See Heaven Opened

Sunday January 15 2012

Epiphany 2B

Text: John 1:43-51

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 toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” ⁴⁸Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get 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 is … different. 

The Gospel of John, I mean, not … any given John that you may have in your life, however accurate the statement might be in applying it to HIM. 

It is something we were reminded of on Christmas, as we read the nativity story as related in the fourth Gospel.  Remember the nativity without a star, or shepherds, or a manger, or sheep, or an angelic chorus or wise men coming from the east. 

John focused instead on WHO Christ was, not on HOW he showed up. 

And he does something different in relating the story of how Jesus’ ministry began. In the synoptic Gospels – the other three – Jesus goes looking for his disciples, and he finds them fishing and calls them away from their day jobs in order to follow him. 

In John, the first disciples are brought to him – and they are brought to him through having been disciples of John the Baptist. In the verses immediately prior to today’s passage, beginning in verse 35, we have John standing with two of his disciples, and as Jesus walks by, John exclaims, “Look, here is the lamb of God!” and that is enough for the two, they step out and follow Christ.

I wonder how it must have felt for John to see the … completion of his task begin. He had been preaching and proclaiming for an indeterminate amount of time in the wilderness.  Long enough to have worn out any clothing that he went INTO the wilderness with, and long enough to have adjusted his diet to what was most readily available as well.  But to have that day come when he could stop talking about the Messiah and start pointing him out to people – right there! – it was enough to trigger the response from these two disciples that he had probably been hoping for all along – to step away from him and step towards Jesus.

If we stop and think, we could probably come up with more than a few John the Baptist stand-ins in our lives as well.  I’ve shared with you about Hermana Elena de Alarcon – Sister Helena – who was my Sunday School teacher as a pre-teen, who took her responsibility to instruct the children of Third Baptist church in Santiago with a dedication and a faithfulness that made an impression even then on children who were so easily distracted by the least little thing.  I remember her comparing the white snow of the Andes Mountains that looked down over Santiago in the winter with the spotlessness of our souls when God looks at us and sees Jesus standing in for us.  It made an impression.

I could relate multiple stories of people in my life who pointed me in the direction of Jesus, who in one way or another declared to me ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ but I know that we all have someone like that in our past – and perhaps in our present – whom we hold with an esteem and a love that we can’t quite put into words, but who are so dear to our hearts that when we think of them we don’t think of them in isolation, but we think of them standing next to the one to whom they pointed us. Jesus is standing right beside them, smiling.

So the text today is actually a telling of the second stage in Jesus’ gathering disciples. Andrew has begun to follow Jesus, and he went and found his brother Peter and brought him along, and now we are back to a scene that is a little more in line with the gathering of disciples that happens in the other gospel narratives. Phillip is called, and he then goes and hunts down Nathanael and tells HIM about Jesus, he does his own impersonation of John right there.  It is interesting to note that in each telling of the disciples’ selection, there is no exact duplication. Either the way they are called, or the order in which they are called, or their NAMES don’t match up. Some have attempted to harmonize the different storylines, but it is, I think, healthier to leave them as they are – mismatched and highlighting different aspects of the story.

For John, it was important to point out that, even for Peter, who ended up being the leader of the disciples and the early church, there was someone there before him, someone who stepped in at the right place and the right time and brought him together with Jesus.

And that is the first lesson we can learn from Andrew. There is someone out there, maybe even our brother or our closest friend, who needs to be brought together with Jesus. And notice that Andrew didn’t spend a lot of time arguing and convincing Peter that this Jesus was the one they were all expecting; all he said was ‘come and see.’

It may sound odd coming from a preacher, but when it comes down to it, while words ARE important, actions DO indeed speak louder than words. That is as true in my life as it is in anyone else’s. Pay attention to words. Pay MORE attention to how they are followed through on.

John had been preaching about the Messiah, but when the Messiah showed up, he knew when to get off the stage.  He knew it wasn’t about him. And so did Andrew. That is the second lesson we can learn from him this morning. Andrew didn’t pull rank when it came to taking his place among the disciples. We don’t really hear anything else about him after this. He becomes one of the twelve, and lets that be that. It speaks to a humbleness that may have taken some settling into (after all, we do have that episode where the disciples are arguing about who would be sitting at Jesus’ right hand later in his ministry), but which ultimately won out.

Finally, we come to Jesus’ interaction with Nathanael. Straight up, from the beginning of the encounter, we know there are some idiosyncratic – some unique – forms of communication going on. ‘An Israelite in whom there is no deceit’; ‘Sitting under the fig tree’; and ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ are not phrases that can be easily explained or understood. Sometimes scripture is just like that. You come across a saying or a phrase that probably made perfect sense to the person who wrote it and the people who heard it read to them, but to us, nearly two thousand years later, the cultural references have been lost to the mists of time and we can surmise a possible meaning, but are for the most part guessing as to the full significance of a statement.

‘An Israelite in whom there is no deceit’ could be Jesus simply stating his assessment of Nathanael’s character. He was, we know, perceptive enough to cut through the surface fluff and uncover the truth that sometimes lay beneath. But it could equally be an instance where Jesus was using humor and making a sarcastic statement. There are other instances where Jesus said things in a joking manner, and this could in fact be one of them. From Nathanael’s response we could understand it two very different ways: a genuine ‘how did you know me?’ or an equally sarcastic retort ‘you have no idea who you are talking about’. ‘Under the fig tree’ might be a way of describing someone who was a philosopher at heart.  One who dedicated time to contemplating the world, society, and how things work. In other words, one who sat and thought about STUFF, and may have at some point done that sitting under a fig tree. After all, they were around. Maybe he had a big forehead, or a receding hairline – not that those would actually indicate any inclination one way or another to deep thought. The point is, there could be some contextual communication going on here of which we are missing the full import simply due to the fact that we don’t have the full context at hand. But that is okay. We draw what we can from what we have and trust the Holy Spirit to do the rest.

Finally, we have this ‘angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’ business. It is straight out of Genesis 28:12 – what we popularly and through the children’s chorus call “Jacob’s ladder”.  In the account of Genesis, the ladder is a figurative description of the relationship between God and Humanity through the covenant he is establishing with Israel.

Remember how John is big on WHO Jesus is? Here is where that comes into play. John is telling his listeners through Jesus’ words that he – Jesus – is the new connection between God and humanity.

And here is the word for us today, the ‘what this means for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton’:

As Christ was breaking in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth through his public ministry, we now, today, as his body are tasked with the same responsibility. We are the ones who get to tell someone that if they come and see, they will come to believe; if they watch us in what we do, and we have this unthinkable treasure to take care of – to be ministers of the Word – but just as the Word in John was anything but passive, the Word today is active – actively working through our lives – if we let him; actively reaching out to those around us – if we let him; actively showing what the Kingdom is like, and not just talking about it on Sundays and forgetting about it Monday through Saturdays – if we let him.

For those of you who may have had a chance to visit our Facebook page, you’ve probably noticed that the picture that is there – it is called our ‘profile picture’ – is not a picture of the sanctuary either inside or out, but a picture of a clay jug – a clay jar. It happens to be from last summer’s governor’s school. Caleb was taking a photography class, and he took the picture and then manipulated it in such a way that the only thing that was in color in the image was the jar itself. Everything else was in black and white.

I have always appreciated the image that Paul gave us of holding this treasure in jars of clay – as a way to remind us that, even though what we carry inside is of incalculable worth – we are still frail and fragile human beings – still imperfect, still broken and fallen creatures.

But despite that fact – that we are imperfect beings living in a fallen world – God still works through us. And we can take great comfort in the fact that God does not expect perfection from his children, just obedience and trust.

And it is through that obedience and trust – obedience and trust that we see most perfectly modeled in Jesus – that we will allow others to see heaven opened up – and in the process, maybe even catch a glimpse of it ourselves.

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Let’s pray.