Abiding

 2nd Sunday after Epiphany, 2026

Readings

Isaiah 49.1-7

Ps 40.1-14

1 Corinthians 1.1-9

John 1.29-42

I sometimes wonder what it would take for us to really believe, and to experience for ourselves, that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness of our world, or as John the Baptist puts it in today’s reading, the lamb of God who takes away the world’s sin?

What would it take, in other words, for us to live without anxiety, experiencing the world we live in as being centred on and shaped every moment by the reality of reconciling love? And knowing deep down that because the love that created all things is capable of transforming the limitations of our lives, not even our most fearful circumstances are capable of overwhelming us or holding us captive? And I wonder about this, in part, because the fearful and violent acts we have witnessed in our own country over the last few weeks expose a deep anxiety in our national psyche, and a sense that our cohesion as a country of many faiths and ethnicities is deeply fractured. A sense, perhaps, of not knowing what we need to do to heal, a sense that even our best efforts to address the hatred levelled at minorities in our community might risk increasing division. As Christians, we are continually reminded that the God who creates us in love, also holds us and guides us in love. How, then, can we live in a world of anxiety and chaos and competing claims without fear?

‘Ultimately’, a wise friend once wrote, ‘ultimately as Christians we must believe that God is in control. That the Lamb of God does in some way, take away the sin of the World. And that all the savagery and despair and evil and pettiness of the world is temporary and is made powerless by the Lamb of God. Ultimately, we must believe that, but when we look around ourselves at the world we actually live in, we are still left wondering and questioning, sometimes whistling in the dark to reassure ourselves.’ We need a sense of where the centre is, of how we can know for sure the reality of Jesus as the Lamb of God who redeems all that in our human experience is irredeemable. 

And I think this is what John’s Gospel points to, most clearly, in our reading this morning. And what it points us to is the reality of Jesus, not as an article of faith or a divine insurance policy, not as a remote historical figure confined to the pages of the Bible, but as a living relationship. And the key is in the interchange that Jesus has with two of John the Baptist’s disciples, one of whom John’s Gospel tells us is the brother of Simon Peter. ‘What are you looking for?’, Jesus says to them. This is straight after John has proclaimed Jesus as the one he has been talking about, the long-expected messiah, the anointed one of God. And so two of John the Baptist’s own disciples decide to follow along. And Jesus says to them, ‘Well? What are you looking for?’

One Bible commentary I read recently says the disciples here are completely caught off guard, that they fluff their reply like daydreaming schoolboys caught off guard by a teacher’s question. So they say, ‘Oh, teacher, where are you staying?’ Um, OK, that’s the best you can come up with?

But actually, it’s not, I think, such a bad answer. In fact, I think it’s an answer that shows these apprentice disciples do get it. In many traditional cultures, certainly in Palestine in the 1st century, to ask somebody where they come from is to ask much more than a street address or directions on a map, the question is really asking: ‘who are you? Where do you come from? Who are you related to? What are you about?’ All pretty good questions.

And not only that, the disciples’ question introduces one of the key words of John’s Gospel, one of the words by which the Gospel writer tips us off that something important is being said here - a word that throughout the Fourth Gospel informs us who Jesus is, what Jesus does for us, and how we are meant to respond. And the Greek word is meno, which the translation of the Bible we read from this morning translates here as ‘to stay, or remain’, but often gets translated as ‘to abide’ - an English word with a much richer range of meanings. So the disciples ask Jesus: ‘where are you abiding?’ Do you start to get it? Jesus has just asked them: ‘what are you looking for? Do you want a guarantee, a magical formula? Is that what you really want?’ And the disciples who, I think, actually do get the point, reply: ‘where do you abide? What’s at the heart of you?’ And Jesus says: ‘come and see’.

It’s an answer that cuts through 2,000 years of crusted-on Church doctrine, all our preconceptions and occasionally self-serving theories about ourselves and about God. Because what we are invited into turns out to be not a set of doctrinal beliefs or ossified creeds but a relationship, a new centre and a new self. ’Enter into it’, Jesus invites us, ‘abide with me, come and see for yourself’.

And John’s Gospel tells us they came and saw where Jesus abided, and they abided with him. The first thing is what this is not saying. It’s not saying, this is what you have to believe. That here is a set of propositions or facts – about Jesus, or about God - that are going to explain the world to you and keep you safe. What it does say is something way simpler, something more like: ‘Spend the day with me. Rest in me. Hang around and see.’ 

Because abiding, in the sense of faithful remaining with, identifying with and dwelling with, is what, according to the Prologue of John’s Gospel, the Word is ultimately about. The Word who is in the beginning with God, and who is God, pitches a tent among us and abides with us. And in the opening verses of the passage we read this morning, John the Baptist testifies that he has seen the Spirit of God descending on Jesus and abiding with him. It’s the same word, meno. Later in John’s Gospel Jesus will tell his disciples that we can abide in him just like the branches on a vine (15.1-4), drawing our life from him. As Jesus and his Father are one, as Jesus abides in his Father’s love, we can abide in his love and God’s Holy Spirit will abide with us (14.17).

These are trinitarian verses, although the Trinity as a doctrine of the Church is not explicit in the Gospel. They are verses about God’s own life both as a creative community of loving diversity and as a unity of abiding - the Word being the utterance of divine love that creates all things and chooses to pitch a tent and live amongst us, and the Spirit poured out from the Father through the Son, empowering and livening and strengthening us. Incidentally, these verses are also about doxology, the right worship of the Church which retraces the order of the outpouring of God’s love in creation. We pray to God the Father in the power of the Spirit that has been poured out on us; and through the Son in whom God’s love is made flesh and blood for us.

But the point of today’s reading is that as Jesus calls his first disciples, so he also calls us. To abide, to be at home and centred in the heart of trinitarian love that is God. This is big picture stuff, what it means to be human, created by God and woven into the structure of created reality. And it’s personal, a loving invitation to discover yourself as intimately known and held in the heart of God. Where you abide, that is the centre of who you are. And how do you abide? Jesus makes it plain, doesn't he? Love as he loved. Love one another, love your neighbour, love those who hate you.

Many Christians initially come to faith because we want to know what is certain. What life means, what the world around us means. And because deep down we want some assurance that whatever life means, it will endure. And our yearning for assurance leads us, sometimes, to surround ourselves with things and with certainties that appear to give security. A shelter that all too easily can get shaken when tragedy strikes, or when human evil breaks into our lives, and our certainties get exposed as a bit flimsy.

What Jesus offers us, instead, is not certainty - at least, not in the sense of protection from the world around us, or even in the sense that we will never again doubt or lose our way – but certainty in the sense of knowing where the centre of our existence is. Certainty in the sense of centring our lives within the matrix of our relationship with the source of all life. What Jesus offers instead is to be with us on a journey from our beginning, which is God’s, into the unknowable future, which is also God’s - and the assurance that whatever happens, we will abide in the relationship that informs us who and why we are.

Abide here. Stay put. And do not be afraid.