Come and you will see—John 1: 39
I have often found myself wondering where Jesus was staying when he gave the invitation to the two disciples. My imagination tends to run a bit rampant. Did he live his everyday life in a small house attached to his carpenter’s shop? Did he spend so much time at the synagogue that he lived in a house adjacent to it? Did he depend on his lodgings to be provided by his extended family and friends? Did he live by the sea so he could take meditative walks along the shore? Did he have a sheltering cave in the mountains for his sojourns there?
A favorite quote of mine is, “Wherever your heart is, there will be your home.” And Jesus had the largest heart of all, a heart that was particularly in sync with the plight of the poor. So what exactly did those disciples SEE? They must have seen the love of God in action; that Jesus stayed where his heart called him to be. They might even have recognized a bit of themselves as they were created to be. Face-to-face encounters with the poor tend to open one’s heart wide.
Consider the well-known words of the ghost of Jacob Marley as he visits Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, “Business!. . .Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. . .Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?”
Consider Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday our country celebrates in January, who came and saw how God loves all people unabashedly equally and then put his heart, soul , and life into making a difference.
Or study the saints, every one of which sees the oneness of God’s creation and then go on to live lives that seek to help the poor.
When God calls; when you wonder where God dwells; will you come and really see and have your life fulfilled?
(first published in the Justice Bulletin Board 1/15/2012)
