When I was in middle school, I loved a good word search. At first, the game looks like nonsense—a jumble of letters, line after line. That’s where the word key—where you’re told what words to look for—comes in handy. With the key, things start looking less messy. Maybe not all at once, maybe not right away: but once you have the key, line by line, within that mess, you start seeing words, you start making some sense of it. Now, the words have always been there; it’s not the key that makes the words. But with the key, you know what you’re looking for; and once you begin to know what you’re looking for, you start to see what you’re looking at: not just letters, but words.
In today’s Gospel, we encounter people who have begun to know what they’re looking for, and who, as a result, have started to see what—or who— they’re looking at. We meet again with John the Baptist. Last week, we read an account of Jesus’s baptism by John. This week, the focus is less on who John baptized—we aren’t actually told here that John baptizes Jesus—but on why he baptized. John tells us that he baptized so that the Chosen One, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, the One who ranked ahead of him because he was before him, “might be revealed to Israel.” John also tells us that, through the baptizing mission, Jesus is revealed to him, John, personally. At first, John tells us, he “did not know” who the man was who ranked ahead of him because He was before him. But then, John is told to look for “He on whom the Spirit descends and remains.” And knowing what he is to look for, and seeing it, John sees, truly sees, who he is looking at in Jesus; Jesus as the Chosen One, the one in whom and through whom heaven and earth are coming together.
We also meet in today’s Gospel with Andrew, Peter, and an unnamed disciple of John’s. These men, like John, have seemingly been on the lookout too; once they hear John say that Jesus is the “Lamb of God” they know what to do: Andrew and the other disciple begin following Jesus—literally, they begin walking after him—not wanting to lose sight of Him. And having started to know and see this Lamb of God, Andrew then goes and finds his brother, Peter, and brings him to Jesus. Peter too will come to know and see Jesus for who He really is—a fact that the Church will celebrate tomorrow, on the feast of the Confession of St. Peter. Through the Spirit working through John, and then through the disciples, Jesus is thus revealed to the disciples themselves and beyond. These men have begun to know what they are looking for, and so, seeing Jesus, they have started to see what they are looking at: not just a man like any other, but “the Messiah,” true God and true man.
Now sometimes, these disciples’ vision will get blurry; sometimes, these disciples will lose sight of Jesus—Peter, for example, will deny Jesus on His way to the cross, notwithstanding his having previously confessed Him as the Messiah. But, despite their shortcomings, having seen and known Jesus, these disciples will keep following Him, and they will help others to know, and see, and follow Him too.
Now, do we know what we are looking for? When we look around us, when we look at our own lives, the lives of our families and friends, and the life of the world, what do we think we are looking at? And what do we see? God? If, more often than not, we look around us—or inside of us—and see not God but a mess, nonsense, then this season of Epiphany is full of especially good news for us.
—because our God is not a God of nonsense: our God is a God of revelation. And that is why He has shown us the key, that is, Himself; that is why He Himself has shown Himself to us through Jesus His Son, the “Word made flesh:” so that our eyes may be opened to see the world for what it really is: God’s Kingdom.
In this season of Epiphany, we celebrate that revelation. The word “epiphany” means something like “manifestation.” And so though Epiphany is often associated with the Magi, and their being led by a star to the child born to be King, Epiphany is not just about Jesus being revealed to the Magi, but about God and His purposes being made manifest.
In Epiphany, we celebrate that God chose to reveal Himself to us, in time and space, through the person of Jesus. We celebrate that He did this in the past: being born, living, dying, and then rising again to defeat the powers of sin and death. But we also celebrate that He will reveal Himself to us in the future: as Paul tells us, all we “who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” are yet waiting for His revealing; we are waiting for Him, as we say in the Creed, “to come again in glory;” we are waiting for Him to make final sense of this often messy world.
And in the meantime, we are yet to celebrate that God also reveals Himself to us in the present—though it may not always look this way at first. In this present, this messy present, we, like John, and like the disciples, are called to know what, and who, we are to look for, so that even in the midst of the seeming mess, of what may look like nonsense, we may know and see God.
We are invited to get to know Jesus as He truly is, so that we may truly see Him, truly follow Him, and invite others to do likewise. We are to do this, as today’s Collect prays, “illumined by [God’s] Word and Sacraments,” so that, through us, Jesus “may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth.”
Many peddle counterfeit Christs and worship false Messiahs, following and inviting others to follow a Jesus-in-name-only who reflects their own sinfulness. We, however, are to get to know Jesus not by looking to these images—not, say, by to looking a Jesus who sanctions cruelty or rewards greed—but by looking to the image of Jesus as shown to us in Word and Sacrament, to the image of Jesus revealed to us in Scripture, and through the Church.
And who is this Jesus? He is a Jesus, as Paul tells us, of “grace” and “peace;” a Jesus who does not leave us in our sin, but who takes away the sin of the world; a Jesus who works through imperfect people, like Peter; a Jesus who, as Isaiah tells us, reaches His “salvation…to the end of the earth,” not reserving it for a particular people; a Jesus who offers His sanctification to all who seek to follow him, through the waters of baptism and the power of the Holy Spirit; a Jesus who is not just a teacher, but King of Kings and Lord of Lords; and, a Jesus who, thanks be to God, delights not in darkness, but in light, in seeing us, and being seen by us.
And, having come to know Jesus, that Jesus, we are then invited to find others and bring them to Him, that they too may “come and see” that in and through Jesus, God Himself is being revealed. AMEN.
Sermon by Mrs. Lorraine Mahoney, Postulant for Holy Orders
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
January 18, 2026