John 1:41

‘He first finds his own brother Simon and says to him, “We have found the Messiah (which is being interpreted ‘the Christ')”.

Andrew then seeks out his brother Simon (Peter) and declares that they have found ‘the Messiah'. Once someone has truly found Christ they cannot help but seek to tell others. That is a proof of their genuineness.

At this stage, in their first enthusiasm, it is clear that they consider Jesus to be the expected Messiah. That was what John was pointing to. Such was the expectancy of God's coming deliverance in those days that it was almost inevitable. But as time goes by that belief will fade, for as they go about with Him they will find that He does not behave as they expect the Messiah to behave. He does not even claim to be the Messiah when speaking to Jews, or in public. Indeed everyone will be puzzled. Even John the Baptiser will begin to have his doubts (Matthew 11:2; Luke 7:19). It is thus not surprising that less enlightened men (at the time) will feel the same.

But Jesus is aware that He has to re-educate them. He has not come with force of arms but with force of words. He has not come to achieve earthly success but to gain a heavenly victory (something brought out in the other Gospels by His Temptation). Thus He will continue on His way and let them watch Him and gradually come to an understanding of Who and What He is. The Messianic claim in the way that they understood it would not only have been dangerous, it would have been wrong. He was not an enemy of Rome. In His purposes Rome was an irrelevance, and He would not die for a cause He was not interested in. He had come to seek and to save the lost and to establish a heavenly kingdom, a kingdom ‘not of this world' (John 18:36). But this as yet was something that they could not understand.

The final certainty that Jesus is the Messiah will in fact come later, when Jesus will redefine the term in terms of the suffering Son of Man (Matthew 16:16 and parallels and John 6:69). So here His response will be to speak of Himself as ‘the Son of Man', stressing His oneness with humanity (v. 51), but with the later intention of revealing a deeper meaning for that title too as the One Who comes out of suffering to receive the throne of God and enter into glory (Daniel 7:13). The writer, however, brings in Andrew's use of the term Messiah because he wants his readers to know that Jesus is indeed the Messiah. (In fact even after Peter's confession of Jesus as Messiah his disciples are having difficulty with the subject (Mark 10:35). They still have the wrong idea).

‘First finds'. Does this mean ‘first' before doing anything else? Or first before finding others? It is probably the former. (There are variant readings, but the differences are not really important).