Scripture: John 1:43-51
I. Gospel: The Sitcom
Sometimes we need to be seen, sometimes we need to be inspired, and sometimes, we need a laugh.
We are prone to see scripture as a very serious thing. The Word of the Lord. Thanks to be to God. Praise to you Lord Christ. We look for the lesson. We don’t look for the joke. Yet, if we are willing to see it, the Gospel is shot through with humor. Jesus says, if your kid asks for bread, would you give him, I don’t know, a snake? Let yourself chuckle. Jesus tells stories, parables, that we learn as sober sermons, but are we missing part of the point in not laughing at the absurdity. A man stores up barns of wealth – and then dies. Dark, stark, yes, but also maybe meant to provoke a cringing laugh. Jesus tells the story of a woman who annoys a judge so much, I mean this lady will not stop, and he just can’t put up with it any longer, and rules in her favor just to end her relentless pleading. It is not a stretch to say that Jesus, and our Gospel writers, have a sense of humor.
Our gospel reading today, from the Gospel of John, has almost a sitcom patter to its rhythm, if you read it that way. You could slow it down – and we will in a moment, because there is a hidden gem, an image and encouragement we should not let escape us – but we can also speed it up and see in it the joy of connection, as humans meet and spar and surprise each other.
Read it this way with me – Jesus decides to go to Galilee – cue travel montage. Then he finds Phillip and says, Follow me. And Phillip – doesn’t! Instead, he runs off to find his friend. You can just hear him saying, “No, really, Jesus, I have this friend and I can’t remember his name at the moment but he totally exists, he is a real person and he would totally be interested in all of this” like he’s trying to get out of an awkward interaction.
But he does find his friend and it turns out he does believe what Jesus has on offer. He exclaims, “This is the guy scriptures had us waiting for. Jesus. Of Nazareth.”
The friend Nathanael does a spit take – “Nazareth! Hah! What good comes from that backwater?”
Aaaaand here comes Jesus, waltzing up as if on cue, the hillbilly from Nazareth. Not only that but he has an ironic retort to Nathanael’s bigoted insult: “This guy tells no lies!”
I mean, c’mon, cue the laugh track here. Jesus know how to disarm an insult.
Nathanael, too cool, responds, “And what do you know about me?”
Jesus, cooler, responds, “I saw you under the fig tree before even Phillip got here.”
And as if on a very corny sitcom, Nathanael’s eyes bug, he points and barks, “Son of God! King of Israel!”
And Jesus closes: “You think that was good? Wait til I open up heaven and angels drop down beside me.” A wink and cut to commercial.
A comedic insult, a self-deprecating retort, an overly dramatic reversal – these are classic forms of humor which have made humankind laugh as long as we have told stories – with recorded versions like those in Greek comedies pre-dating our Gospel reading. So we should find no surprise in a Biblical joke – and we should let the Gospel make us laugh!
What do we have to gain by laughing at today’s reading? For one, we may experience it simply as fun, how we laugh at a good time – and indeed it is. Sometimes faith is like that. We can come to church on Sunday and laugh and learn. It can be a thoroughly good time, with our companions on the road. Jesus is inviting us too, to be disciples who are open to the comedic turns of our growing understanding.
We can laugh too at Nathanael’s presumption, his boneheaded prejudice, an ironic misfire, because we know now he is speaking to the Lord. Nazareth, are you kidding me? How often do we underestimate people based on some poorly formed impression? We can laugh at our folly and Nathanael’s too, because we are not so different.
And all the moreso for the dramatic reversal – a beat of comedic joy, an absurd aboutface, that even Jesus has a hard time not laughing at. Maybe he was in on the joke, this laughable Nazarene, made of fun of by his future disciples, and even rejected by his own hometown crowd, in another famous gospel scene.
The author and preacher Frederick Buechner reflects at length on Jesus’ humor in his book, “Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale”.
“There are even times when Jesus seems to see the comedy of his own life. His fellow Nazarenes, the ones he grew up with, worked with, played with, come at him with fire in their eyes to throw him off the cliff as a blasphemer at worst and a lunatic at best…He sees how they see the preposterousness of Jesus, the carpenter’s son, putting himself forth as Christ, God’s son. He sees how they are affronted by him as one who proclaims himself anointed to preach the good news to the poor when it is no news to anybody that he himself is the poorest of all…Blessed is he, in other words, who gets the joke.”
The Nazarenes don’t get the joke. But Nathanael, despite his initial prejudice, does. It bursts out like a belly laugh. And why? Because Jesus saw him. Under the fig tree.
II. Seeing through the Story
But before we join Nathanael under the fig tree, let’s turn our attention to the other disciple in this story, Philip. While Nathanael sees at first with the eyes of prejudice and skepticism before his dramatic conversion, Philip seems to take Jesus’ call in stride. He is so convinced of Jesus that he immediately goes to find a friend to bring along, because he has seen Jesus through the story of God’s faithfulness. As a Jew, Philip grew up on the story, on the covenant, on the righteousness and justice of the prophets. And he saw this embodied in Jesus.
These two stories of faith, of conversion and of steady, abiding faith, are two archetypes, two ways to see the story of faith. Both might fit us, or maybe one better than the other. Both are stories of seeing God.
My grandma grew up in the mountains of West Virginia, actually on a mountaintop. She was born on Flat Top, but she grew up on Panther Knob. Her mom liked to go to church but there was no church on Panther Knob, not even one at the bottom of the mountain she wanted to go to, she was a Baptist, so she when she rarely went, she’d walk down the mountain and to another mountain and up that one to church. Now, these were Hardshell Baptists. Fire and brimstone. Brash and Loud. Not words often used to describe Cedelia Farley, my great-grandmother. At that church, they preached a faith marked by conversion. I was in the gutter and God pulled me up. Amazing Grace. Well, Cedelia didn’t really relate to that story, because faith in Christ had always just been a part of the fabric of her life. Didn’t make her better than anybody, it’s just what her story was. She came up in it and she saw her life through it.
This reminds me of our great national and faith inspiration who we celebrate this weekend, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He too came up in the church, in fact he was a preacher’s kid. I also came up in the church and was a preacher’s kid, so that’s me comparing myself to Martin Luther King Jr. Of course, the comparison only goes so far, because unlike me, he grew up as a Black man under the shadow of the Jim Crow South. But instead of accepting that prejudice, he saw himself and African-Americans through the story of God’s promises, God’s righteousness and God’s justice. He learned that story in the home, in the church, it was the fabric of his life. The story shaped him and sent him. And he invited others into the story. This was the power of God that he embodied – he empowered his own community by assuring them that God saw them in their struggles and struggled with them, and he invited all people to reject racism and to see through God’s eyes that we could become a beloved community.
This is at the heart of his most famous speech, it’s the dream he saw through story of faith, of injustice overcome, of people reconciled to each other. Another time he saw it like this:
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one destiny, affects all indirectly.”
Author Cole Arthur Riley drives home this point about seeing each other in a story about her father. She says, “I was staring at my father in the mirror one day when it occurred to me he didn’t look like his reflection. I said, Do you think that is your face? He looked at me like I was joking. I was not…It was the first time it occurred to me that we will never really see our own faces. We can see in a mirror and it’s doing its best – but that is not your face, just an image of it. I remember thinking how much more handsome my father was in real life. I wanted to tell him but couldn’t find the words, so I just grabbed him and stared. We need other people to see our own faces – to bear witness to their beauty and truth…I want someone to bear witness to my face, that we could behold the image of God in one another and believe it on one another’s behalf.
So whatever our story is, whether we’ve had conversions or steady paths of faith, we can be like Philip, like Dr. King, like Cole Riley, and see each other’s faces through the story of God’s love. We can see each other and love each other.
III. Under the Fig Tree
As Christ sees us. As Jesus saw Nathanael under the fig tree.
Let’s finish here, where things begin, for Nathanael, where they always begin for us. We love because God has loved us first. We may in moments seek God, but God seeks us. God finds us where we are, under the fig tree.
When Jesus meets Nathanael he shocks him by saying, I saw you under the fig tree before Philip came to you. In other words, when you sat alone, in your quiet moment, I saw you.
Now “under the fig tree” was a figure of speech for scholars, and where they studied. So perhaps this is a way for Jesus to honor Nathanael, even as he has insulted Jesus, to say, you see the worst in me, but I see the best in you.
I think as well, there is a sense of solitude which Jesus speaks to in Nathanael. Philip had not found Nathanael yet. He sat alone. In his thoughts. With whatever weighed on him in quiet solitary moments. Holding what he could only hold alone.
I wonder where the fig tree is for you. Sitting at the kitchen table, going over your finances and it just not adding up. On your commute, in your thoughts, worried for your kids. At work or at school, surrounded by people and yet alone. In the waiting room, waiting for the doctor and the diagnosis. Or in prayer, wrestling with your faith.
Wherever your fig tree is, Jesus sees you in your quiet struggle and in the best of you as well. I hope you will hear a voice in that seeing, as I think Nathanael may have. His sudden reaction suggests he felt heard much more than Jesus’ literal voice. I think he heard something like a song by Fred Rogers, known to many of us as Mr. Rogers. These words, I think, are what it is like to be seen by Christ. And I invite you to experience them as such.
It’s you I like,
It’s not the things you wear,
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like
The way you are right now,
The way down deep inside you
Not the things that hide you,
Not your toys
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like
Every part of you.
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like,
It’s you yourself
It’s you.
It’s you I like.
May the comedy of the gospel make you laugh today. May you see yourself in the story of God’s promises. And may you know that the one who scriptures spoke of, through law and prophets and gospel, whose spirit moved with people across the world and through the ages down to here and now, that one, that Christ, is with you and sees you under your fig tree today. Amen.
Matt Hartley 