Wisdom: You Don t Know What You Know Richmond s First Baptist Church, January 28, 2018 The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany Mark 1:14-20 As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, Follow me and I will make you fish for people. And immediately they left their nets and followed him. Andrew. I ve been thinking about Andrew. Do you remember him? He was one of those four fishermen Jesus called by the Sea of Galilee. In the Gospel of Mark he is introduced as the brother of Simon. That means they would have grown up in the same house, sat at the same supper table, maybe even slept in the same bed. It was almost certainly their mother who washed their clothes and cooked their meals and probably their father who taught them how to fish. When they got older they went into business together: Simon and Andrew, Incorporated. Now, we hear a lot about Simon in the Bible, whose name was later changed to Peter, but what about Andrew? Why don t we hear more about him? I did a quick search and found Andrew s name mentioned twelve times in the Bible. Anybody want to guess how many times Peter s name is mentioned? 168. Obviously, Andrew needs a better publicist. And maybe that s my job this morning. So, let s see if we can do a little digging, and come up with Andrew s untold story. And this is where it gets tricky, because I usually tell you not to get your Gospels mixed up. If you re going to talk about Andrew in the Gospel of Mark then talk about Andrew in the Gospel of Mark, I say. Don t sidestep over into Matthew, Luke, or John. 1
You ll get a whole different picture. But not a whole different person, right? Andrew is still Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, no matter which Gospel he s in. So, what if, just this once, we sidestepped over into the Gospel of John, where Andrew figures a little more prominently? We first hear about him in connection with John the Baptist, who sees Jesus walking by and says, Behold, the Lamb of God! The text says that two of John s disciples were standing there with him, and when they heard what he said they started following Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following he asked, What are you looking for? They said, Rabbi, where are you staying? and he said, Come and see. It was about four o clock in the afternoon. The fact that they remembered the time makes me think that something significant happened, and what happened next confirms it. After spending the rest of that day with Jesus Andrew went to find his brother Simon and told him, We have found the Messiah! And then he brought him to Jesus who said, You are Simon, son of John? From now on you will be called Cephas (which is the Aramaic word for Peter, which is the Greek word for rock). And so, Simon becomes Rocky, which is a terrific nickname. It may be one of the reasons Peter gets so much attention in the Gospels. But I m not here to talk about Peter; I m here to talk about Andrew. Let s review: 1. Something had moved Andrew to come to the Jordan where John was baptizing. Maybe he had heard the stories all the way up there in Capernaum, about this fiery prophet living in the wilderness, eating locusts and wild honey, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Maybe he and his brother Simon had talked about it and maybe it was Andrew who said, Let s go! 2
2. Do you remember what I ve been telling you about wisdom? That it seems to begin with an open mind, with the kind of curiosity that says, Let s go, and with the kind of humility that bows down? Andrew had that, apparently, because when he heard John preach he repented. He waded out into the Jordan and confessed his sins. He was baptized. Now, let me confess: I don t really know that John baptized Andrew. It doesn t say so in the text. But I don t see how he could get to the next step without going through that one. 3. Because right there in John 1:35 it says, The next day John [the Baptist] was standing with two of his disciples. And then in verse 40 it says, One of the two disciples who heard John speak and followed Jesus was Andrew, Simon Peter s brother. Put those two verses together and you have to conclude that, at least for a little while, Andrew was a disciple of John the Baptist. He had decided to follow him, perhaps thinking that he was the Messiah, until John pointed to Jesus and said, There s the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! And then Andrew began to follow Jesus. 4. It was about four o clock in the afternoon. Andrew spent the rest of that day with Jesus. And at the end of it he was able to tell his brother: We have found the Messiah. I m not saying that Andrew had worked his way through the entire four-step process of wisdom, where at first 1) you don t know what you don t know, and then 2) you know what you don t know, and then 3) you don t know what you know, and finally 4) you know what you know, but he was well on his way. He had at least moved through the first two steps. To get to his next step you have to move to another gospel, and to this 3
passage in Mark that was read earlier, because up until this point even though Andrew had started to follow Jesus, Jesus hadn t asked him to follow. All that changes beginning at Mark 1:16. Listen: As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, Follow me and I will make you fish for people. And immediately they left their nets and followed him (vss. 16-18). Now, if all you had was the Gospel of Mark you might wonder how that could happen. How could this invitation from a mysterious stranger move anyone to drop his nets and follow? I ve heard some of the sermons on this passage, where preachers say it must have been something about the look in Jesus eye or the authority in his voice that moved those fishermen to follow. But I think there is a simpler explanation, and that is that Andrew already knew who Jesus was. If you can accept the testimony of John s Gospel as part of his actual story then Andrew had already recognized Jesus as the Messiah; Jesus just hadn t asked him to follow. In Mark s Gospel he does, and Andrew does, because the word messiah means the anointed one, the king! And if the king asks you to do something you ought to be willing to drop everything, even the source of your livelihood. But let s stay in the Gospel of Mark for a moment, and let s imagine that Andrew didn t know who Jesus was. It is still entirely possible that Andrew had heard Jesus preach, because in Mark 1:14-15 it says, Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news. The word that is translated as proclaiming or preaching is kērussōn. It is a present active participle which refers to an action that takes place repeatedly. It means that Jesus didn t only 4
preach once: he preached again and again. He was going all around the region of Galilee telling people that the Kingdom of God was coming. And let me say this about that: If you are living in a kingdom, or an empire, or a nation that is working for you, where you can get a good education, and make a decent living, and retire comfortably, then you may not want things to change; you may want them to stay exactly the way they are. But if you are living in a kingdom, or an empire, or a nation that is not working for you, where you can t get a good education, or make a decent living, or retire comfortably, then you might be ready for a change, so ready you would be willing to drop everything for a chance at that kind of kingdom. And that may have been exactly where Andrew was. I was talking to someone last week who suggested that under the oppressive rule of the Roman Empire every fish that Andrew caught would have belonged to the emperor, and if Andrew was going to get anything out of it, it would be only after the emperor had taken the lion s share. So, there is another reason Andrew might have been willing to follow Jesus: He might have been ready to join the revolution. We can t know everything that was going on in Andrew s mind, but we might be able to understand what was going on in his heart, simply because most of us have been there, where we are trying to make a big decision and there s just no way to know if it s going to be the right thing or the wrong thing. Like the decision to get married. I sat beside a young woman on an airplane last week who showed me her engagement ring. She was getting married in July and she was very excited. But I asked 5
her, How did you know he was the one? And she said, I just knew. Does that sound familiar? It wasn t anything she could put into words. She was a certified public accountant but she couldn t tell you how she did the math. She s five-three and he s sixsix and when people see them together they sometimes laugh, as if they didn t belong together. But we do, she said. And when I asked, How do you know? she shrugged her shoulders and said, I just do. Sometimes we know things at a deeper level than we can articulate. We don t know them up here, at the head level, but down here, at the heart level. And sometimes it s deeper than that. Last week I had dinner with a young pastor who talked about how he was called into the ministry, and if you had heard his story you might have said it didn t make sense. He was a pharmaceutical representative, making good money ( Really good money! his wife chimed in). But he had served on his church s pastor search committee, and they had traveled around the region listening to different pastors preach. They talked about what kind of pastor they were looking for and what kinds of gifts were required and the more they talked about it the more it sounded like him. But he wasn t a pastor; he was a pharmaceutical rep, and do I need to remind you? He was making good money ( Really good money, his wife said). There was no good reason he should have quit that job and gone to seminary, but that s what he did, and after a fifteen-year stint in the ministry he was called as pastor of his home church, the same church where he had served on the search committee. When I asked him how he knew that answering the call to ministry was the right thing to do he said, I just knew. 6
It s step number three in the four-step process of wisdom. It begins when you don t know what you don t know. You re not stupid, you re just ignorant. It s where Andrew was before he went down to the Jordan. But then, after hearing John preach, and after being baptized, and after meeting Jesus, Andrew moved on to the second step, where you know what you don t know, or maybe what you didn t know only a moment before. Because there must have been that moment when he was with Jesus that Andrew thought, He s the one. He s the one we ve been looking for all these years. He s the Messiah. But then there was that third step, when the Messiah said, Follow me. There was Andrew, holding those nets and in the very next moment he was not holding them. He had dropped them to follow Jesus. If you asked him later how he knew that was the thing to do he might have said, I just knew. It wasn t a decision he made up here, in his head; it may not have even been a decision he made down here, in his heart; it may have come from a deeper place, from down here in the soul. Andrew knew what he couldn t have known, not in the usual sense of that word, but he knew it all the same. He just knew. So, what about you? What big decision have you been wrestling with, waiting until you had all the information so you could make an informed choice? How many times have you looked at the list of pros and cons and added a few more on both sides? Is it possible you will never have all the information? Is it possible that there is no way to know in advance how it s going to turn out? Sometimes you can t wait until you have all the answers: you just have to take a leap of faith. And when that time comes you won t know that it s the right thing up here, in your head; it will come from some deeper place, from your heart, or from your soul. 7
Let me be more specific: What about the decision to follow Jesus, or join a church, or teach a Sunday school class, or lead a small group, or go to seminary, or become a minister or a missionary? Those kinds of decisions probably aren t going to come from up here in your head. When people ask you later, Why did you do that? you may not have a good answer, and when they say, How did you know? you might say, I just knew. Like Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter. He was a fisherman, but a fisherman whose heart was restless. When he heard about John the Baptist he said to his brother, Let s go. And when John said, Repent and be baptized, he waded out into the water. And when John pointed to Jesus and said, Behold the Lamb of God! Andrew followed. And when Jesus said, What are you looking for? he asked, Where are you staying. And after spending the day with Jesus he told his brother, We have found the Messiah. And when Jesus said, Follow me, Andrew dropped his nets. Why did he do it? Andrew himself might not have been able to articulate his reasons. How did he know? The same way you will, When the time comes. Jim Somerville 2018 8