John was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus. Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi,” which translated means Teacher, “where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come, and you will see.” So they went and saw where Jesus was staying, and they stayed with him that day. It was about four in the afternoon. Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus. He first found his own brother Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah,” which is translated Christ. Then he brought him to Jesus. Jesus looked at him and said, “You are Simon the son of John; you will be called Cephas, which is translated Peter.” (John 1.35-42)
It can be tough living in the shadows of someone else. A high school student recently told his parents that he had decided to attend a college that neither his older sister nor his older brother was attending. Asked why he had selected the college, he said he didn’t want to be always in his brother’s shadow. A few years younger than his brother, he had followed him in grade school and in high school, more often than not known as the little brother. It was time, he felt, to go his own way.
If anyone understood, it would have been Andrew, whom we meet in the scriptures selected for this Second Sunday in Ordinary Time. The selection, overall, makes sense. We’ve recently left behind the Christmas Season, a festive and, some would say, excessive time of year, complete with tinseled trees and colored lights. Now, it’s back to the ordinary business of life.
So, the creche with Baby Jesus is stored away until next year and we begin “Ordinary Time,” as it is logically called on the liturgical calendar, a period of weeks that will move us slowly, but steadily, towards the Lenten Season and then to Easter, another apex awaiting us in the months ahead. And, what better way to start “Ordinary Time” than with the ordinary life of Jesus of Nazareth, no longer a child in a crib, but now an itinerant preacher walking the backroads of Judea, especially in the region of Galilee.
As we can see from the short section of the scripture that we have today, the evangelist John does not waste much time getting us to the adult Jesus, whom we meet already here in Chapter One of his gospel. He has no infancy narrative with shepherds or magi as his compatriots Luke and Matthew do, but, instead, chooses to introduce us to Rabbi Jesus by way of John the Baptist, the mercurial messenger of the Jordan.
In short, John catapults us into the public ministry of Rabbi Jesus without fanfare, using John the Baptist as the one making the introductions, the Rabbi apparently “walking by” a group of people and John, standing in the vicinity with two of his followers, points to Jesus and tells them, “Behold, the Lamb of God,” which, the gospel writer argues, was enough to prick their interest, the two following Jesus and staying with him. Or, as John says, Andrew and the other disciple “went and saw where Jesus was staying, and they stayed with him that day.”
The evangelist is purposefully making a not-too-subtle shift from John the Baptist to Rabbi Jesus, even transferring John’s disciples to the Galilean Teacher, now found front and center on the stage for the remainder of the gospel. And while the other gospels also invest some time similarly in John the Baptist, the evangelist called John abruptly makes a break from the more familiar call of the disciples that we find in the other three gospels. In them, Rabbi Jesus walks along the Sea of Galilee and finds a few fishermen at work, whom he calls to follow him.
Not here. Unlike these other gospel writers, there is no call of the disciples at the Sea of Galilee, no fishermen fixing their nets, and no leaving their boats behind to follow Jesus. There is simply Andrew and another follower of John who test the waters, so to speak, follow Jesus, and urge their family and friends to do the same. John describes this call of the disciples in shorthand, writing, “Andrew first found his own brother Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah.”
And, as we see, the first thing that Rabbi Jesus does when introduced to Simon is to change his name, insisting that he now be called Cephas, or, its Greek equivalent, Peter. It may be an odd thing to do when you meet someone–to give them a different name–but the evangelist is simply emphasizing the radical shift that is about to take place in Simon’s life as he follows the Teacher. The old man is left behind, the new man is ahead.
Much like a Pony Express rider, John gallops to this point quickly. In the same way that he used John the Baptist to move our attention to Jesus of Nazareth, so now he uses Andrew to turn our eyes to Peter. In both instances, he is moving us from the lesser to the greater. The evangelist doesn’t even hide the plot, introducing us to Andrew as “the brother of Simon Peter,” an unusual identification even at the time, an age when men were identified as sons of their fathers, not as brothers of someone, as Jesus rightly does when he says to Simon, “You are Simon the son of John.”
In other words, Andrew, as John sees it, lives in the shadow of his brother, Simon, even if Andrew is the first to find Rabbi Jesus. That fact is solid as cement as soon as the evangelist chooses to introduce Andrew, not as the son of John, as he surely was, but as “the brother of Simon Peter.” He wants us to look ahead to Simon, not stay with Andrew. As a result, Andrew’s moment in the spotlight is short by any assessment.
And, for that matter, his star never rises again. While Peter becomes the first of the disciples, at least in terms of leadership and frequency of appearances in the text, Andrew disappears into the background, called by name only three times in the entirety of the gospel, the first being here when he introduces his brother to Jesus. Later, in Chapter 6, Andrew will bring a boy with loaves and fish to Jesus. And then, in Chapter 12, he will bring a group of Greeks to Jesus after they have asked to see him.
Given that reality, we might choose to see Andrew simply as a bit player in a larger drama, his historical footprint light, his significance slight. Aside from these three Biblical references, there is no trace of him, no record of his entering synagogues to preach and to teach, and only later legends that would purport that he ended up around the Black Sea, where he was crucified on an “X-shaped” cross.
In fact, it would be very easy to overlook Andrew–as the scriptural text almost wants us to do–but, if we do, we also may overlook someone–and something-important. Anyway, that’s the way I see things. The Byzantine Church, to its credit, calls Andrew “protokletos,” which, translated from the Greek, means “first called,” an acknowledgement that he, in fact, followed Jesus before his brother Peter did.
If we scratch a little further beneath the surface, Andrew may represent something even more important to us, if we allow him to. And what is that? His seeming insignificance can become inspiration for all of us who also live in the shadows, faithful followers of Jesus of Nazareth who go unnoticed and unheralded because all the attention ends up going to someone else. In this way, he becomes the patron saint of the overlooked and the unimportant folks who follow the ways of Jesus, people intent on living the life of the Galilean Teacher, but whose names are never going to be known and whose lives are never going to be remembered.
But, if we are like Andrew, we get the job done, regardless of how little attention comes our way, bringing people to Jesus as he did, stepping back into the shadows as soon as we have shown them the way to Jesus. We will never have the big titles or the bright lights, and, when our lives are done, there will be no record of our good deeds or our hours of service. Never big name stars, only B actors, we nonetheless play our part, content to be unheralded.
But, like Andrew, going unnoticed will not matter. Our calling is not to achieve big things or to have high acclaim. Instead, our calling is to take the days of the ordinary lives that we have been given and to use them in service to the One whom we, like Andrew, believe to be the Teacher and the Messiah. And, in this way, we make his name live on through the ages and his deeds remembered long after we are gone, even if we ourselves are soon enough forgotten.
In other words, Andrew makes clear that the proof of discipleship is not found in headlines or in bylines, but more often found in the daily tasks of love as ordinary people live out the call of Rabbi Jesus, however underappreciated these tasks may be. While we will never become a household name like Mother Teresa, it does not mean our attempts to feed the hungry and to give drink to the thirsty are unimportant. It just means they go unnoticed–except by those who hunger and by those who thirst.
The example of Andrew, then, allows us to define discipleship in terms of quiet service and small deeds rather than in terms of big stature or high prominence. We may never make a name for ourselves and, more likely than not, we will live in the shadow of others who end up getting the credit, but we continue to serve the Teacher faithfully and quietly, honoring our call to be disciples in the ordinary business of life.
Decades ago, when the writer William Least Heat Moon lost his job teaching English at a college in Missouri, he hit the road, deciding he’d trade the high-profile world of academia for the low-profile world of rural America. After he was done with his travels across the country, he wrote a book that he called “Blue Highways,” a travelog as old as “The Travels of Marco Polo” or as recent as John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley.”
In the book, published in 1982, Least Heat Moon explains the title early on. He writes, “The tumult of St. Louis behind, the Illinois superwide quiet but for the rain, I turned south onto state 4, a shortcut to 1-64. After that . . . I was going to stay on the three million miles of bent and narrow rural American two-lane, the roads to Podunk and Toonerville. Into the sticks, the boondocks, the burgs, backwaters, jerkwaters, the wide-spots-in-the road, the don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it towns. Into those places where you say, ‘My god! What if you lived here!’ The Middle of Nowhere.”
In other words, I guess we could say, all those places where the Andrews of the country live, generally unnoticed and frequently overlooked. Thousands of miles and months later, when Least Heat Moon finds himself in Dime Box, Texas, he strikes up a conversation with the local postmaster who tells him, “City people don’t think anything important happens in a place like Dime Box. And usually it doesn’t, unless you call conflict important. Or love or babies or dying.”
He doesn’t tell us the postmaster’s name. But it easily could have been Andrew. Because he would have been right at home in Dime Box, Texas, where the locals respected him for the good he did there, even if his better-known brother Simon was in all the big city newspapers. Truthfully, I have no idea if the evangelist John intended that same message in his text today, but I like to think that maybe, just maybe he did.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 