Remember the first time that Jesus appears in the Gospel of John (Jn 1:35-39). John the Baptist is standing with some of his disciples when Jesus passes by, and John points to Jesus and says, ‘There is the Lamb of God.’ (Jn 1:36) And the two disciples standing with John the Baptist followed Jesus. They followed him – they were looking at his back. But then he turned and saw them following him, and he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ What are you looking for? And they replied, ‘Teacher, where are you staying?’ And what did he say? ‘Come and see.’ Come and see. And they went and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him for the rest of the day. Then, St John says in the Gospel, ‘It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.’ What does it matter that it was four o’clock in the afternoon? It was actually a time for prayer. In the early church, every day was shaped around times of prayer and four o’clock was one – the time of the evening prayer, the afternoon prayer when they stopped work and prayed. This little story is a wonderful description of discipleship.
(Christian Life in the Light of Christian Meditation 1: Discipleship by Laurence Freeman OSB )
