Second Sunday after Epiphany
Don’t you wish sometimes you could have been there, could have seen them in person? You know: the disciples and, of course, Jesus himself. You do hear people say things like that every so often. Wouldn’t it have been something to have been able to meet Peter, to shake Matthew’s hand? Or how about being able to actually hear the Sermon on the Mount? When people wish for this kind of thing, the motivation seems to be a combination of healthy curiosity and the idea that maybe it would be easier to believe this whole Jesus thing if we could see it with our own eyes. But I tend to doubt that it would be easier to believe the Jesus story if we could have seen everything for ourselves.
I am not at all convinced that seeing the disciples would make the gospel easier to believe. In fact, it might make it harder! The disciples were not, after all, from among society’s best and brightest. They were not highly educated, well-dressed, or outwardly impressive. In fact, the first thing you would notice would probably be their commonness. Their dirty fingernails, the callouses on Philip’s heels, the missing teeth that were plain as day every time James smiled. You’d be surprised at how short a couple of them were. You might be surprised by their “colorful” language. They were sailors and fisherman, after all.
As adults, we need to set aside the pictures from the children’s Bible we grew up with. You know, the ones where the disciples were generically handsome and strong with well-groomed beards, wearing nice robes. In those pictures the disciples were always clean and surprisingly Anglo-Saxon looking. But they were subsistence laborers, so they were probably pretty ragged looking. Are we really all that different from them, though. I mean, maybe we’re not much to look at, either. …And maybe that’s Good News after all. Because somehow that bunch of uneducated fishermen were in touch with the deepest truth and deepest love of the universe. Those ordinary people changed history by their witness. It’s amazing! In fact and as Frederick Buechner once noted, it all has a fairy tale-like feel to it.
Most of us have a soft spot in our hearts for fairy tales. A fairy tale’s reversal of expectations intrigues us. There’s something amazing about finding out that the frog is really a handsome prince, or that the ugly duckling is the one that grows up to be a beautiful swan. We love it when the moment of truth comes for the characters in a story. Fairy tales are stories of transformation, and that’s what happened to these average people we call “the disciples”. If you were to bring all the disciples together into one room, you would never guess by looking at them that this less than stellar-looking group of ordinary people would change the world. But they did. The disciples changed the world because it was to them that the greatest love was first revealed. That’s why Jesus called them in the first place. If you’re going to save the world, you’ve got to start somewhere. And if you’re going to save the world through humility, gentleness, compassion, and sacrifice, it makes sense to begin with a bunch of people who couldn’t get much more humble if they tried! The messengers fit the message. In fact, over the course of his ministry if Jesus’ most significant struggle with his disciples to keep them humble and ordinary-looking. Every time a couple of them started angling for power or arguing amongst themselves as to who was the greatest, Jesus knocked them back down to the street level of service.
The disciples needed to be common, ordinary, and humble if they were going to do Jesus any good and, therefore, change the world. That’s why Jesus called them. But in the calling process, there was more going on than we realize. Our passage from John 1 is a case in point. Jesus has already attracted Simon Peter and his brother Andrew when he calls also a man named Philip to follow him. No sooner does Philip join Jesus’ still-small group of disciples, than he runs to fetch his brother, Nathanael, whose call to follow Jesus is particularly remarkable. Based on this story alone, you’d have to say that Nathanael dove in based on little more than a kind of spiritual parlor trick: Jesus claims to have seen Nathanael sitting under a fig tree even before Philip went to go get him. Jesus seems to know that this was a neat trick, but not exactly the most startling thing in the world! Still, it’s enough for Nathanael to sign on. It even motivates him to declare openly that Jesus is the Son of God and the king of all Israel.
Nathanael’s confession was pretty simple. But in this story, Jesus reveals some pretty amazing things if we pay close attention. Twice in this brief passage there are very clever, very telling allusions or references to a key Old Testament figure: Jacob. The first reference crops up in the curious way that Jesus greets Nathanael. Jesus says, “Well now, here comes a true Israelite, a man in whom there is no guile.” 0The Greek word used in verse 47 is the word for “guile,” which can also mean craftiness, deceit, being tricky, underhanded. The most famous person to Palestinian Jews who was a trickster par excellence was Jacob himself, from the book of Genesis: the crafty deceiver who eventually was re-named Israel. In fact, the name Jacob literally means “deceiver”. That’s why some have paraphrased Jesus’ words here to say something like, “Here is an Israelite with no Jacob in him! Here is a son of Jacob who is not a chip off the old block!”
Jacob always got ahead in life by his own trickery. He relied on his own cunning and craftiness to snag the good things in life. He outsmarted his dim-witted brother, Esau, by doing an end-run on his nearly blind father Isaac. And then spent the better part of twenty years finding ever-more creative ways to trick his Uncle Laban out of just about everything he owned. And for some reason, let’s call it grace, God liked Jacob. Jacob had a dream of a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. Jacob called the place “bethel,” beth-el, Hebrew for “the house of God”, the place where God and people meet. In that dream God assured Jacob that despite all the stunts Jacob had pulled, God was with him. And God would stay with Jacob, finally and quite literally wrestling him into an understanding that the best things in life come by grace alone. It’s not about the power to grab what you want. It’s about being humble to receive what only God can give.
“Here comes an Israel who is not Jacob,” Jesus basically said when he first saw Nathanael coming his way. Of course, before this Nathaniel says, “Nazareth! Can anything, or anyone, good come from that backwater town!” And Jesus basically says, “You’re right, Nathanael: I’m not much to look at. But I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m the One!” Nathanael believes this, and Jesus then responds by declaring himself to be the living Bethel: the place where God and people meet. It’s the whole story of the whole Bible getting a re-boot. Jesus is establishing a new Israel, a new people.
If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that the only reason Philip and then Nathanael were so quickly impressed by Jesus was because they were naive and uneducated. There is something innocent, naïve, and child-like in the way Nathanael comes to faith. Jesus himself says as much. “You believe just because I told you about the fig tree!? That’s nothing! Just wait until you realize that I am the walking, talking Bethel–the place where God and humanity, meet! Just wait until you see the angels, buddy!” But Jesus isn’t criticizing Nathanael’s simple faith, he’s commending it. This is someone who is innocent enough to believe that something not just good but something of God really did come from Nazareth. Apparently, we need a little naiveté to embrace the gospel’s fairy tale-like depiction of God in human form. We need a little holy innocence to believe that in that small band of ignorant fishermen, a cosmic treasure lay hidden. The disciples, as it turns out, are the frogs who turn into princes.
When we’re being honest, we know that we are no more impressive-looking, or outwardly dazzling than those first disciples. But by grace, we, too, have been touched by the deepest truth of the universe: God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. If it takes being child-like to believe this, then so be it. And so, we hang onto our faith in the gritty realities of this world. We have seen that dark and terrible things are present in the world today. Good and evil continue to be locked in deep conflict, and some good things are lost along the way. It’s that child-like aspect of faith that keeps hope alive. The gift of faith and our resulting willingness to embrace and believe what seems improbable and highly unlikely has given us a glimpse of Joy. We catch an Epiphany glimpse of a larger world in which God is the Creator and Jesus is the true King.
The past couple of years have shown us only too well how difficult it can be to maintain our faith in the face of grim realities. Here’s what has changed. We still believe in Jesus, we are still wide-eyed in our wonder over him. But our eyes are open, not shut, and we see again and again the very realities that required God’s Son to become incarnate here, right in the midst of human conflict and struggle. We recognize that the shadow of the cross is always present. That cross is what it took for even God’s own Son to start setting things right again.
It’s a lesson the disciples learned eventually, too. Through betrayals and denials and abandonment, the disciples stumbled along with Jesus, finally and by grace alone arriving on the other side of that great event we call Easter. And in the ultimate reversal of expectations, the dead one became alive again. And finally the morning dawned in John 21 when Nathanael and the others were fishing in a boat only to see some hazy figure on the distant shore, cupping his hands to his mouth and calling out, “Catch anything?”
They knew then who he was and so rowed back to the shore as fast as they could. Nobody said much. John says they didn’t even dare to ask, “Is it you, Jesus?” They felt like they were in a dream, a dream of heaven and earth meeting. But they knew it was Jesus. Nathanael knew it, too.
This Jesus now looked like he had been to hell and back, bearing scars and looking somehow different, changed, but he was undeniably alive. And when at breakfast that morning he took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them, there was no longer any doubt who this stranger on the beach was. He was the same man who, years before, told Nathanael that he hadn’t seen anything yet. Having now been to the cross and back, Nathanael agreed. Back on that day when he first came to faith, Nathanael had been pretty innocent all right. But in a way, despite all he’d seen, suffered, lamented, and wept about, he was still innocent, still child-like enough to believe that the one he watched die was alive again, that the truth of Jesus as our living Bethel was no dream. And every once in a while, out of the corner of his eye, Nathanael was able to see one of those thin places where heaven and earth meet. And by grace, so can we. Thanks be to God!