Come and See
Besides the family always gathering at our house, there is one thing I remember specifically about Christmas Eve when I was a small child. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins came to our house while we waited for Santa. We did have a convenient chimney for him to come down (grown-ups assured us the fire wouldn’t bother him), but there was the complication that he wouldn’t come while we were watching for him.
The adults solved the problem by having our dear aunt take the children into a bedroom to sing Christmas carols. When everything was ready to be revealed, someone would call us. “Hurry, hurry, Santa was just here, hurry and see if you can see him before it’s too late!” We would all run out on the front porch to search the sky for a glimpse of Santa’s departing sleigh. One of us would be certain to see a distant red light that had to be Rudolph’s nose.
Ah, well, we missed him again. “But come and see what he brought,” someone would say. We would turn back to the living room where there was a mountain of presents, not just under the tree but spilling across the room and stacked on furniture. Not because each of us children got piles of gifts, but because all the gifts for all the relatives were there. It was spectacular.
My sisters and I talk as if this is what we “always” did. Even if the same ploy really did work several years in a row, or the older sisters went along for the sake of the younger, our family broke when I was nine years old. Never again were we able to say there was anything we “always” did at Christmastime.
One photo has kept that tradition vivid for me. Maybe it’s from the last good Christmas. Someone managed to snap a picture of my little sister’s face as she got the first glimpse of the presents under the tree. That look of overwhelming delight on my baby sister’s face still makes me happy.
Why am I telling you a Christmas story when it’s time to be looking forward to Easter? Because, as I write, I’m grieving a Christmas marked by disappointment and a sense of loss. As I talk to Jesus about this and try to make my mind like his, what I keep remembering is that picture of my little sister’s face at the moment someone said to her, “Come and see.”
The men Jesus called to follow him were looking for the Messiah. Perhaps, more than once, they had heard news that got their hopes up, only to have them knocked down again. Maybe it was difficult to keep believing that the Messiah would come in their lifetime. But one day, John the Baptist pointed to Jesus and called him the “Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world.”
One of John’s disciples who followed Jesus was Andrew. Andrew told his brother Peter. Peter told Philip, and Philip told Nathanael. Nathanael questioned whether anything good could come out of Nazareth, Jesus’s hometown. Philip simply said, “Come and see.” Nathanael did come and see, and he found Jesus, the one who heals the brokenhearted.
Another day, Jesus talked to a Samaritan woman as he sat resting by a well. This woman who had had five husbands had undoubtedly suffered some disappointment in her lifetime. Jesus said he could give her living water that would bubble up in her to eternal life. He told her he was the Messiah she was looking for. The woman went back to town and told everyone she encountered, “Come and see.” These people were not disappointed. They heard Jesus for themselves and knew they had found the Savior of the world.
Jesus’s teaching and healing brought hope and expectation to those who heard and believed. Then came the crucifixion. No more hope, nothing to look forward to.
After the Sabbath, two deeply grieving women went to Jesus’s tomb to do what they thought would be their last act of service for him. It’s difficult to comprehend their disillusionment. They had thought Jesus was going to free their people from the power of Rome, and now Rome had killed him.
When the women came to where Jesus was buried, they didn’t find the sealed tomb they had expected. Instead, they saw the angel of the Lord, who had rolled the stone away from the entrance. He said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you seek Jesus who was crucified. He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay” (Matt. 28:5-6 ESV).
Once they had seen that what the angel said was true, they were to go quickly and tell his disciples that Jesus was alive. They joyfully ran to do just that. I imagine their faces looked like my little sister’s when she saw the piles of gifts. How long was it before they could stop grinning?
These women obediently told Jesus’s disciples that Jesus had risen from the dead. His disciples told others, and those others told more, and on and on until someone told ME! What about you? Will you come and see?
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned–every one–to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
Hallelujah!
Through the gift of a faithful mother and grandmother, grew up knowing Jesus as a friend. Married for nearly two-thirds of her life, there has been time for several seasons, from homeschooling to owning a coffee shop. She has three grown children and nine grandchildren. An element of this season is writing about literature and life at Plumfield and Paideia.
Photograph © Ravi Roshan, used with permission
