Christmas XII
Come and see where I’m staying
John 1: 38
Rabbi, where are you staying?
The whole Christmas story can be seen as an answer to this question. It is an answer that takes us all across SE Mediterranean lands, and occupies many chapters of Matthew’s and Luke’s narrative. These describe the physical, human, geographical circumstances of the incarnate Son — where he lived, why he lived there — from the last days of Mary’s pregnancy to the move to Nazareth.
John also sets the story in a context, a cosmic one, that begins with the eternal origin of the Word, the identification of Jesus not only as God but also as the author of all creation. In the end John’s prologue does tell us that the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. But John leaves it to the other evangelists to fill us in on Jesus’ childhood beginnings. John simply has Andrew ask Jesus directly: Rabbi, where are you staying?Where is your dwelling?
The question surely contains the profounder question: Rabbi, where are you from? What remarkable family produced this remarkable stranger? Maritimers would say: you must have come from away? John the Baptist hails him as the one who would take away the sins of Israel and baptise with the Holy Spirit. Surely then he must be from a powerful priestly family, surely he must be staying with another priestly family as he comes to John for baptism, but equally surely he is a priest of a sort that did not deserve the Baptist’s excoriation as a brood of vipers.
In reply, Jesus did not say: Well, I was born in Bethlehem, then we moved to Egypt, then settled in Galilee where I grew up. Nor, of course, is it time to begin to betray his real heritage in words which it will take the evangelist John many decades to articulate. Jesus simply says: Come and see. His words are surely as deep in their implication as Andrew’s question: Where are you staying. The evangelist says briefly: He made his dwelling among us, or He camped (tabernacled) among us. So now, in effect, Jesus is inviting Andrew and the other unnamed disciple of the Baptist to come and see what it is like for the Word made flesh to come and camp among us.
Christmas is now over for the year. The focus on Jesus’s origins now becomes one on where Jesus is staying. If we look at the same SE Mediterranean area in which Jesus first stayed, we might fail to see any sign that he is staying there now. The same may be said of Africa, the Far East, Europe and the Americas. Where is Jesus staying?
Since Pentecost, of course, we know that the answer is: collectively in the Church, individually in the hearts and lives of humans who look to him as the light of the world. Though the world clamours for political and social structures that are indwellt by God, and we are promised that the world to come will operate under divine governance, until then the search for where God is at work takes us to the hearts and lives of people who live for him.
The quivering excitement of life that is now indwellt by the Spirit of Jesus is remarkably expressed in Ehre sei dir Gott from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
Tim and Patricia Pope
Ehre sei dir, Gott Bach, Christmas Oratorio BWV 248 - Mortensen
Netherlands Bach Society
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