John 1:43-51
“Knowledge”
January 17, 2021 – Second Sunday after Epiphany
Growing up in Santa Monica, California, I learned that people who lived over the hills to the north of us were not as cool as those of us who lived west of Los Angeles. The “Valley” would eventually have a widespread reputation via pop cultural images of “Valley girls,” and the excellent fictional adventures of two dudes named Bill and Ted. Even before that, we who enjoyed the cool breezes blowing over nearby beaches knew that nothing and nobody good came out of the Valley.
Of course, that geographical prejudice was unfounded and wrong. It wasn’t long until my mind changed about the Valley. My sister moved there and some of my friends. There were good people in the Valley, not to mention that it was the location of the Farrell’s ice cream store closest to us.
One of the best cures for a bias against another place is, of course, to go there. That’s why travel can be a humanizing and peace-producing activity. It’s harder to lump a whole town or region or country under a label like “hick” or “snob” or “degenerate” when one has actually met and spent some time with people who live there. Rather than base your opinion on an unfounded bias, without evidence, you take the time and effort to get to know people who live in a different place and in a different way from you.
As our text opens today, we see Jesus, on His way to Galilee, first finding Philip. Then Philip went to find Nathanael and bring him to Jesus. Nathanael is the center of this part of the story of the first disciples. Philip and Nathanael were both Galileans, Philip from Bethsaida and Nathanael from Cana. The whole region had a reputation as a bit of a wild backwater, known for radical politics and bandits.
So when Philip told Nathanael that Jesus was from Nazareth and the response is the local proverb, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” it’s a little like the cat calling the dog furry or the lake calling the river wet. Like much of human prejudice it was one group of people improving their own self-image by putting down another group. Just hearing his remark about Nazareth, you might think Nathanael had completely missed the rest of what Philip had said about Jesus.
Yet Nathanael had heard all of it. He intrigued by Philip’s claim that they had “found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote.” Nathanael had his bias against Nazareth but he also had a mind and heart open and curious enough to accept Philip’s simple invitation, “Come and see.” He was prejudiced, but he was willing to consider the possibility he was wrong, to take a fresh look at someone from a place he had already judged. If we want ourselves to be freed from the sin of pre-judging people on the basis of from where they come, Nathanael is our example. As F. F. Bruce says, “Honest inquiry is the sovereign cure for prejudice.”[1]
Some of our missionary friends have wonderful stories to share which demonstrate there are still many people in the world like Nathanael in relation to Jesus. Tuesday evening a missionary in Baja, Mexico, a friend of Trudy’s, told how a woman asked to study the Bible together with her in a spirit of honest inquiry. That woman now, said Trudy’s friend, is very close to accepting Christ as Savior.
Yet that willingness to be honestly open-minded about spiritual things, and, yes, about other people, is rare enough that it is still remarkable. Jesus Himself remarked on it here in the next verse of our text, verse 47. When Nathanael was arriving, Jesus saw him coming and said, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” You may be more familiar with the King James language, “in whom there is no guile.”
By calling Nathanael an “Israelite,” Jesus was pointing back to the original Israelite, the patriarch Jacob whose name was changed to Israel. Jacob started out as a man of deceit or guile. His very name meant something like, one who “supplants” or “circumvents” or “usurps” or “overreaches.” He seized an opportunity to steal his brother’s birthright and then connived with his mother to steal that same brother’s blessing from his father on his deathbed. You might even call him an “insurrectionist” in his own family.
Jesus labeled Nathanael as a descendant of the man who came to be called Israel. It’s almost as if the Lord were ironically mentioning Jacob’s wily nature to play off a bias which said and sometimes says that all his descendants are cunning, sneaky people. But here is one, says Jesus who has none of that, no deceit in him. If, Jesus was saying, His own people really are like that, Nathanael was better than you might expect.
Jesus played with the ugly ideas of local and racial prejudice here so as to set aside the idea that Nathanael or anyone else should be judged by his race or place of origin. Martin Luther King Jr., whom our nation will remember tomorrow, learned from Jesus his dream that human beings should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Yet verse 48 goes on to tell us that Nathanael was surprised that Jesus knew his character. “Where did you get to know me?” he asked. Perhaps honesty and integrity were a personal point of pride for Nathanael, part of his self-image. Whatever it was, what Jesus said struck a chord inside him, gave him a sense that Jesus knew him well. Deep insight and personal knowledge of his own soul wasn’t what he’d been expecting of some backwater prophet from Nazareth. Yet there it was. Jesus knew him.
I can only imagine Jesus smiling as He spoke to Nathanael again, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” What exactly that meant to Nathanael is one of the little intriguing mysteries of Scripture. It could have been as simple as the place where he was sitting when Philip came to get him. It could have been a scene of some deep spiritual experience, like St. Augustine’s revelation under a fig tree. It might have been where a key moment in his life happened. Whatever it was, Nathanael recognized that Jesus’ knowledge about that fig tree was something no ordinary human being could have had.
There is no way for us to know if, when he heard Jesus mention the fig tree, Nathanael’s mind jumped to Psalm 139 that we read today,
O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
But it clicked in Nathanael’s mind that only God has knowledge like that, knowledge of every moment of a person’s day, knowledge of every thought from a distance. So Nathanael’s openness to new knowledge suddenly paid off right there in his mind which Jesus showed He knew so well. He connected all the dots and exclaimed, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”
If you step back, Nathanael’s confession of faith, because that’s what it was, is pretty incredible. It will be further along in the Gospel story until we read about Peter saying something to the same effect, or Mary of Bethany saying the same here in John’s Gospel chapter 11. Calling someone the Son of God was unusual. Later on, Jews and then Muslims would expressly state their conviction that God has no son. It was an idea that did not immediately fit with Jewish monotheism, their conviction that there is only one God. So it’s surprising that Nathanael came to it so quickly, so early. In this season we should say that it was an amazing epiphany.
Nathanael did not come to his realization about Jesus just out of the blue. It did not come to him in some unaided flash of brilliant insight. There was groundwork already laid for that wonderful bit of knowledge. First of all, as the ancient Christian preacher Chrysostom noted, both Philip and Nathanael must have already carefully studied the Hebrew Bible. How else could Philip have told him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote,” and Nathanael understood what he meant?
A serious student of any discipline, whether it’s Scripture or mathematics, philosophy or engineering, will tell you that you often only get brilliant ideas or sparks of knowledge when you’ve put in some hard work that makes them possible. I can tell you I usually don’t start out preparing a sermon with my best thoughts about a text. I have to read it several times, maybe in the original language, read some commentaries, mull it around, compare it to the other Scriptures for the day, maybe talk about it with someone else. Then it percolates. Maybe driving down the road, maybe on a run, maybe waking up to go the bathroom in the middle of the night, something comes together, a story that helps explain it, a connection I hadn’t seen, a moral I should draw.
One of the hardest things for my wife to teach her Christian students as they take philosophy from her is that knowing Jesus, gaining knowledge about our Lord, is not all just about instantaneous and magical insight granted by the Holy Spirit. Yes, the Spirit can work in us that way, but more often He lays the groundwork, He guides us to the right passages in Scripture, to good books about Scripture, to wiser and more experienced Christians who teach us what they know. That’s how Nathanael came to that shining moment when he could confidently proclaim what he knew about Jesus.
The Holy Spirit also prepares us for knowledge of the Lord by calling us to habits of mind which make us receptive to learning what He wants us to know. Part of Nathanael’s good character is how his mind worked. He knew he was biased. He even spoke his bias against the town of Nazareth out loud. But he did not let his bias be the end of the story. He went to investigate and learn from Jesus with an open mind.
Jesus said there was no deceit in Nathanael, no guile. We tend to think of deceit and guile as vices turned outward. One deceives other people and connives to get what one wants from them, like Jacob did to his brother Esau. But deceitfulness can also be self-deceit. We fool ourselves into believing that bias and half-baked opinion are the complete and honest truth. Then we further deceive ourselves to think we don’t need to consider opinions or even evidence to the contrary.
Nathanael could have deceived himself into believing his opinion about Nazareth was the whole story. He could have refused to go see Jesus for himself. But he didn’t. He not only did not deceive others; he did not deceive himself. In the words of my friend Jay Wood, Nathanael had intellectual virtue, a good habit of the mind, of being open to new evidence, of a thoughtful willingness to reconsider his own thoughts and attitudes.
Of course the most important evidence to which anyone should be open is that which Nathanael received here. More than anything, may we develop the holy intellectual habit of being open to thoughtful consideration of whatever Jesus has to say to us. But, friends, in the world as it is now, that same sort of intellectual virtue is sorely needed in relation to our thoughts on all sorts of subjects and to all the people around us. Let us not be self-deceived into thinking our own ideas about politics or social issues, about persons of another color or of a different social class are true beyond any doubt. Instead, like Nathanael, let us be willing to go meet and talk with and learn from those who think differently, who see the world with different eyes and from different perspectives. It’s only then that what we think or have to say will come anywhere near true knowledge.
You might think that it’s not the preacher’s place to offer you advice on how to think about anything except God and spiritual stuff. Maybe you’re right. To be true to what I just said, I need to give that point of view due consideration. But even if you are right, things you might call matters of politics or business or science or even just practical, everyday life still ultimately concern what concerns Nathanael here. If Jesus is who we believe and say He is, then He is going to show up everywhere and in anything we have to think about.
Our assigned Scripture readings each week sometimes feel disconnected. It’s hard to see how Paul’s little lecture in I Corinthians 6, on sexual immorality, connects with Jesus and Nathanael. What has not going to prostitutes got to do with not letting prejudice, bias and sloppy thinking keep us from Jesus? But look again at what Paul says. Why is sexual immorality bad? Because “your bodies are members of Christ.” What you do with your body affects your relationship with Jesus. And he says, “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” Your body is meant to glorify God.
Take that truth about our bodies and apply it to some of the bias and prejudice that is so much in our face these days. Realize that black bodies are members of Christ; black bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Suddenly we see that we cannot deceive ourselves in thinking that what happens to black bodies in our society, whether it’s poverty or incarceration or unjust violence and killing, has nothing to with Jesus. It has everything to do with Him, and with us, if we really and truly want to know Him.
On a day which is also designated as Sanctity of Life Sunday, we must also recognize that what happens to unborn infant bodies in our society has everything to do with Jesus. They too are created by God to be members of Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit. That same psalm we recited which connects with how the Lord knew where Nathanael was at every moment also says that God knows each of us before we are even born, even as we are being formed in the womb. How can Jesus be at the center of our attention and knowledge if we forget about Jesus in those tiny lives coming into the world?
Which all means that we need to pay careful attention to what Jesus said to Nathanael in the last couple verses of our text, starting with verse 50, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” Nathanael was blessed, partly due his own study and openness of mind, with a great and glorious chunk of knowledge about Jesus. But Jesus hauled him up short to say, “Don’t imagine you’ve got it all, that you have arrived, that you haven’t yet got a lot to see and to learn.” We need to take that to heart as we try to be thoughtful Christians in these times.
We especially need to keep reminding ourselves that all the political and scientific and economic and pragmatic answers we arrive at, no matter how good they appear, are only provisional. No matter how much we might feel that some action, some vote, some plan for the future is in line with who Jesus is and what He wants, it will always be incomplete and imperfect. Like Nathanael, we can’t possibly have seen all of Jesus yet, but we can go forward in hope and expectation because of what we have seen.
That last verse is cryptic and strange. Jesus told Nathanael that “Very truly” (literally “Amen, Amen,” or “Verily, verily”), “I tell you that you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” The “Son of Man” was what Jesus called Himself. The image He used goes back to that devious character Jacob. In Genesis 28, Jacob the deceiver started to become a new person, to leave behind his deceptions, on the night when he saw a ladder between heaven and earth and the angels of God going up and down it. Jesus took that ancient story and put Himself in place of the ladder. Jesus became the connection between heaven and earth, between God and a human being like Nathanael, like you or me. That’s what Nathanael was going to see, to discover, to finally know, as he became a disciple of Jesus.
Nathanael shows up at the end of John’s Gospel too, chapter 21 verse 2. That’s how we know he was from Cana. It’s mentioned there. Nathanael went the whole distance with Jesus. He learned and experienced the whole story. He saw Jesus die and He saw Jesus risen from the dead. He saw that ladder between heaven and earth firmly fixed in place forever. He saw those greater things because he was willing to open his mind, to keep on learning for the rest of his days.
I hope to be like Nathanael. As I get older I tend more and more to think I’ve heard it all, that there’s “nothing new under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes says. But Nathanael is a reminder to me and to you to keep going back to Jesus and discovering, first of all, how much He knows about us, better than we know ourselves. But also hugely important, we discover how much we still have to learn about Jesus and about what it means to be His follower. Let us seek that glorious knowledge together.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] The Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), p. 60.