Epiphany 2B, 14 January 2024. The Very Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
- 1 Samuel 3:1-20. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.
- 1 Corinthians 6:12-20. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God and that you are not your own?
- John 1:43-51. You [all] will see greater things than these.
O God of calling and questing, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.
In the midst of sequential Gospel of Mark readings during the season of Epiphany, today we hear a passage from the Gospel of John. I don’t have the foggiest idea why. The answer often given is that the Gospel of Mark is just too short – it moves too fast. (I’ve parroted that answer myself.) But when I stop to think about it, I realize that I’ve never heard anyone in church complain that a Gospel reading (or a sermon, for that matter) was too short!
This Gospel interruption from John, this piece of the first chapter in John is a funny little story. I wonder if it was funny when John first wrote it and the humor has been lost in translation. Did any of you listen to this story and think, “wait, Nathanael believes Jesus is the King of Israel because Jesus said he saw him under a fig tree?” Angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man? It’s quite cryptic.
I’m sure you have, at some time in your life, done a ‘connect-the-dots’ picture – think back! Before you connected all the dots, if it was a complicated picture, you didn’t know what it was going to look like. You might have had some hints – maybe parts of the picture were drawn in but it was hard to figure out how the whole thing would look until you drew in the lines that connected the dots. Plus, if the copy of the connect-the-dot picture had been generated on an old copier, with marked up glass, there might have been extra dots on the page that made the picture even harder to figure out. That’s a little bit what this Gospel lesson from John is like.
John clearly wants his hearers to know how Philip and Nathanael got involved with Jesus. John tells us that Jesus wanted to go to Galilee (the verb here is not so much about decision as it is about desire). He had been in the Judean wilderness at the Jordan River where he was baptized, far from the Sea of Galilee. The Gospel of John doesn’t tell the story of the baptism, just John the Baptist’s report that he did baptize Jesus and that John the Baptist saw the spirit descending on Jesus like a dove. We don’t even know if Jesus also saw this. Then two of John the Baptist’s followers, Andrew and an unnamed person, were curious and started following Jesus. Then Andrew recruited his brother whose name was Simon. The story goes that Jesus met Simon, took one look at him and said “you will be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter, which in our day would be translated as the nickname Rocky).
After Jesus met Peter, Jesus desired to go to the Galilee, where he found Philip who was from the same town as Peter and Andrew. That town was named Bethsaida, which means house of fishing. It’s a story about Jesus making connections. We tell stories about connections like this all the time, don’t we? Jesus found out about Philip because Philip was from the same town as Peter and Andrew. Then Philip went and found Nathanael. That’s how Nathanael got involved. So those are the first dots being connected in the picture of Jesus’ early community.
The next part of the picture is Nathanael’s response to Philip’s news that he believes he has found the Messiah in Jesus, the Son of Joseph. Nathanael says, “a Messiah? FromNazareth?” Maybe he meant, “A Messiah from that insignificant place?” or he could have meant something worse – Nazareth seems to have had a bad reputation as a home to bandits and other troublemakers. It was a small-time community, an agricultural village with probably no more than several hundred residents. Since it was so close to the opulent new Roman city of Sephoris, it probably supplied builders and other laborers who made a living working for the oppressors, working for wages paid by the occupying empire. Hard to imagine that a Messiah would be from there. And yet, our whole body of Gospel texts practically shout, “Yes! That is exactly where our messiah was from!”
See for yourself, Philip replied. So Nathanael did – and as he approached Jesus, Jesus said, “ah – here’s a guy who doesn’t hold back – he says what’s on his mind.” It’s also a play on the name Israel (aka Jacob) who was quite the deceiver– so an Israelite in whom there is no deceit might be a bit of a dig and in a guy-talk kind of way, also a compliment. Nathanael, first skeptical, was now incredulous. He didn’t believe that Jesus knew that about him because he’d never met Jesus before. He said, “from when do you know me?” And Jesus replied, “I knew when I saw you under the fig tree.”
So here’s a place where the story gets confusing for any of us who aren’t sure what that means. And, by the way, none of us knows for sure what this meant to John or John’s followers. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to mine the text for what it means to us now. It might mean that Jesus was watching Philip and maybe even overheard his skepticism. There was also a saying that rabbis debated scripture under fig trees. It’s not exactly clear what it meant – it might be something like our saying “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” or “he went out on a limb” – a tree metaphor – and it seems like it was some kind of metaphor associated with discussing scripture. There was a saying that studying Torah was “gathering figs” – you know, collecting delicious and nourishing morsels.
In this passage from the Gospel of John, full of allusions to the First Testament, John’s audience probably knew the biblical prophecies of Zechariah and Jeremiah imagining a future time when a person will call their neighbor under a vine and fig tree, marking the beginning of a messianic rule of right-relationship under a David-like monarch. [1]. Also, as Adele Reinhartz points out in the Jewish Annotated New Testament, the tree of the knowledge in Genesis is traditionally considered to have been a fig tree and it’s associated with abundance and well-being. [2]
It seems like the important thing is that Nathanael was a skeptic and a debater, who didn’t hold back. I also think it’s important that Jesus saw Nathanael first. Jesus seemed drawn to Nathanael. Now maybe Jesus’ standards are just extremely low when it comes to followers – there’s certainly plenty of evidence for that. (I mean, we’re all here aren’t we?) But maybe, Jesus knows that having skeptics in his group is going to make the journey a LOT more interesting. In any case, Nathanael was impressed enough by Jesus’ insight to exclaim that this Rabbi from Nazareth is the Son of God, the King of Israel. Or maybe he’s teasing. We don’t know. And Jesus’ response is, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” You all are going to see heaven opened up and angels of God ascending and descending upon the son of man” Note, Jesus answers Nathanael’s Son of God (maybe a title with initial caps) with “son of man” (or humanity or human one) with no initial caps. This is all translator choice because the Greek didn’t use upper and lower case.
Any faithful Israelite knows that story of Jacob (the first Israelite) and Jacob’s dream where he saw angels – that is messengers – of God going up and down a ladder between heaven and earth. The ladder was the connection between heaven and earth. But what Jesus is saying is that the angels – the messengers of God – are going up and down upon the son of man. The son of man is a connection, a path between heaven and earth. It’s not a ladder and it’s not a dream. This is John the Evangelist’s way of declaring that the person of Jesus was fully human and sent from God to help us all be fully human – to connect us to the divine. According to John, Jesus is the Messiah and the Messiah is a connection between heaven and earth. Jesus, in creating a community of love, will draw others to God. [3]
Now here’s the last dot that we have to connect to get the whole picture. If we as a church are really the Body of Christ – it is both our calling and our quest to become a connection, to serve as a connection between heaven and earth. It is both our calling and our quest to be a community of love which draws others to God through us and upon us. We are carriers or vehicles on which the messages from people and God might come and go on. As the apostle Paul admonishes us, our body – our collective body — is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is within us, and which we have from God and that we are not our own. It’s all metaphorical – and mystical in its description.
What’s not metaphorical or mystical, according to today’s lessons, are the messages. One message is about listening. We spend a lot of time talking to God – especially in the Episcopal Church – we are a wordy bunch. We might not experience God’s voice so often – but it’s no wonder – God can’t really get a word in edgewise most of the time. The message of the Samuel story is that what we should say to God (or Love) is we are ready to listen. And then we need to be quiet and pay attention. We need to create more space – more silence – not just in our worship but in our lives to listen deeply to what Love is saying.
One message is about glorifying or praising God (or Love) with our bodies. I want to emphasize that Paul is using the plural you when writing about the body: “you all are not your own, you all belong to God, so glorify God (or Love) in your-all’s body.” And finally, for those who have found a community of love like this one (Emmanuel Church, I’m talking to you), one message is to keep saying to our friends, especially the skeptical ones – “come and see for yourselves.” Come and see this community of love that we are building. Come and see and be a ladder connecting heaven and earth. Come and see and share the bounty we have experienced and be a messenger. Come and see.
- Craig R. Koester, “Messianic Exegesis and the Call of Nathanael (John 1:45-51),” in Journal for the Study of the New Testament 39 Je 1990, p. 30.
- Adele Reinhartz’ note in The Jewish Annotated New Testament (New York: Oxford Press, 2011), p. 160.
- Brother Geoffrey Tristam, Superior, SSJE, used this language to speak of Richard Meux Benson’s founding vision for SSJE.