THE SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR

Ver y truly I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. John 1:51 By the Rev Dr Liz Hoare

Nathaniel was impressed because in answer to his indignant question ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered that he had seen him under the fig tree before Philip called him. Indeed he was so impressed that he blurted out that Jesus was the Son of God, the King of Israel. He was impressed because it seems that Jesus had supernatural powers so he must have come from God. There is a lot more to this final section of John’s Prologue than first meets the eye, however, though most of us will have to work harder at understanding the references and allusions than some of John’s original readers.

We might wonder why Nathaniel was sitting under the fig tree? Perhaps he was praying or meditating. If he was praying that God would come and release his people, he had some fixed ideas and prejudices to be dealt with before he could see. His cutting response to Philip’s excited news that he had found the Messiah showed that he expected God to do things in a certain way otherwise it couldn’t be God. How many times do we get down to pray and ask God to fix things in the way that we think they should go?

Or perhaps Nathaniel was wrestling in prayer like Jacob his ancestor, whose story reverberates through this passage so strongly. Jacob who was renamed Israel and who had a dream in a lonely place where he saw a ladder reaching up to heaven with angels ascending and descending on it. When he woke he knew without a doubt that he was in the presence of almighty God. He called the place Bethel: ‘the house of God.’

At least Nathaniel went to see for himself and so in spite of his scepticism he met Jesus face to face. There is something comic in the exchange between Jesus and Nathaniel as the latter goes from scornful scepticism to wild and abandoned adulation. Yet he still had not grasped the half of it. Like Jacob he too was in the presence of almighty God, but he was still limited by his own expectations. He exclaimed that Jesus was the ‘son of God, the king of Israel, but little did he realise that he was in the presence of the light of the world, the word made flesh, God himself. There is wordplay here on the word ‘see’ which means so much more than just looking in John’s Gospel. Philip has already said to Nathaniel ‘Come and see’ (v46) and Jesus now assures him that being in his presence will open up heaven to earth in such a way that he will learn to see things from a wholly different perspective. That promise is as true for us as it was for Nathaniel. Learning to see things from God’s perspective is one of the most wonderful parts of the life of discipleship.

Heaven open is not something we only sing about in Christmas carols and then forget.