Come and See
The Invitation
Come and See
John 1:35–2:22
There is a moment in every Christian’s life that changes everything. It is, of course, the day when a person truly encounters Christ. For you and me, that may have been through a sermon, a podcast, a friend, or a stranger sharing Jesus. For the first followers of Jesus, His early disciples that would one day become His apostles, it was from actually encountering Jesus.
The first two to encounter Jesus really had no pretensions of becoming students; that’s what disciples are. They were curious fishermen who had heard about this wild man of a preacher, who lived out in the desert, a man who spent his whole life in the wilderness. It seemed like everyone was talking about him, so you went to see what he was all about. He had become known as the baptizer; his name was John. For two young men standing beside the Jordan River on an unremarkable afternoon, they expected a direct sermon; he was always ticking off the Pharisees, they had already been asking if he was the messiah, which he denied, but he still called them vipers, asking them, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come”? He didn’t do that this day; instead, he saw a man he had baptized in the river a few days ago. He looked at us and pointed, saying, “Behold the Lamb of God.”
This is where the story of the apostles begins—not with their own courage or their own spiritual searching, but with a discipler who loved the one he was discipling enough to let him go. John the Baptist had understood his calling with rare clarity. He was not the groom; he was the best man. His joy, he would later say, was made full in hearing the groom’s voice. The greatest thing he ever did was disappear from the story he had helped to start.
The two who turned and followed Jesus that afternoon were Andrew and the young man who would one day write these very words down in a Gospel—John, son of Zebedee. He never named himself in his own account. But he remembered the hour.
“Jesus turned and saw them following and said to them, ‘What are you seeking?’ And they said to him, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and you will see.’ So they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour.”
John 1:38–39
John remembered the hour because the hour was the hinge of his life. “The tenth hour”—four o’clock in the afternoon by Jewish reckoning—is recorded not because it was an important time of the day, but because to John, it was the hour of his come-to-Jesus moment. He was there. He remembered. And decades later, when he set out to write the account of everything he had witnessed, he began here.
I wonder – where does your story begin?
What It Meant to Say “Rabbi”
The word that Andrew and John used to address Jesus was not a casual title you say out of respect. In the world of first-century Judaism, “Rabbi”—literally, “my great one”—was the title given to those religious teachers who had gathered a following and were considered capable of interpreting the Torah with authority. As the scholar John Meier notes, in the early part of the first century the title was “given to religious leaders and teachers who attracted a following, whether or not the individual had any formal training and official authorization to teach.” Only after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 did more formal requirements for rabbinic ordination emerge.
A rabbi’s disciples were not students in any modern sense of the word. They did not attend lectures and go home. They attached themselves to their rabbi’s life. They traveled with him, ate with him, observed how he prayed, and watched how he handled the Scriptures in the middle of ordinary conversations. The goal of the disciple was not merely to know the rabbi’s teaching but to become like him—to have the same instincts, the same reflexes, the same way of seeing the world that his master had. The relationship was more apprenticeship than classroom, more household than lecture hall.
Does our life reflect that we are attending a classroom or being apprentices of Jesus?
(How can you tell the difference)
So, when Andrew and John asked Jesus, “Where are you staying?” they were not asking for an address. They were asking to become part of His life. And Jesus’ answer was the first invitation He ever extended to disciples in this Gospel: “Come and you will see.”
Discipleship is not primarily the transfer of information.
It is formation by proximity.
“Come and see”—will echo through the rest of John’s chapter. Philip will say it to Nathanael. The Samaritan woman will say it to her village. It is the phrase of a community that knows it cannot adequately describe what it has found, but believes that encounter will do what explanation cannot. The first act of discipleship in the Gospel of John is not a sermon. It is an invitation to come near.
How can we invite others to come and see when we cannot take them to Jesus in person?
The First Thing Andrew Did
John records that after spending the afternoon with Jesus, Andrew went and “first” found his brother. They were tight, their bond was deeper than siblings, and deeper than friends. Andrew just won the spiritual lottery. Who would he tell first? It was Simon, his brother.
I imagine him running to Simon, short of breath, teary-eyed, and shouting with labored breath, “We have found the Messiah.” He had known Jesus for perhaps four hours. He had not seen any miracles, no resurrection to point to, no sermons to summarize. He had only spent an afternoon in the man’s company—and that was enough to send him running toward the person he most wanted to share it with.
Who was your Simon?
When Andrew brought Simon to Jesus, what happened next is one of the most quietly extraordinary moments in the Gospels. Before Simon had said a single word, Jesus looked at him and said: “You are Simon, the son of John. You shall be called Cephas.”
Cephas is Aramaic. Petros is Greek. Both mean “rock.” The new name is notable because Simon hadn’t done a single thing – Jesus simple knew already who he was. He had not confessed anything, demonstrated anything, or proven anything. The man who would later deny Jesus three times was given the name of a rock before he had shown any evidence that he could hold together under pressure. Jesus declared who Simon would become before Simon had done a single thing to earn it.
He knows you, too. He has already written down your name; it’s a new name, we will learn it … soon.
Read Revelation 2:17
In Scripture, a name-change is always a declaration of divine intention spoken before the human has any basis to believe it: Abram becomes Abraham before the son is born; Jacob becomes Israel in the middle of the night, still limping; Saul becomes Paul on a road that was taking him in entirely the wrong direction. The new name is not a reward for becoming something. It is the announcement that God intends to make something, spoken into the gap between what is and what will be.
Simon did not yet know he was a rock. He would not feel like one for years. But Jesus knew, and Jesus said so.
The new name is not a reward.
It is a declaration spoken into the gap between what is and what will be.
Philip, Nathanael, and the Lesson Beneath the Fig Tree
The next day, Jesus found Philip and called him with the same two-word summons: “Follow me.” Philip immediately found Nathanael and declared, as Andrew had declared, that he had found the one Moses and the prophets had written about. And Nathanael said what most city folks say of people from a no-name rural town, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
This is worth digging deeper.
Nathanael was himself a Galilean—from Cana, not far from Nazareth. His skepticism was not the contempt of an outsider. It was the honest assessment of a man who knew his region, knew its towns, and found it implausible that the long-awaited Messiah would emerge from a village so obscure that it appears nowhere in the Old Testament, nowhere in the Talmud, and nowhere in Josephus before this period. Nazareth had no temple, no rabbinic school, no distinguished history. That the hope of Israel should have been quietly growing up there among craftsmen and farmers struck Nathanael as simply unlikely.
Philip did not argue. He said, “Come and see.” He passed along the same invitation he had received and trusted that Jesus Himself would convince his friend.
Do we ever let our desire to defend Jesus get in the way of our invitation?
When Jesus saw Nathanael approaching, He said something that at first seems strange: “Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!”
Nathanael was startled: “How do you know me?”
And Jesus replied: “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.”
Nathanael’s response to this single sentence is extraordinary: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” He went from dissing Nazareth to proclaiming Christ as the Son of God and King of Israel.
Why does Nathanael do this?
This seems, at first reading, wildly disproportionate. Why would knowing that Jesus saw him under a fig tree produce a confession that uses the language of the great coronation psalms? What did Jesus actually say to him?
To understand the exchange, we need to look in the world of first-century Jewish learning—because that world gives the fig tree a significance that most modern readers entirely miss.
“Why were the words of the Torah compared to the fig tree? As with the fig tree, the more one searches it, the more figs one finds in it; so it is with the words of the Torah—the more one studies them, the more relish he finds in them.”
Midrash Rabbah on Proverbs 27:18
The fig tree, in the rabbinic imagination, was the tree of Torah. Its fruit ripened unevenly and had to be sought out gradually—you could not harvest a fig tree all at once the way you could an olive tree. This made it the perfect image for the patient, lifelong, always-yielding work of Scripture study. And because it provided shade in the heat of the day and a quiet, enclosed canopy, it became the classic setting for meditation and for the informal teaching relationships between rabbis and their disciples.
When Nathanael was “under the fig tree,” he was engaged in the most serious spiritual activity a first-century Jewish man could be engaged in: he was meditating on Scripture. He was not merely sitting outside. He was in the posture of a disciple—alone with the text, turning it over, seeking its depths. This was his study desk, his prayer closet, his place of encounter with the Word of God.
And Jesus saw him there. Not merely physically—He knew what Nathanael was meditating on.
The evidence lies in what Jesus says immediately after Nathanael’s confession: “Truly, truly, I say to you, you shall see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” There is only one passage in all of the Hebrew Scriptures that speaks of angels ascending and descending—Genesis 28:12, the account of Jacob’s dream at Bethel. In that passage, Jacob, fleeing his father’s house after his one act of deception, lies down in the open field and dreams of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, with the angels of God going up and down upon it. He wakes in awe and says: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
Why would Jesus reference this passage?
Nathanael had been meditating on Jacob. On the ladder. On the gate of heaven. Perhaps on the messianic hope that the God who met Jacob at Bethel would one day meet His people again in a definitive way—would open the heavens and bridge the distance that sin had placed between God and man.
And Jesus walked up and answered the meditation.
The connection runs even deeper.
When Jesus calls Nathanael “an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit,” He is making a deliberate contrast with Jacob—the man who was called Israel, but who is remembered in Genesis as the one who deceived his father. Jacob’s guile cost him twenty years of exile. Nathanael’s integrity, by contrast, marks him as the kind of Israel God was always hoping for—undivided, transparent, without the crooked maneuvering that had characterized the father of the nation.
When Nathanael hears Jesus’ answer, he understands immediately. The titles he reaches for—“Son of God” and “King of Israel”—are drawn from the great royal psalms (Psalm 2:6–7; 89:26–27) and the Davidic covenant of 2 Samuel 7:14. They are the vocabulary of messianic expectation, used by a man who had been meditating on the very texts from which that vocabulary comes, and who has just had his private meditation answered in real time by the one he was meditating about.
What do we learn from Nathanael about his understanding of who the messiah would be, and contrast that with John the Baptist?
Jesus is not merely the subject of Israel’s hopes. He is the fulfillment of Israel’s story.
He is the new Bethel.
He is the gate of heaven.
Where He is, the distance collapses.
Discussion Questions
1. John the Baptist points his own disciples away from himself toward Jesus, at real cost to his own movement. What does it look like in practice to be the kind of person who makes disciples of Jesus rather than disciples of yourself? Where do you see this done well—or done poorly—in the church today?
2. Andrew’s first instinct after spending time with Jesus was to find his brother. The text says he did this “first.” Who in this group has been someone’s “Andrew”? What made that person reach out, and what was it like to be brought?
3. Jesus renames Simon before Simon has done anything to earn the name. How does your community hold space for people to become who God says they are, rather than who they have been? What would it mean to speak “new name” language over one another?
4. Nathanael was meditating privately on the Scriptures, and Jesus answered his meditation in public. Have there been passages of Scripture you have wrestled with that later came alive in an unexpected way—through a conversation, a circumstance, or a person?