasted God. It is to be taken into God “en theo” which overflows into a passion in sharing it with others. “We have found the Messiah”. We have found what our hearts have been looking for. Now that they have touched the Divine, more than sharing the experience, they brought Peter to Jesus to the same experience.
In this encounter between Jesus and the two disciples, we catch a glimpse of how our mission should be shaped. Like I mentioned last week, we often envisage discipleship as “doing good”. While that is good, what is more profound is to make available the encounter with Christ and souls longing for salvation. Otherwise, it does not make sense to speak of baptism. Our mission to be disciples requires that we contemplate and be touched by God and with that to go out and bring others that they too may be touched by Him and thus be saved. Like John the Baptist we make clear that path for people to come close to God.[1]
In conclusion, salvation is not a promise that we will not face troubles. In fact, sometimes the knowledge of Christ and His salvation comes at a heavy price. The Baptist himself paid the ultimate price of witnessing to the Christ. But, right until his beheading, he unstintingly pointed to the Christ. His penultimate act was to point out the Lamb of God to the disciples who have been searching for Him. So, if we take seriously our vocation and mission, we should emulate John the Baptist in his humility as always being the pointers to Christ. And our mission like Andrew and John is to seek God so that our intimate knowledge of Him will spur us to lead other to Him.
[1] It may come across that “feeding the poor”, that is, doing good is not something urgent. It is. Attending to the cry of the poor is necessary. But what is the logical conclusion of feeding the poor? An amelioration of their condition? What is the goal of creating a "just world"? That they have a “decent” life? That they may enjoy what we are enjoying? The question to ask is this: Their decent life and what we are enjoying, can these conditions be equated to salvation or to heaven?
