John
1:43-51
If you want to know something about someone,
often you start with where they come from. When I was in seminary in North
Carolina, there were only a handful of us from the northeast. So when I heard
that the incoming class included a Marine chaplain-in-training who was from
Pennsylvania, I went over to say hello. I asked her where she was from, and she
said she was from a small town that nobody had ever heard of. I said, “What
would that be, someplace like Womelsdorf?” and her eyes got really wide. I have
no idea why I chose that place, except that I’ve always thought the name sounds
funny. I had never even been there, but I can hear myself saying something
like, “Can anything good come from Womelsdorf?”
It was actually kind of an embarrassing moment. I
had sort of insulted her hometown. I didn’t mean it that way, but that’s how it
could have come across. The experience does, however, leave me with some
sympathy for Nathanael, at that point still a disciple-to-be, who hears about
Jesus of Nazareth, and makes the offhand, snarky comment,
“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” [John
1:46]
For a long time, Nazareth was held to be a
backwater up in the Judean hills. It was far from the Mediterranean coast,
which was the most cosmopolitan area, and far from Jerusalem, which would have
been the center of both faith and politics. That gave rise to a tradition of hearing
Nathanael’s comment as an expression of the attitude “that Galileans were
impious hillbillies detached from Israel‘s religious center.”[1]
Enter the archaeologists. As a recent National Geographical article
puts it,
“Gallilee — long thought to have been a rural back water and an isolated
Jewish enclave —was in fact becoming more urbanized and romanized during Jesus’
day than scholars once imagined, and partly by the fact that Jesus’ boyhood
home was just three miles from Sepphoris, the Roman provincial capital.
Although the city isn’t mentioned in the Gospels, an ambitious building
campaign fueled by Galilee’s ruler, Herod Antipas, would have attracted skilled
workers from all the surrounding villages. Many scholars think it’s reasonable
to imagine Jesus, a young craftsman living nearby, working at Sepphoris — and,
like a college freshman, testing the boundaries of his religious upbringing.”[2]
Then the excavations in town continued and they
have discovered the largest-known concentration of Jewish ritual baths — and a
complete absence (at least so far) of pig bones,[3]
suggesting that despite the Roman presence the area was actually a sort of
Bible Belt.
So Phillip’s comment could mean
1)
Can anything
good come out of that hick town? Or
2)
Can anything
good come from that bunch of construction workers? or
3)
Can anything
good come from a bunch of Bible nerds?
Take your pick: whom do
you trust least? Updated a little, would
it be somebody from Utah, a Teamsters steward, or a Southern Baptist? We aren’t quite sure where Nathanael would
have pigeonholed Jesus on this continuum, but somehow I do think Jesus has the
same problem now that he did then. People
think that he’s going to fall easily into some kind of category and he refuses
to do that.
Part of the problem is that so many folks are so loud in
proclaiming that he is on their side, or that they know exactly what he would
say and do in the twenty-first century.
I would put myself in that group, too.
I am sure, very sure, that he would be standing up for the poor and for
migrants and for the decent treatment of women.
But are my notions of how to do that the same as his would be? I hope so.
I hope so, and I am certain enough to make phone calls and write some
letters and even pay the occasional visit to a legislative office about
it. But what if I encounter someone with
different notions of how to do things, someone who is not just some cynical
staffer who has memorized the talking points or an angry partisan who has drunk
the Kool-Aid? Mind you, those people are
out there. So, too, looking the other
way, are folks who plaster bumperstickers on their cars or their guitar cases
like they are hex signs that will ward off all evil from the land. (How am I doing on these stereotypes?)
Jesus refused to let Nathanael do that to him. That’s what his (to us) weird response meant.
“When
Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an
Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to
know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called
you.’” [John 1:47-48]
There’s a whole,
beautiful passage of Micah where the prophet promises a day when God will act
so that people can turn their swords into plowshares and their spears into
pruning hooks [4:3].
“Nation
shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither
shall they learn war anymore;
but they
shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no
one shall make them afraid.” [Micah 4:3b-4a]
Jesus tells Nathanael he
has seen him in a place like that.
Whatever it was that divided them – and there must have been something –
he told him flat out that he could still see him in the kingdom of God, because
Jesus saw that his heart was right:
“Here is truly an Israelite, in whom there is no
deceit.” [John 1:47]
It was to that kind of
open heart that Nathanael responded, even to the point of confessing,
“Rabbi,
you are the Son of God! You are the king
of Israel!” [John 1:49]
Now, neither you nor I can see people’s hearts like Jesus
did, and does. That’s why it’s all the
more important that we give people the benefit of the doubt as much as
possible. So often, what brings out
something good in someone is the expectation that it’s in there somewhere. Nathanael went along with Jesus, and no doubt
was there when he saw him do for others what he had done for him. There was Zacchaeus, the tax collector who
spontaneously offered to return all that he had ever extorted. There was the woman taken in adultery, whose
life he saved and then told her, “Go, and
sin no more.” There was a man so far
out of his mind that the people of his town had to chain him up so that he
wouldn’t hurt himself, and when Jesus left him he was sitting there calmly and
making sense. He could see past Peter’s
fears that led Peter to deny him. He
could see through James’ and John’s bragging and boasting about who was the
greatest. Don’t you think he does the
same for us (whoever “us” is) and for “those people” (whoever they are)?
George Fox, a founder of the Quakers, said, “Walk cheerfully
over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a
blessing and make the witness of God in them to bless you.”
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