John 1:43–51
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’
Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’
Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’
Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him and said of him, ‘Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael said to him, ‘How do you know me?’
Jesus answered him, ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.’
Nathanael answered him, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’
Jesus answered him, ‘Because I said to you, “I saw you under the fig tree,” do you believe? You will see greater things than these.’ And he said to him, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.[p 9]
Coming to Christ
The story of any conversion to Christ is an exceedingly personal and intimate matter, involving not merely a person’s reason, but that person’s spirit and soul, his or her emotions and imagination. For some, conversion is comparatively easy: they come to see themselves as sinners, they discover that Christ and only Christ has the answer to their problem, and in straightforward repentance and simple faith they trust Christ and are saved. With others the process is by no means so simple or direct. They come to Christ through seas of doubts and difficulties, problems and prejudices galore. Nathanael was one such person, and it may well help us if we try and follow him through the maze of thoughts and emotions that he experienced in coming to faith.?’
Taking the first step
The first step that Nathanael took in the direction of Christ was to give vent to an uninhibited expression of cynicism and doubt. ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’, said he, biting the head off Philip who had just been trying enthusiastically to evangelize him. It wasn’t very courteously put, and it certainly made no attempt to spare the feelings of the would-be evangelist. But it was a step towards Christ. Not a very positive step, you might think, but still a step.
Any who take the trouble to think about Christ long enough to begin to see what claims Christ is making, even if they then resent those claims, have begun to move toward Christ. They may turn back at once, but they have taken at least one step. The trouble with many people is that they have never taken even this first step. They don’t believe in Christ, but they don’t know why they don’t. They have never bothered to think seriously about what he said. They will remark quite knowingly that of course they can’t accept that Jesus is the Son of God, because it is intellectually impossible. But they will add that they consider that he was a good man—quite oblivious to the fact that they are revealing by the remark that their intellect has really done remarkably little thinking on the subject at all. If a man claimed to be God, and wasn’t, he could by no stretch of imagination be called a good man.[p 10]
Philip's excitement
There’s no denying that from one point of view Philip’s approach to Nathanael had not been the most tactful. To begin with, although our Lord had been living in Nazareth for some years, so that it was quite natural and correct to speak of him as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, he was not born in Nazareth, but in Bethlehem exactly as the prophet Micah had foretold (5:2). Philip might have known that Nathanael was a stickler for getting all the details correct; and there was no point in making it intellectually difficult for him by using loose and inexact phraseology. And then Philip was so obviously excited, and he should have known that if there was anything that would make Nathanael suspicious, it was excitement and enthusiasm in religion. Nathanael’s [p 11]temperament and taste did not run in that direction. Religion for him was a solemn and stately thing, with ancient musical chants and mournful intoning. And God for him was almighty, distant, remote, awe-inspiring in his greatness and holiness, the very thought of whom made a person serious and subdued. The Messiah, too, as he had been brought up to believe, was a cosmic figure: when he came, he would come in the clouds of heaven. And here was Philip not only claiming that he had come, but talking about him as a someone he knew personally, like his next door neighbour.
Certainly Philip was excited; but then a man who has made the discovery that Philip had just made could scarcely avoid showing some excitement. Some people, if they had merely won three quarters of a million in the lottery, would paint the town red, and no one would think their excitement strange. And yet here was Philip claiming to have discovered the whole secret of history, the purpose of life, the meaning of the world and the significance of the human race! Listen to him as he bursts in on the privacy of Nathanael’s shady seat in the garden: ‘We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.’ Excitement or not, at least Philip was not talking about some little private vision that he himself had thought up. He was claiming to have found the cosmic figure about whom the greatest of Israel’s lawgivers and all her prophets had prophesied consistently down the centuries.
Nathanael's idea of truth
Now, being a good Jew, Nathanael believed all this. The disturbing thing about what Philip was saying was that this Saviour of the world had come and, what is more, Philip was absolutely sure he had found him. He sounded all too certain about it. Nathanael, like a good many others, preferred in matters of religion to travel hopefully rather than to arrive. If you were content to tell him you believed that one day God would put the world right, Nathanael was at once prepared to reply that he shared the certain conviction that most likely God would one day perhaps improve things considerably; or at least he felt it was not unreasonable to entertain a distinct hope that he might. But tell Nathanael the Saviour of the world had come, that he could be met personally and you could be sure about it, and Nathanael[p 12] found it far from attractive. Somehow it took away all the delicious sense of freedom and room for manoeuvre that you had. He didn’t mind such talk so long as you could retort, if things began to get too uncomfortable, that of course no one could be sure about these things.
And then, the way Philip put it, the whole thing sounded so directly personal. ‘We have found him,’ he said. Now to pray vaguely for God’s kingdom to come, why, there are many decent men and women who would be only too happy to do that. And if it were a question of helping the kingdom of God to come by putting your back into a ten-year plan for agriculture or joining a public-spirited campaign to get an act through parliament banning child pornography, any right-minded person would join it. But to be faced with a person, claiming to be the King himself, and insisting on a one-to-one encounter—that was profoundly disturbing. There would be no knowing what personal claims he might make, what invasions of one’s privacy and independence might follow. This was one example of it already. Here he was, trying to get away from things for a while, sitting under the shade of the fig tree in his own private garden, enjoying the peace and privacy of it all, when Philip comes barging in and destroying the calm, not only of the garden but of his mind and conscience, with the troublesome idea that the Saviour of the world was down the street and that Nathanael was invited to meet him personally.
He could, of course, refuse to meet him and stay in the quiet of his garden. But he knew instinctively that that would be the end of any peace for the rest of the day. Conscience would start working overtime, and all kinds of thoughts and emotions chase each other through his head and heart. He knew that this Jesus was a fraud. There was no doubt about it. Still, he had never met him and knew next to nothing about him. How he knew he was a fraud without knowing anything about him was a bit difficult to explain, particularly if he wanted to escape the charge of being prejudiced and obscurantist.
Then there was another thing. It was certainly pleasant sitting under this fig tree. It was, in fact, every Jew’s ambition to sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, as the prophet Micah phrased it (4:4). To enjoy reasonable political freedom, to have enough to live on comfortably with some to spare for the cultural side of life, so that you could sit in your garden in the shade of an old fig tree and savour life a bit—the Jews felt it was everyone’s[p 13] God-given birthright. And Nathanael had arrived (though multitudes hadn’t); he had his own place, and life was tolerably smooth and interesting. But nice as it was, the thought would keep coming: is this all? Is this all that life is about? To have your own house, a wife and pleasant children and then enough to retire on comfortably and to do the things you’ve always wanted to do, and after that to . . . well, and after that . . . You couldn’t live for ever, of course; but was this life all? And what about the millions who didn’t manage to make it, so to speak, even in this life, for whom life was little more than a kind of penal servitude in the prison of poverty and ill health? Did the promise of a Saviour of the world amount to no more in the end than the rich sitting under their fig trees and the poor in the labour camps until death put an end to both? If there was only the merest grain of truth in what Philip was saying, it was at least worth investigating seriously.
And so, when in answer to his question, ‘Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?’, Philip simply said, ‘Come and see for yourself ’, Nathanael got up and went to meet Christ personally.
Face to face with Christ
To be honest, he felt a bit naked leaving the shelter of his fig tree and walking down the middle of the road to meet this person. What was he letting himself in for? Why had he even started out on the road? Why hadn’t he stayed behind his doubts? His doubts were good, solid and reasonable doubts, big and respectable enough to hide behind. Whatever was he exposing himself to now? But it was too late to go back, for there standing in front of him was Christ.
Christ was the first to speak. ‘That’s what I call a real true Israelite,’ he said, ‘not like old Jacob full of deceit and dishonest pretence. You say exactly what you think, don’t you? There’s not a drop of guile in you.’
‘Rabbi,’ said Nathanael politely, ‘I wasn’t aware that we had met before, how do you know me?’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ said Christ; ‘I saw you before Philip called you. You were sitting under your fig tree, weren’t you?’
What happened next is difficult to describe. For Nathanael it was like opening the door to find water outside, which one minute is[p 14] round your ankles and the next has risen so fast that it is up to your armpits. He had always held it as a religious doctrine, and indeed as a philosophical axiom, that, if there was a God at all, he must be omniscient. But somehow he had never realized it meant this. No privacy at all, anywhere? No privacy, not even in your own back garden under your own fig tree? No privacy, not even for your inmost thoughts, or doubts? Nothing but an all-seeing, all-invading God everywhere and at all times?
What happened? Had the heavens suddenly opened and he had been discovered, as an insect is discovered when the stone under which it is hiding is removed? No, as far as he could see, the sky was still the same. It was Christ standing there and focussing all the omniscience of God on Nathanael personally and individually. And strangely enough, he didn’t feel in the slightest bit scared. It was a tremendous relief, in fact, to discover that he was known, personally known, and that nothing was hidden and nothing had to be. The doubts, and the sarcasm with which they had been expressed, were all known and accepted as the honest expression of what he had really felt at the time. But more important now was the sense that he, the man behind the doubts, was known and that he was accepted. The God who knew everything about him accepted him in spite of it, and without reproach; so he had no need now to try and hide anything, no need to withdraw behind his doubts to hide. And funny thing: now that he no longer felt any need to hide himself, his doubts were gone. Well, he no longer needed them anyway; he had scarcely noticed them going. Curious! He hadn’t always felt like this. What happened? He had come to Christ, and what he had never dreamed of, in a moment, without long argument, he had found.
What had he found? Well, it must be God. Then this was what Philip had meant when he said, ‘We have found him’. It wasn’t presumption or arrogance; it was fact. ‘I must have found him, too’, Nathanael said to himself. ‘Only,’ he might have said to Christ, ‘if you save me, it’s more like being found.’
All this and much more perhaps had gone through Nathanael’s mind, though it was only a second or two since Christ had finished speaking. There was no doubt what reply he should make. Steadily, without a quaver of a doubt, he replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’[p 15]
‘Yes,’ said Christ, ‘and let me tell you, you haven’t yet discovered a millionth part of what’s involved in what you’ve just said. You shall one day see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’
A few brief hours ago and that remark would have made Nathanael feel very uncomfortable. Imagine having every hiding place removed and, whether you were willing to or not, having to look up and see the very face of infinite holiness. Imagine having to do so all unprepared and unreconciled to him, with your conscience witnessing to unforgiven sins, and not having even one doubt thick enough to give even the semblance of cover from the searching eyes. The very idea would have made Nathanael cringe in dread. But that wasn’t how he felt about it now. He felt nothing but a surge of wonder and new hope and meaning. He had come to Christ. He was reconciled to God. He had nothing to hide, nothing that he was afraid would one day be discovered. It was all known and forgiven. And now in addition there was something more and even bigger: a future that made sense of life, a future for the world, a future for Nathanael. Let the heavens roll apart here and now; he could scarcely wait! His garden with its fig tree was still quite pleasant, but somehow now it did look a bit small.
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