Can Anything Good Come Out Of …?


Sunday, January 15th, 2006
Epiphany/Ordinary 2B
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Text: John 1:43-51

43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” 44 Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 45 Philip 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.” 46 Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” 47 When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” 48 Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” 49 Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” 50 Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” 51 And 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.”

The prospect of letting them walk out into the world is sometimes simply terrifying. That is as starkly clear as I can put it when it comes to the children. When our friend told us almost eleven years ago that we would be living the rest of our lives with our hearts walking around outside our bodies, she was not kidding. The thing is it gets HARDER, not easier, as they get older. That’s because, just like us, the longer we live the more we become aware of the ugliness that can so quickly rear its head in the world, and the higher the chance that they will run into it.

A few weeks ago, before Christmas, Hannah came to me and told me about some boys in school who have apparently decided that teasing her and making fun at her expense is one of the ways they are going to spend their time. She told me about how it made her angry, and upset to the point of wishing she were bigger than they are so she could get back at them. It brought back vivid memories of my own, of being similarly teased as a child by stronger, bigger and faster boys and my heart ached.

Even here, in rural Virginia, in an area where it is still relatively safe to leave the door unlocked, we are visited by violence and exposed to the underside of human existence. Granted, it’s not with the same frequency as in other more urban settings, but in some ways that makes it all that more shattering. Our community was faced with that violence just this past Thursday, in the death of a local man. A fellow pastor, who recently moved here from one of our larger metropolitan areas, put it this way: “it’s no different from the big city.”

For me, the fact of violence in our midst is more a reflection of human nature than it is a result of the environment in which we happen to find ourselves.

In our text this morning, we find an example of that fallen human nature. We’re at the beginning of the Gospel according to John, and Jesus is selecting his disciples. We know from previous readings and lessons and stories that, if nothing else, the disciples WERE spectacular examples of human frailty; sometimes petty, sometimes argumentative, sometimes just plain thick-headed, not always so brave, or honorable, or clear-thinking; in short, no different from you and me.

Philip is the first to appear, and John has Jesus speaking just two words to him: “follow me”. Philip turns around and has a few MORE words for HIS friend Nathanael. To him, Philip says: “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” And what is Nathanael’s response? Is it, “Great! Take me to him!” or, “REALLY??? FINALLY!!! Where is he? Quick, let’s go!”

No, it’s none of those. What we find in Nathanael’s response is an example of how the establishment and religious leadership were going to respond to Jesus generally as he became more well-known during his ministry. His response was: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

It is one of the single most destructive tendencies of the human heart: Judging – and PRE-judging someone based on either superficial or even irrelevant information is as violent to the human psyche as any blow dealt by a closed fist or an open palm.

Our lesson today comes from Philip’s next statement:

“Come and see.”

He didn’t start an argument, he didn’t try to convince Nathanael directly, all he did was ask him to come and see for himself. I think Philip knew what Nathanael was feeling, because I suspect Philip himself had to go through the same process. Philip himself was a Galilean, just like Jesus. And in first century Palestine, there was a definite sense of place in society determined by where you were from. As a Galilean, Philip had grown up with the understanding that Nathanael expressed. In modern terms it might be called an inferiority complex. Seeing yourself as all-around LESS than someone else. In the worst cases, that someone is ANYONE else.

But Philip overcame that weight that was pulling him down. He understood on meeting Jesus that there was an element of worth in everyone – and the epiphany for him was that he discovered that in himself. Christ called him out of his regular existence and with two words invited him to enter into relationship with him.

The lesson for us here this morning is that, just as Philip introduced Nathanael to Christ, we are likewise to introduce others to Christ. The question of course is how do we do that if Jesus is not just around the corner? Granted, we ARE in Jerusalem, but … just not THAT Jerusalem. J

In the passage just before this one, Jesus called Andrew and Simon Peter to follow him. We heard Chance read part of it yesterday evening when he shared at the brotherhood fish dinner.

They are in Bethsaida, which in the first century was a Jewish town – more or less – it was a very GREEK town for the most part. The inhabitants most likely spoke both Aramaic, the form of Hebrew common for the time, as well as Greek. Galilee was on the northern ‘border’, so to speak, of what was considered Judea “proper”. Beyond it was the even more heavily Greek influenced areas of what are today Syria and Turkey.

Though they were under Roman rule, the language of the common man, the language of commerce, was still Greek. It would make sense for Jesus to select his disciples from an area where Greek was spoken in a Jewish context, for that was who Jesus was intending to reach. Jesus was coming from a Hebrew society, but was well aware of the reality of the culture of the day – the agglomeration of Greek and Roman practices and societal structures and mores required that those who would become Christ’s disciples be able to communicate in the language of the people to whom they would be sent. The disciples were just who would be needed to mediate the Gospel of Christ between the Jewish and Greek worlds.

Back to that question: where are we going to find Jesus in this day and age in order to introduce people to him? Well, that’s the rub, as Shakespeare would say. You’ve heard me say it before: the original – and still appropriate – meaning of the word ‘Christian’ is “little Christ”. That means no more and no less than that we’re IT. WE – both individually and collectively ARE the Christ to whom we are going to introduce people. So how can that be?

How can we even pretend, especially as we are at times painfully aware of the many ways in which we don’t even come close to being imitators of Christ? When we make the wrong choices, when we think those dark thoughts, when we let those jagged words come out of our mouths and cut into the heart and crush the spirit of the loved one, or the child, or even worse, that stranger, the person we don’t even know and whom we will probably never see again?

Well, who better to deliver the Gospel of grace to a broken world than broken people who have received and experienced that grace themselves?

Who better to put into words and actions just how it feels to know what it is like to be loved by Christ first, and have that love call us out of our brokenness into a relationship with him? Who better to understand what it is like to recognize that, however much the world tells us how useless, how unworthy, how broken and unfixable we are, there is someone who loved us enough to come to earth, became human just like us, and is teaching us how to live – even today, even now even here.

Let’s pray.