Seek and find

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.