January 19, Epiphany 2A (John 1:29–42)

In these next two weeks, the lectionary offers two different accounts of Jesus calling his first disciples. Not surprisingly, given that the accounts come from two different traditions, the stories are different—but they do overlap.

I raise this before talking about either of them because if you, like me, tend to reflect on the text one week at a time, next week could be tricky for you. This week—unless you happen to be observing the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul—Jesus calls Andrew and his brother Simon Peter while John the Baptizer and others are hanging out on the road. There’s no mention of fishing or the Sea of Galilee. But, if you look ahead to next week, John has been arrested—and you’ll see that these same two disciples get called, along with the sons of Zebedee, from their fishing post along the Sea of Galilee. So, preachers: beware—or at least alert that you have two weeks in a row of disciple calling.

I don’t often look ahead to the next week; nor am I tempted to skip ahead to the end of the story. I don’t read the last chapter of a mystery first, and while I try to figure things out along the way, I am often wrong. But what do we do when we read a story where the ending is known, like we do every week in worship? Even if people are not as biblically literate as we like to think they once were, it would be rare to have a hearer in worship this weekend who doesn’t know how the story of Jesus ends. In the case of the Gospel of John, regular Easter worship attendees will hear echoes of the resurrection account in these early days of Jesus’ ministry. It can be helpful to connect the dots between what we hear in the beginning to things that appear later.