In the closing verses of this chapter we have a narrative of the calling of some four or five of our Lord's earliest disciples. It is interesting on many accounts, more particularly perhaps on this that it distinctly points out the reason whythese men attached themselves to the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.
I. Had Jesus Christ come in His own Name, as did many of the revolutionary chieftains of the time had He appeared as a merely political Christ the Jews would gladly and thankfully have welcomed Him, even in spite of His Divine pretensions. But as it was, seeing that He disappointed their hopes, and practically disallowed the ideal which they had permitted themselves to set up, they turned upon Him in their fury, and cast Him out as a detected impostor. There is something remarkable, then, in the fact that these first disciples of Christ had a spiritual insight, so far superior to that of the rest of their fellow countrymen, that they could detect in Jesus of Nazareth what seemed to be hidden from the eyes of everybody else. Although not uneducated, and certainly not unintelligent men they had not, as we know, received the benefit of the highest culture of their day; and yet, while doctors and Sanhedrists, scribes and Pharisees, with all their learning, were blind to the glory of Jesus, these simple-minded Galilean fishermen were perfectly assured that it was He of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write.
II. Consider the reason why the Jews of the present day ought to believe that the Messiah has already come. (1) The time of the Messiah's Advent is distinctly announced in the ancient Scriptures and distinctly announced, we think as occurring between the return of the nation from the Babylonish captivity and its subsequent destruction and scattering at the hands of the Romans. (2) Two different comings of Messiah, different in their characteristics and attributes, are spoken of in the writings of the prophets. The one coming is to a people living in their own land, having a city, having laws, having a national existence; the other coming is to a people scattered in all quarters of the earth, and needing to be brought back to the land given by Divine covenant to them and to their fathers.
G. Calthrop, Penny Pulpit,new series, No. 1,034.
Reference: John 1:45. A. Edersheim, Church of England Pulpit,vol. xiii., p. 157.