43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ 44Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 45Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ 46Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ 47When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ 48Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ 49Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ 50Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ 51And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’
[John 1.43-51]
Through the Bible, Jesus tells us “ask and you
shall be given, seek and you shall find.” [Mt 7.7]
That’s a
great promise, but in reality it’s not that simple. I’ll give you an example: I’ve been asking
for a big lottery win for about twelve months now, and still nothing.
I want to
look a bit closer at the ‘seek and you shall find’ bit today.
I suspect
Jesus wasn’t thinking about my children when he said this.
Things go
missing in our house all the time: shoes, school uniforms, TV remotes, hair
brushes, coats and bags; and the absence is usually only noticed about five or
ten minutes before we’re all due to leave the house.
At this
point chaos ensues: Charlie and I take off in different directions, we rummage,
we ratch, neat piles of clothes are hurled across the sofa as we try and find
the elusive item.
The twins,
who are teenagers, do there bit and glance in the general direction of their
bedrooms, and Faith, who’s seven invariably plonks herself back on the sofa figuring
she’s got another ten minutes to play with her dolls.
Now, we’ve
tried various techniques for tackling this problem of lost things and time lost
searching. I’ve reminded the kids of the
wisdom of “a place for everything and everything in its place”, and for a time
that works, until someone’s in a rush and doesn’t put the hairbrush back where
it should be, then when they next need it they trash the house to find it and
nothing’s in its place anymore.
Charlie
tried bribery — offering a pound to whoever found the missing item. That worked well, sort of, for a bit. Actually, I made thirty pounds and Charlie
stopped offering.
This got
me thinking though: why can I find these things, yet the kids can’t; and I came
up with three reasons.
1) It’s not in the place they’re looking. Obviously if you’re looking in the wrong
place you’ll never find the thing you’re looking for. I once spent an hour looking for a coat
before Harry remembered that he’d left it in his locker at school.
2) They don’t try hard enough. I’ve been blessed
with the ability to move things when looking; I’m able to actually pick up a
cushion and look behind it, Heaven forbid my children should ever move anything
in the house.
3) They’re not sure what they’re looking for. This
usually happens when they’re sent on an errand, Charlie might ask one of them
to get her slippers, and they won’t find them because they were looking for the
pink slippers she threw out six months ago, and the new slippers are white; or
they might be sent for a cardigan, and mistake it for a jumper and not fetch
it.
So those
are the three reasons: not there; not trying and not sure.
Now how does this apply to today’s reading? Well
if you look at it, there’s a lot of seeking and finding going on: Jesus finds
Philip; Philip then finds Nathanael and invites him to come and see;
Jesus sees Nathanael, and tells him he saw him under a fig tree;
then Nathanael sees Jesus for who he is, the Son of God, the King of
Israel.
There was even more seeking going on in the bigger
picture: the Jewish people had been seeking this Son of God for hundreds of
years. And I wondered, why was it that Nathanael, a Jewish person,
didn’t recognise Jesus, the Son of God, right away, is it the same as my kids
not finding their P.E. kit?
So let’s look at the three reasons:
Not there: was Jesus not in the place Nathanael was
looking for him? To begin with, maybe
not, but Nathanael doesn’t recognise him even when seeing him face to face,
even after being told by Philip that this guy is .the one’. So it’s not that.
Not trying: was Nathanael not trying hard enough?
Well, Jesus calls him a ‘true Israelite’, which I suppose could be an ironic
term, but we’re told that Nathanael was sitting under a fig tree, which is
traditionally where Jewish Rabbis would teach the people about God and the
Messiah. So it’s probably not that
either.
Not sure: was Nathanael unsure because Jesus
didn’t look like the Messiah? Well, what does a Messiah look like? A lot of
Jewish people at that time were expecting a mighty warrior who would wipe out
the Romans, or someone like Moses who could lead the people to freedom. Jesus was a wandering preacher from Nazareth
— a town with a pretty poor reputation — so for Nathanael at least he doesn’t
fit the description. Not until he
demonstrates his power by seeing something he shouldn’t have been able to see.
What can we learn from this story?
A couple of things really: firstly we shouldn’t
judge a book by its cover.
Secondly, Nathanael was a ‘good’ Jew, who was
looking for Jesus and trying hard, but not seeing because he didn’t know what
he was supposed to be looking for.
We can be good Christians, and we can still be
wrong about our expectations of who Jesus was and is, and if we’re wrong and we
go telling other people wrong things we can drive people away from Jesus
instead of to him.
There’s only one place to get the right picture of
who Jesus was — the Bible, particularly the Gospels. If anyone wants to get to know him better,
that’s the place to start.
And remember, seek and you shall find.
