ORDINARY FOLKS WITH EXTRAORDINARY FAITH

Text: John 1:43-51

These are some of the first stories of conversion to Christianity. These men, Philip and Nathanael, are local residents, natives of Galilee. Philip is from Bethsaida, a town on the northeast coast of the Sea of Galilee, a fishing village - which was also Peter’s and Andrew’s home town. We might wonder why Jesus would choose these fishermen as his followers. Perhaps one reason is that they are people he is familiar with, Galileans. Another reason might be that they are ordinary working people, people with whom he can identify, since Jesus too comes from a family of tradespeople, his father Joseph being a carpenter. And they are village people, rural people. They speak his own language, they share his lifestyle, they know the hardships of poverty, just as he does. And they are also Jews, of the same religion as Jesus.

Jesus invites Philip to follow him and Philip readily agrees. And Philip immediately goes to his friend Nathanael and invites him to come and meet Jesus. Philip’s reason for inviting Nathanael is that “we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote….” But Nathanael needs a little more convincing. The one Philip has found is Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth. Maybe Nathanael’s attitude is an example of local prejudice, something like the rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton.
So Jesus enters the conversation. When he sees Nathanael, he seems to know about his suspicious attitude. Jesus appreciates that about Nathanael; he says, “Here’s an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” In other words, here’s a person who is straightforward, without any ulterior motives - an honest, forthright person who tells it as he sees it. Nathanael wants to know how Jesus knows about him. Jesus describes the exact situation where he has seen Nathanael in the village. Nathanael’s response is immediate: “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” And now Jesus wants to know what’s going on. “Do you say that because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? That’s nothing. I’m telling you that you will see much greater things than that - you will see heaven opened and the angels of God going back and forth between heaven and the Son of Man.” I wonder what that means? Look at the picture on the front of the bulletin - an artist’s idea of angels flying between heaven and the Son of Man, who is Jesus. It’s a little bit like animation, with cartoon characters flitting back and forth. I suppose animation is about as accurate as any other depiction. I like this picture: the bright colours, the sense of swift movement, the trumpets, the clouds, the joyful expression on the face of Jesus…and his curly hair! Do you suppose Jesus had curly hair? And the angels have straight hair! It’s very imaginative, and so it should be - Jesus is challenging Nathanael to expect great things in his new adventure of being a disciple, and for that Nathanael will need not only his natural honesty and forthrightness, but also to develop his ability to imagine beyond the immediate situation with spiritual insight.
I dare to say that even though we don’t meet Jesus as he passes by while we’re sitting under a fig tree in a Galilean village, we do meet Jesus in much the same way as Nathanael. In the Lutheran tradition, we say that we are called at the time of our baptism, and for most of us that means we are called before we even know the name of Jesus. Nevertheless, each of us is called as an individual, blessed with specific gifts, valued by Jesus for who we are and what we offer, and expected to exercise the spiritual imagination to find our way of following Jesus and serving those around us. “Spiritual imagination” is rather a complex term, but it simply means faith - being willing to believe in God whom we can’t see. And the way we exercise that faith is to do those things which we can see need to be done. We do that by imagining Jesus with us, and doing those things that by faith we see him doing.

I’m going to use excerpts from a sermon by a Christian Reformed pastor:

“Fairy tales are stories of transformation, and that’s what happened to these simple people we call the disciples. If you took the disciples and brought them al together into one room, you would never…guess by looking at them that this weak-looking pack of ordinary folks could change the world. But they did. The disciples changed the world because it was to them that the secret of the universe 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 in the end you’re going to save the world through humility, gentleness, compassion and sacrifice, it makes sense to begin with a bunch of fellows 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 had any significant struggles with his disciples, it was the struggle 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 slapped them back down to the street level of service. When Peter tried to wield a sword, Jesus told him to put it back in its sheath.

The disciples needed to be common, ordinary and above all humble if they were going to do Jesus any good and so change the world. Still, Jesus did need them and that’s why he called them….

Something more is going on [with Nathanael] here. Twice in this brief passage there are very clever references to a key Old Testament figure: Jacob. The first [one] crops up in the curious way that Jesus greets Nathanael. Jesus says, “Here comes a true Israelite, a man in whom there is no guile.” The Greek word for guile can also mean craftiness, trickiness, underhandedness. The most famous Biblical person who was a trickster…was Jacob himself, the crafty deceiver who was renamed Israel. 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!”

Nathanael does not have the kind of guile that characterized Jacob but rather Nathanael exhibited the straight-shooting, honest demeanor of Israel, of the new man who emerged after God knocked Jacob flat with grace. Perhaps all this is intended to point to the idea that Jesus is founding a new Israel, a brand new people. Gone are the days of craftiness and guile when people had to live by the wits to survive. A new era of innocence has dawned, a time that requires an almost child-like, naïve ability to embrace the fairy tale-like truth of Jesus. It may be another way of saying that to enter the kingdom of God, you need to be like a little child….

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 rather naïve bumpkins. There is something child-like in the way Nathanael comes to faith….But far from criticizing Nathanael’s simple faith, Jesus commends it. This is someone who is innocent enough to believe that something not just good but something of God really did come from Nazareth….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.

But although there is something child-like about faith - Philip’s faith, Nathanael’s faith, your faith, my faith - faith is not finally childish. Instead we hang onto our faith in the gritty realities of this very real world. In fairy tales, as surely in our present situation, dark and terrible things are present, good and evil wage horrific battle….But the child-like aspect of faith keeps hope alive because our willingness to embrace and believe the unlikely has given us a glimpse of joy. We’ve caught a glimpse of a larger world in which God is the Creator and Jesus is the true King.

Nathanael makes one other appearance in the Bible and it comes in the very last chapter of John….By the time you get to John 21, Jesus has been killed dead in plain sight of the disciples. The shrewd powers that be looked at Jesus, asked if anything good could come from Nazareth, and concluded “Nope,” and so they dispensed with him. But 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?”….

This Jesus now looked as if he had been to hell and back, bearing scars and looking somehow different, changed, but he was undeniably alive….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, he 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 the living Israel was no dream. And every once in awhile, out of the corner of his eye, Nathanael was just sure he saw the flutter of angel-wings behind Jesus’ head. Blessed are the innocent and true, for they shall see God. [1] [

[1] Scott Hoezee, “The Child’s Leading”, www.calvincrc.org/sermons/2003/john1.html, pp. 2-5