Come and See. Two invitations. And one is conditional on the other.
Those getting ready for the 30 day retreat will probably be sick of this gospel passage already—we’ve used it a couple of times by now—but there’s a lot said those two words. Come and see.
You have to hear them from the mouth of Jesus. And hear them spoken to you. They’re a personal invitation and one you can respond to or not as you please. First, to come—to get up and go somewhere with Jesus, sight unseen. It takes a particular kind of generosity and readiness to risk to even consider doing that. To even consider walking off with him wherever he might take you. And no doubt a little tug of war gets going in all of us when we hear the invitation to ‘come’. There’s the safety of where you are right now—even if you don’t like where you are at least it is familiar to you—over against the fear that you might be taken somewhere you don’t know and don’t want to know. That set of forces would lock you in position, get you to hold fast, to stay put but, thank God, there’s another force at work too—Jesus is attractive to you. Something about him draws you, makes you want to go with him. And it’s not the sense you should or ought to go but that deep down you really do want to. You want to get close to this man; you want to know him better.
And that’s the tug of war. Which will you do? Will you stay put or will you come and see? And the answer, I’ll bet, is … both. You’ll do both, sometimes you’ll come along happily and sometimes you’ll hold back prudently. But every time you go with him, spend time with him, stay with him where he lives, you’ll see something. You’ll see Jesus and your trust will grow.
Come and see. Insofar as you ‘come’ you’ll ‘see’ and what you see will make it easier and easier to ‘come’. That’s what a retreat is about. Come with him and see him and stay with him and follow him.