John 1:43-51 "The Child's Leading" Scott Hoezee

Don't you wish sometimes you could have been there, could have seen them in person? I mean the disciples and, of course, Jesus himself. You hear people say things like that once in a while. Wouldn't it have been something to have been able to meet Peter, to shake Matthew's hand? What if even now we could somehow go back in time to hear the Sermon on the Mount? Often when people wish for such things, the motivation seems to be a combination of healthy curiosity and the idea that maybe it would be easier to believe the gospel if we could have seen gospel events unfold before our very eyes.

But I myself doubt that latter point. I am not at all convinced that seeing the disciples would make the gospel easier to believe. In fact, seeing the disciples in person might just make it more difficult! The disciples were not, after all, from among society's upper echelons. They were not highly educated, well-dressed, or outwardly impressive. The odds are that if you could have met up with Jesus' band of followers, the first thing that would have struck you would have been their commonness. You would perhaps notice their dirty fingernails, the callous on Philip's big toe, the missing teeth that were on such obvious display every time James grinned. You might be surprised at how short and stubby a couple of them were and would note the poor grammar that they often employed.

We need to forget about the illustrations from those well-meaning children's Bibles some of us grew up with. In those pictures the disciples tended to be pretty handsome with well-groomed beards, sporting robes worthy of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. In such depictions the disciples were always clean and remarkably Anglo-Saxon looking. The fashions may have changed over time, but in an era when tunics and robes were what people wore, we often visualize the disciples wearing the ancient equivalent of Armani designer suits. Probably, though, they were far more common and ragged looking.

That's why I said a moment ago that if magically you could see the disciples, then their demeanor, speech, and appearance would not make it easier to believe the gospel but just possibly tougher to swallow. Can it really be that this rag-tag group of uneducated fishermen were in touch with the deepest truth and dearest secret of the universe?

Most everybody has a soft spot in their hearts for fairy tales. There is just something about a fairy tale's reversal of expectations that intrigues us. There is something delicious about finding out that the frog is really a handsome prince, that the ugly duckling is the one that grows into the most resplendent of all swans. We enjoy it when the moment of truth comes for the characters in a story as they discover that the scruffy-looking character they never quite trusted is actually the true king of the realm. In the classic The Wizard of Oz we get a double treat at the end of the story: first, the great and powerful Oz turns out to be nothing but the man behind the curtain, a puller of levers and switches who looks like a humbug of a charlatan. But then, almost before the dust of that reversal of expectation settles, we get jolted yet again: as it turns out, the humble man behind the curtain is a pretty good wizard after all.

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 all together into one room, you would never in your wildest imagination 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. But in the calling process, there was more going on than we realize. Our passage from John 1 is a case in point. Jesus has already attracted Simon Peter and and his brother Andrew when he calls also a man named Philip to follow him. No sooner does Philip join Jesus' still-small group of disciples, and he runs to fetch his brother, Nathanael. Near as we can tell, Nathanael, though a follower of Jesus, did not become one of the inner-circle of twelve disciples. Yet his particular call to follow Jesus is remarkable.

Based on the external evidence alone, you'd have to say that Nathanael dove in based on little more than a kind of spiritual parlor trick: Jesus claims to have seen Nathanael sitting under a fig tree even before Philip went to go get him. The fact that Jesus seemed to know that was a neat trick but not exactly the most startling thing in the world! Still, it was enough for Nathanael to sign on even as it motivated him to declare openly that near as he could tell, Jesus was the Son of God and the king of all Israel. You can only conclude that it was the Spirit of God who sealed all this to his heart. Something more is going on here, and that is true in more ways than one. Because twice in this brief passage there are very clever, very telling allusions or references to a key Old Testament figure: Jacob.

The first reference crops up in the curious way that Jesus greets Nathanael. Jesus says, "Well now, here comes a true Israelite, a man in whom there is no guile." The NIV translated that as "in whom there is nothing false," but that's not quite right. The Greek word used in verse 47 is the word for "guile," which can also mean craftiness, being tricky, underhanded. There are not too many biblical characters who are described as being full of guile, but the most famous person who was a trickster par excellence was Jacob himself: the trickster and crafty deceiver who eventually was re-named 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!"

Jacob, as you may recall, always got ahead in life by his own wits. He relied on his own cunning and craftiness to snag life's goodies. He outsmarted dim-witted Esau, did an end-run on his nearly blind father Isaac, spent the better part of twenty years finding ever-more creative ways to snooker his Uncle Laban out of just about everything he owned. Of course, it caused Jacob to live a good deal of his life on the lam. He was always running away from his latest scam victim. Jacob was like an ancient grifter, moving from town to town, swindling folks out of this and that, but then high-tailing it before he could get caught.

For some reason, though, God liked Jacob. Once, when fleeing the wrath of Esau, Jacob had a dream of a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it (Jesus is clearly alluding to this dream, by the way, in verse 51). In that dream God assures Jacob that despite all the stunts Jacob had pulled, God was with him. God even promised to bring Jacob back to the Promised Land one day despite the fact that it was currently a place from which Jacob had to flee. How did Jacob react to this wonderful dream and promise? In typical, guileful, Jacob-like fashion: he tries to strike a deal with God. "OK, Lord: if you come through and do what you just said, then I will let you be my God!" Talk about your wheelers and dealers! Jacob even haggled with the Almighty!

Or we could say he wrestled with God because that's how that whole story climaxes. Having swindled Uncle Laban out of everything but the shirt on his back, Jacob has run out of places to hide. So he has no choice but to go back home and face the music with Esau. Once again Jacob has employed the full power of his intelligence to insure a favorable outcome. But long about the time he is ready to set his plan into motion, a stranger from the darkness jumps him on the banks of the River Jabbok. They wrestled the whole night through, and just as the eastern horizon was starting to pink up, Jacob thought he finally had the man pinned. But suddenly, with no more than a flutter of his fingers, the dark stranger wrenched Jacob's hip clean out of its socket, letting Jacob know that the whole fight had been rigged from the outset. He was defeated, done in, finished. And out of that magnificent defeat, as Frederick Buechner termed it, Jacob got the greatest blessing ever, he got a new name, and he got a new outlook on life.

Jacob hobbled away from the Jabbok on a bum hip and he limped for the rest of his days. But now his gait was the only thing that was crooked about Jacob: everything else in his character had been straightened out by the gift of grace. Jacob learned the hard way that the best things in life come not by wit and cunning and force and strength but by grace.

That's who Jacob was, and that is the one to whom Jesus compares Nathanael. 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. "Here comes an Israel who is not Jacob," Jesus basically said. It was nice for Jesus to say this, all the more so considering that the last thing Nathanael had said before meeting Jesus was a kind of sneer: "Nazareth! Can anything, or anyone, good come from that backwater town!" That's what Nathanael said, and apparently it was an honest thing to say.

Because Jesus as much as replies, "You're right, Nathanael: I'm not much to look at. But I'll let you in on a little secret: I'm the One!" Nathanael believes this, and Jesus then responds by declaring himself to be the living Bethel. When Jacob had his dream of a ladder to heaven, he declared the place where he had the dream to be "bethel," beth-el, "the house of God." Jacob seemed to think that this one location was unique, was some kind of singular focal point for the intersection between God and this earth. But in John 1 Jesus says that he himself is that intersection point: if you were with him, you were in the presence of God!.

Maybe all this Jacob stuff seems a bit oblique, but it is not far-fetched. But even so, why is it here? Perhaps it 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 their wits to survive. A new era of innocence has dawned, a time that requires an almost child-like, naive ability to embrace the fairy tale-like truth of Jesus. It may be yet another way of saying that to enter the kingdom of God, you need to be like a little child.

Because that's what Nathanael is like. You know, I'm not very good at tricks that involve sleight-of-hand. Some magicians are very good at this kind of thing--they can take a half-dollar coin and make it seemingly jump from one place to another, from his closed fist to your closed fist, from his hand to behind your ear, and so forth. I'm not very good at that, but give me the average five year-old child and even my clumsy, rather obvious coin tricks will elicit wide-eyed wonders and exclamations of "How did you do that!?" It's not too tough to make a little kid look the wrong way for a second!

If you wanted to be cynical, however, you could say that the only reason Philip and then Nathanael were so quickly impressed by Jesus was because they were rather naive bumpkins. There is something innocent, child-like in the way Nathanael comes to faith, and even Jesus says as much. "You believe just because I told you about the fig tree!? That's nothing! Just wait until you realize that I am the walking, talking Bethel--the place where God and humanity, meet! Just wait til you see the angels, my friend!"

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. Apparently we need a little naivete to embrace the gospel's fairy tale-like depiction of God himself living inside the man Jesus. 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, and some good things are lost along the way. 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.

We don't stop noticing the bad things that happen, and sometimes in the teeth of war and its carnage, of death and the sufferings we endure on this earth, sometimes the Joy-inspired hope we bear causes us to weep. We are innocent enough to believe unlikely things but not so innocent as to miss seeing that the gospel often has a tough time making it in a world of guile, cynicism, and despair.

Nathanael makes just one other appearance in the Bible and it comes in the very last chapter of John. Nathanael is a kind of book-end character for John's gospel, appearing in only the first and final chapters. 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?"

They knew then who he was and so rowed back to the shore as fast as they could. Nobody said much. John says they didn't even dare to ask, "Is it you, Jesus?" They felt like they were in a dream, a dream of heaven come down to earth. But you know how it is with good dreams sometimes: you don't dare say anything for fear you'll wake up and it will all disappear like a soap bubble wafting in the air. But they knew it was Jesus.

Nathanael knew it, too. This Jesus now looked like he had been to hell and back, bearing scars and looking somehow different, changed, but he was undeniably alive. And when he took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to them, there was no longer any doubt who this stranger on the beach was. 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 our living Bethel was no dream. And every once in a while, 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. Amen.