Covenant United Methodist Church

John 1:43-51

“Being Known”

 

Have you ever played the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”?  That’s where you try to connect who-knows-whom to Kevin Bacon within six moves.  Usually that’s done with actors, but since his father was Ed Bacon, who was behind almost every urban renewal effort in Philadelphia for decades, it’s pretty easy to connect anyone in this area to Kevin Bacon in only a few moves.   For instance: I know Robin Hynicka (who is pastor at Arch St. United Methodist Church) who knew Ed Swartz (a former city councilman) who knew Ed Bacon, whose son is Kevin Bacon.  That’s four degrees of Kevin Bacon for me.

 

There might have been something like that going on behind this very strange, initial interaction between Jesus and Nathanael.  Nathanael, we find out way at the end of John’s gospel [John 21:2], came from Cana in Galilee.  That was not all that far from Nazareth, close enough that when he heard Philip say that the Messiah had come from there he had the same sort of reaction that somebody from Wallingford might have if they heard that the new secretary of the UN came from Secane.  John tells us that Jesus’ first miracle happened in Nathanael’s hometown of Cana, where Jesus and his family knew somebody well enough that they were invited to a wedding there [John 2:1-2], as were his earliest disciples.  In other words, Jesus and Nathanael may have run in overlapping social circles even before they met.

 

Perhaps Jesus had heard Nathanael’s name or knew of Nathanael having a good reputation in the community.  That would lead to a greeting like ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Perhaps Nathanael was a little disturbed by this, enough to feel like he has to ask ‘Where did you come to know me?’, which would then be a statement of humility as much as anything else.  When Jesus says he saw him under a fig tree, there were a lot of rabbis who held that the best place to study the scriptures was seated under a fig tree because it reminded them of the promise of the prophet Micah of the day when

 

“They shall sit, everyone under their vine and under their fig tree,

and none shall make them afraid.” [Micah 4:4]

 

More than that, though, seems to be behind what came next, when

 

Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’

 

It’s as if Jesus had said to Nathanael, “I know who you are,” in the sense of knowing his name and where he came from and that sort of thing, but Nathanael heard him say, “I know who you are,” in the sense of knowing his spirit and his heart.  Jesus never passed up an opportunity like that, a chance to speak to someone’s deepest self.

 

For Nathanael, his soul, and his hopes and his dreams, were connected to his faith and what he had learned from his study of the scriptures.  So Jesus makes a reference to Jacob’s dream of a staircase (or as we sometimes hear it, a ladder) that joined earth and heaven.  He promised Nathanael that he would see those two worlds that seem so far apart brought close together, and that Jesus would be the one to do that.

 

Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ 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.’

 

What is it like, though, suddenly to come face-to-face with somebody like that?  What is it like to discover that there is someone who knows you that thoroughly and who can bring God into the relationship?

 

Walter Wangerin wrote a meditation that he titled, “To a Lady with Whom I’ve Been Intimate, Whose Name I Do Not Know”.  As you’ll hear, it comes from a time when “Ayds” was the name of an over-the-counter diet pill and cigarettes were sold from supermarket shelves. It says, in part, this:

 

“You.  I saw you in the Great Scot Supermarket tonight, and now I can’t sleep on account of you – thinking that, perhaps, you’re not sleeping either.

Ah, you!  You count your coins with bitten nails, not once but again and again.  This is the way you avoid the checker’s eyes, as though ashamed of the goods you buy, as though they declare your loneliness at midnight:

 

Two six-packs of Tab, because your haunches, sheathed in shorts, are enormous and bump up your back as you shift your weight from foot to foot.  You sigh.  I think that you do not know how deeply you sigh, nor yet that I am behind you in the line.

 

Four frozen dinners whose cartons assure you that there is an apple dessert inside.  Swiss steak, roast beef in gravy, chicken drumsticks, shrimp.  Which one will you save for Sunday dinner?  Do you dress up for Sunday dinner?  Do you set the table neatly when the dinner thaws?  Or do you eat alone, frowning?

 

Liquid breakfasts, a carton of Marlboros, five Hershey bars, …vitamins with iron, a People magazine, Ayds to fight an appetite, two large bags of potato chips.  At the very last minute you toss a Harlequin paperback on the counter.  Is this what you read at Sunday dinner?  Is this your company?

 

What private wars are waged between your kitchen and your bathroom?  Here I see an arsenal for both sides: the She who would lose weight against the She who asks, ‘Why?’ and, ‘So what?’ – the She whose desires are fed too much, even while they’re hardly fed at all.  ‘It’s your own fault,’ the first accuses; ‘two tons were never tons of love’  But the other cries, ‘If I were loved I would not need to eat.’

 

Ah, you.

 

Rubber thongs on your feet.  The polish on your toenails has grown a quarter inch above the cuticle.  I notice this because when the checker rings your bill, you drop a quarter which rolls behind me in the line.  I stoop to pick it up.  When I rise, your hand is already out and you are saying, ‘Thanks,’ even before I have returned it to you.

 

But I do a foolish thing, suddenly, for which I now ask your forgiveness.  I didn’t know how dreadfully it would complicate your night.

 

I hold the quarter an instant in my hand; I look you in the eyes – grey eyes of an honest, charcoal emotion – and I say, ‘Hello.’  And then I say, ‘How are you?’  I truly meant that question.  I’m sorry.

 

Shock hits your face.  For one second you search my eyes; your cheeks slacken, then, as though they lost their restraint and might cry.  That frightens me: what will I do if you cry?  But then your lips curl inward; your nostrils flare; the grey eyes flash; and all at once you are very, very angry.

…

 

Light illumines truth: obesity, the foolish game between Ayds and potato chips, between cigarettes and vitamins.  These things are the truth.  These you hide.  Yet it is only truth that Jesus can love. …

 

Not me, after all.  It is Jesus who asks, ‘How are you?’  And if you would then sell the false self by which you sustain the contemptible Self and die; if you would answer truly, ‘I’m fat, helpless, and alone, unlovely,’ then he would love you.  No: then you would know that he has loved you all along.  To see one truth is to discover the other – which is that he loves you not because you are lovable, but because he is love.  And here is the power of his love, that it makes ugliness beautiful!  To be loved of God is to be lovely indeed.”[1]

 

Nathanael learned that.  Maybe the woman in the grocery store learned that.  May God grant that the rest of us learn it, too.

«-- Return