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 about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” 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.”
(John 1:43-51)
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
As many of you know for the first three years of my ministry (almost 25 years ago now!) I served a three point pastoral charge in Central Newfoundland. The three churches were located in three very unique communities: Beaumont, Roberts Arm and South Brook. Roberts Arm was where we lived. It was a small town, but a busy one. It had a grocery store, a small department store, a couple of convenience stores, a public library, a gas station, a restaurant and a motel. You could get pretty much anything you wanted to get in Roberts Arm, so if you were so inclined you never had to leave. It had a government wharf right across the street from the manse we lived in and there were a lot of fishermen who lived there – and before I’m accused of being sexist any women I knew who were involved in the fishing industry in Newfoundland (at least when I was there) would have laughed out loud if you had called them “fishers.” They were fishermen – and never, ever call a Newfoundlander what they don’t want to be called. The second point was Beaumont. It was actually off the coast of Newfoundland, so I had to take a short five minute ride on a small ferry to get there. It was very isolated and aside from one convenience store that I remember there wasn’t much else there. It was a fishing community as well, and the church (which was the largest of the three congregations on the charge) overlooked one of the bays and if you got to the right part of the island you could stare out at the open North Atlantic. There were views that were literally breath-taking. The third point was South Brook. That church was the smallest on the charge. On a good Sunday (a REALLY good Sunday) we might get 15 people. On an average Sunday you could probably count on anywhere from 8-12. On a bad Sunday? Well, let’s just say there were bad Sundays from time to time. Aside from a gas station, there really wasn’t a whole lot in South Brook (although I checked out South Brook on Google this past week and now it has two convenience stores, two gas stations and apparently a hockey rink!) But when I was there, you pretty much had to leave town to get much of anything. South Brook wasn’t a fishing community because it was located inland. At one time it was a logging community, but there wasn’t much logging going on 25 years ago. People there used to poke sad fun at themselves, and there was one woman in my congregation who used to paraphrase this morning’s Gospel reading when she spoke about the town. “Can anything good,” she used to say (with a smile on her face, but I think also with a bit of sadness) “come out of South Brook?”
That’s what they said about the place where Jesus was raised. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth had an identity problem. Apparently two thousand years ago Nazareth was neither very prominent nor very prosperous, and in fact it’s so unimportant that although there’s archaeological evidence that suggests Nazareth was destroyed during the Babylonian invasion that happened 700 years before Jesus was born, there are no mentions of Nazareth during Roman times (except in the New Testament) until almost 200 years after Jesus died. And, if indeed it was said “can anything good come out of Nazareth,” then it seems Nazareth was perhaps a town with a reputation, so to speak. Not the sort of place you’d want to bring up your kids if you could avoid it. And yet, it seems to have been the town that Joseph and Marry settled in after they returned from Egypt with Jesus. What an odd choice of hometown for the Son of God. And perhaps there was a reason for that choice.
It seems to me that this points out a problem that’s endemic in human society. It’s hard for us to see the good. Sometimes it seems that the question isn’t so much “can anything good come out of Nazareth” (or South Brook) – instead the question can seem to be “is there anything good?” Goodness sometimes seems to be in short supply wherever you look. We get inundated on a daily basis (or more often if we choose) with so much bad news. We got one of those Amazon home assistants named Alexa for Christmas from my brother in law. All I have to do at any time of the day or night now is say “Alexa, give me my briefing” and Alexa will proceed to give me all the daily headlines – which are usually about bad things. It can be depressing. When I was a kid growing up in Scarborough (back in the days before there were 500 TV channels at our fingertips) one of the TV stations we used to watch from Buffalo was WUTV – Channel 29. Channel 29 was cool because it had a Japanese science fiction show called “Ultra Man” that I used to watch all the time. But one of the things it also used to have was something called “The Good News Report.” It was about a 5 minute capsule of good, positive, uplifting stories. And some news programs today do something like that – but, again, it’s usually a 5 minute or so capsule that gets lost in the “real” (which means “bad” news of the day.) Finding the good can be difficult at times when we’re so surrounded by the bad.
I found it interesting that this passage from John’s Gospel came up for this week in the lectionary when we’ve once again been inundated with people being dismissed or attacked because of where they come from. I won’t, obviously, offer a verbatim quote, but the words of the President of the United States in these past few days about African countries being – to put it delicately – undesirable (similar to comments he’s made about Mexicans and Muslims and Haitians) is just another manifestation of Nathanael’s “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Closer to home, an 11 year old Muslim girl in Toronto having her hijab cut off from behind by a complete stranger just a couple of days ago is another manifestation of someone thinking “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” And, while I don’t want to get too political from the pulpit, maybe it’s because we have the so-called “leader of the free world” routinely spouting these offensive and odious ideas that some people feel empowered to think that “those people” - whoever “they” are – can’t be any good and therefore aren’t worthy of any respect or dignity. All I can say is that Canada is a part of the “free world” - and he ain’t my leader! But in this passage from John’s Gospel, the story of Nathanael reminds us that these unthinking, knee jerk reactions we can so easily have toward people we don’t know or don’t understand have no basis in reality and that we need to overcome this “can anything good come from …” mentality that can so easily seep into our thinking, and it tells us that they can be overcome. Nathanael, of course, would learn. He would encounter Jesus. He would get to know Jesus. He would become a disciple of Jesus. The way to overcome our prejudices about people who are different from us is to learn about them and to meet them and to discover that they’re not really that much different than we are and that we don’t have to be afraid of them and that we don’t have to hate them. Maybe we can just love them – because, you know, God does.
“Can anything good come out of South Brook?” Well, I knew some very faithful people in South Brook who would literally give you the shirt off their back if you needed it and who deeply influenced my life and ministry and faith in the three years I ministered to them, some of whom I’m still in touch with all these years later. That was pretty good. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Well, the Son of God came out of Nazareth and taught the world the way of love and compassion and grace, and accepted all who approached him without judgment. That was pretty good. The reality is that the good is all around us. Sometimes we’re blinded to it because we’re so focused on the problems and the challenges – but it’s all around us. I think that as Christians we need to make a concerted effort to see the good. So many Christians like to focus on what we call the doctrine of original sin, but I rather think that we need to start adopting a doctrine of original goodness. The creation story of Genesis, after all, tells us that when God had finished the work of creating God looked at what had been created and said it was “good.” “Good” is the default position. And I believe that goodness is still there. It’s marred and distorted perhaps by human actions and – frankly – by human sin, but it’s there, and the more we come to understand God the more able we are to love our neighbours no matter how different they might seem on the surface.
Nelson Mandela once wrote that “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Nathanael learned. Good things do come out of Nazareth. Good things come from everywhere. Good people come from all over.
No comments:
Post a Comment