'Philip findeth Nathanael, and saith unto him, We have found Him, of
whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of Nazareth,
the son of Joseph. 46. And Nathanael said unto him, Can there any good
thing come out of Nazareth? Philip saith unto him, Come and see. 47.
Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and saith of him, Behold an
Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! 48. Nathanael saith unto Him,
Whence knowest Thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that
Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. 49.
Nathanael answered and saith unto Him, Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God;
Thou art the King of Israel.'—JOHN i. 45-49.
The words are often the least part of a conversation. The Evangelist
can tell us what Nathanael said to Jesus, and what Jesus said to
Nathanael, but no Evangelist can reproduce the look, the tone, the
magnetic influence which streamed out from Christ, and, we may believe,
more than anything He said, riveted these men to Him.
It looks as if Nathanael and his companions were very easily convinced,
as if their adhesion to such tremendous claims as those of Jesus Christ
was much too facile a thing to be a very deep one. But what can be put
down in black and white goes a very short way to solve the secret of
the power which drew them to Himself.
The incident which is before us now runs substantially on the same
lines as the previous bringing of Peter to Jesus Christ. In both cases
the man is brought by a friend, in both cases the friend's weapon is
simply the expression of his own personal experience, 'We have found
the Messias,' although Philip has a little more to say about Christ's
correspondence with the prophetic word. In both cases the work is
finished by our Lord Himself manifesting His own supernatural knowledge
to the inquiring spirit, though in the case of Nathanael that process
is a little more lengthened out than in the case of Peter, because
there was a little ice of hesitation and of doubt to be melted away.
And Nathanael, starting from a lower point than Peter, having questions
and hesitations which the other had not, rises to a higher point of
faith and certitude, and from his lips first of all comes the full
articulate confession, beyond which the Apostles never went as long as
our Lord was upon earth: 'Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the
King of Israel.' So that both in regard to the revelation that is given
of the character of our Lord, and in regard to the teaching that is
given of the development and process of faith in a soul, this last
narrative fitly crowns the whole series. In looking at it with you now,
I think I shall best bring out its force by asking you to take it as
falling into these three portions: first, the preparation—a soul
brought to Christ by a brother; then the conversation—a soul fastened
to Christ by Himself; and then the rapturous confession—'Rabbi, Thou
art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.'
I. Look, then, first of all, at the preparation—a soul brought to
Christ by a brother.
'Philip findeth Nathanael.' Nathanael, in all probability, as
commentators will tell you, is the Apostle Bartholomew; and in the
catalogues of the Apostles in the Gospels, Philip and he are always
associated together. So that the two men, friends before, had their
friendship riveted and made more close by this sacredest of all bonds,
that the one had been to the other the means of bringing him to Jesus
Christ. There is nothing that ties men to each other like that. If you
want to know the full sweetness of association with friends, and of
human love, get some heart knit to yours by this sacred and eternal
bond that it owes to you its first knowledge of the Saviour. So all
human ties will be sweetened, ennobled, elevated, and made perpetual.
'We have found Him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did
write: Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph.' Philip knows nothing
about Christ's supernatural birth, nor about its having been in
Bethlehem; to him He is the son of a Nazarene peasant. But,
notwithstanding that, He is the great, significant, mysterious Person
for whom the whole sacred literature of Israel had been one long
yearning for centuries; and he has come to believe that this Man
standing beside him is the Person on whom all previous divine
communications for a millennium past focussed and centred.
I need not dwell upon these words, because to do so would be to repeat
substantially what I said in a former sermon on these first disciples,
about the value of personal conviction as a means of producing
conviction in the minds of others, and about the necessity and the
possibility of all who have found Christ for themselves saying so to
others, and thereby becoming His missionaries and evangelists.
I do not need to repeat what I said on that occasion; therefore I pass
on to the very natural hesitation and question of Nathanael: 'Can there
any good thing come out of Nazareth?' A prejudice, no doubt, but a very
harmless one; a very thin ice which melted as soon as Christ's smile
beamed upon him. And a most natural prejudice. Nathanael came from Cana
of Galilee, a little hill village, three or four miles from Nazareth.
We all know the bitter feuds and jealousies of neighbouring villages,
and how nothing is so pleasant to the inhabitants of one as a gibe
about the inhabitants of another. And in Nathanael's words there simply
speaks the rustic jealousy of Cana against Nazareth.
It is easy to blame him, but do you think that you or I, if we had been
in his place, would have been likely to have said anything very
different? Suppose you were told that a peasant out of Ross-shire was a
man on whom the whole history of this nation hung. Do you think you
would be likely to believe it without first saying, 'That is a strange
place for such a person to be born in'? Galilee was the despised part
of Palestine, and Nazareth obviously was a proverbially despised
village of Galilee; and this Jesus was a carpenter's son that nobody
had ever heard of. It seemed to be a strange head on which the divine
dove should flutter down, passing by all the Pharisees and the Scribes,
all the great people and wise people. Nathanael's prejudice was but the
giving voice to a fault that is as wide as humanity, and which we have
every day of our lives to fight with; not only in regard to religious
matters but in regard to all others—namely, the habit of estimating
people, and their work, and their wisdom, and their power to teach us,
by the class to which they are supposed to belong, or even by the place
from which they come.
'Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?' 'Can a German teach an
Englishman anything that he does not know?' 'Is a Protestant to owe
anything of spiritual illumination to a Roman Catholic?' 'Are we
Dissenters to receive any wisdom or example from Churchmen?' 'Will a
Conservative be able to give any lessons in politics to a Liberal?' 'Is
there any other bit of England that can teach Lancashire?' Take care
that whilst you are holding up your hands in horror against the
prejudices of our Lord's contemporaries, who stumbled at His origin,
you are not doing the same thing in regard to all manner of subjects
twenty times a day.
That is one very plain lesson, and not at all too secular for a sermon.
Take another. This three-parts innocent prejudice of Nathanael brings
into clear relief for us what a very real obstacle to the recognition
of our Lord's Messianic authority His apparent lowly origin was. We
have got over it, and it is no difficulty to us; but it was so then.
When Jesus Christ came into this world Judaea was ruled by the most
heartless of aristocracies, an aristocracy of cultured pedants.
Wherever you get such a class you get people who think that there can
be nobody worth looking at, or worth attending to, outside the little
limits of their own supercilious superiority. Why did Jesus Christ come
from 'the men of the earth,' as the Rabbis called all who had not
learned to cover every plain precept with spiders' webs of casuistry?
Why, for one thing, in accordance with the general law that the great
reformers and innovators always come from outside these classes, that
the Spirit of the Lord shall come on a herdsman like Amos, and
fishermen and peasants spread the Gospel through the world; and that in
politics, in literature, in science, as well as in religion, it is
always true that 'not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty,
not many noble are called.' To the cultivated classes you have to look
for a great deal that is precious and good, but for fresh impulse, in
unbroken fields, you have to look outside them. And so the highest of
all lives is conformed to the general law.
More than that, 'Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph,' came thus
because He was the poor man's Christ, because He was the ignorant man's
Christ, because His word was not for any class, but as broad as the
world. He came poor, obscure, unlettered, that all who, like Him, were
poor and untouched by the finger of earthly culture, might in Him find
their Brother, their Helper, and their Friend.
'Philip saith unto him, Come and see.' He is not going to argue the
question. He gives the only possible answer to it—'You ask Me, can any
good thing come out of Nazareth?' 'Come and see whether it is a good
thing or no; and if it is, and if it came out of Nazareth, well then,
the question has answered itself.' The quality of a thing cannot be
settled by the origin of the thing.
As it so happened, this Man did not come out of Nazareth at all, though
neither Philip nor Nathanael knew it; but if He had, it would have been
all the same. The right answer was 'Come and see.'
Now although, of course, there is no kind of correspondence between the
mere prejudice of this man Nathanael and the rooted intellectual doubts
of other generations, yet 'Come and see' carries in it the essence of
all Christian apologetics. By far the wisest thing that any man who has
to plead the cause of Christianity can do is to put Christ well
forward, and let people look at Him, and trust Him to produce His own
impression. We may argue round, and round, and round about Him for
evermore, and we shall never convince as surely as by simply holding
Him forth. 'I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto Me.' Yet we
are so busy proving Christianity that we sometimes have no time to
preach it; so busy demonstrating that Jesus Christ is this, that, and
the other thing, or contradicting the notion that He is not this, that,
and the other thing, that we forget simply to present Him for men to
look at. Depend upon it, whilst argument has its function, and there
are men that must be approached thereby; on the whole, and for the
general, the best way of propagating Christianity is to proclaim it,
and the second best way is to prove it. Our arguments do fare very
often very much as did that elaborate discourse that a bishop once
preached to prove the existence of a God, at the end of which a simple
old woman who had not followed his reasoning very intelligently,
exclaimed, 'Well, for all he says, I can't help thinking there is a God
after all.' The errors that are quoted to be confuted often remain more
clear in the hearers' minds than the attempted confutations. Hold forth
Christ—cry aloud to men, 'Come and see!' and some eyes will turn and
some hearts cleave to Him.
And on the other side, dear brethren, you have not done fairly by
Christianity until you have complied with this invitation, and
submitted your mind and heart honestly to the influence and the
impression that Christ Himself would make upon it.
II. We come now to the second stage—the conversation between Christ and
Nathanael, where we see a soul fastened to Christ by Himself.
In general terms, as I remarked, the method by which our Lord manifests
His Messiahship to this single soul is a revelation of His supernatural
knowledge of him. But a word or two may be said about the details. Mark
the emphasis with which the Evangelist shows us that our Lord speaks
this discriminating characterisation of Nathanael before Nathanael had
come to Him: 'He saw him coming.' So it was not with a swift,
penetrating glance of intuition that He read his character in his face.
It was not that He generalised rapidly from one action which He had
seen him do. It was not from any previous personal knowledge of him,
for, obviously, from the words of Philip to Nathanael, the latter had
never seen Jesus Christ. As Nathanael was drawing near Him, before he
had done anything to show himself, our Lord speaks the words which show
that He had read his very heart: 'Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom
is no guile.'
That is to say, here is a man who truly represents that which was the
ideal of the whole nation. The reference is, no doubt, to the old story
of the occasion on which Jacob's name was changed to Israel. And we
shall see a further reference to the same story in the subsequent
verses. Jacob had wrestled with God in that mysterious scene by the
brook Jabbok, and had overcome, and had received instead of the name
Jacob, 'a supplanter,' the name of Israel, 'for as a Prince hast thou
power with God and hast prevailed.' And, says Christ: 'This man also is
a son of Israel, one of God's warriors, who has prevailed with Him by
prayer.' 'In whom is no guile'—Jacob in his early life had been marked
and marred by selfish craft. Subtlety and guile had been the very
keynote of his character. To drive that out of him, years of discipline
and pain and sorrow had been needed. And not until it had been driven
out of him could his name be altered, and he become Israel. This man
has had the guile driven out of him. By what process? The words are a
verbal quotation from Psalm xxxii.: 'Blessed is he whose transgression
is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man unto whom the
Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.'
Clear, candid openness of spirit, and the freedom of soul from all that
corruption which the Psalmist calls 'guile,' is the property of him
only who has received it, by confession, by pardon, and by cleansing,
from God. Thus Nathanael, in his wrestling, had won the great gift. His
transgression had been forgiven; his iniquity had been covered; to him
God had not imputed his sin; and in his spirit, therefore, there was no
guile. Ah, brother! if that black drop is to be cleansed out of your
heart, it must be by the same means—confession to God and pardon from
God. And then you too will be a prince with Him, and your spirit will
be frank and free, and open and candid.
Nathanael, with astonishment, says, 'Lord, whence knowest Thou me?' Not
that he appropriates the description to himself, or recognises the
truthfulness of it, but he is surprised that Christ should have means
of forming any judgment with reference to him, and so he asks Him, half
expecting an answer which will show the natural origin of our Lord's
knowledge: 'Whence knowest Thou me?' Then comes the answer, which, to
supernatural insight into Nathanael's character, adds supernatural
knowledge of Nathanael's secret actions: 'Before that Philip called
thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. And it is because
I saw thee under the fig-tree that I knew thee to be "an Israelite
indeed, in whom there is no guile."' So then, under the fig-tree,
Nathanael must have been wrestling in prayer; under the fig-tree must
have been confessing his sins; under the fig-tree must have been
longing and looking for the Deliverer who was to 'turn away ungodliness
from Jacob.' So solitary had been that vigil, and so little would any
human eye that had looked upon it have known what had been passing in
his mind, that Christ's knowledge of it and of its significance at once
lights up in Nathanael's heart the fire of the glad conviction, 'Thou
art the Son of God.' If we had seen Nathanael, we should only have seen
a man sitting, sunk in thought, under a fig-tree; but Jesus had seen
the spiritual struggle which had no outward marks, and to have known
which He must have exercised the divine prerogative of reading the
heart.
I ask you to consider whether Nathanael's conclusion was not right, and
whether that woman of Samaria was not right when she hurried back to
the city, leaving her water-pot, and said, 'Come and see a man that
told me _all_ that ever I did.' That 'all' was a little stretch of
facts, but still it was true in spirit. And her inference was
absolutely true: 'Is not this the Christ, the Son of God?' This is the
first miracle that Jesus Christ wrought. His supernatural knowledge,
which cannot be struck out from the New Testament representations of
His character, is as much a mark of divinity as any of the other of His
earthly manifestations. It is not the highest; it does not appeal to
our sympathies as some of the others do, but it is irrefragable. Here
is a man to whom all men with whom He came in contact were like those
clocks with a crystal face which shows us all the works. How does He
come to have this perfect and absolute knowledge?
That omniscience, as manifested here, shows us how glad Christ is when
He sees anything good, anything that He can praise in any of us.
'Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.' Not a word
about Nathanael's prejudice, not a word about any of his faults (though
no doubt he had plenty of them), but the cordial praise that he was an
honest, a sincere man, following after God and after truth. There is
nothing which so gladdens Christ as to see in us any faint traces of
longing for, and love towards, and likeness to, His own self. His
omniscience is never so pleased as when beneath heaps and mountains of
vanity and sin it discerns in a man's heart some poor germ of goodness
and longing for His grace.
And then again, notice how we have here our Lord's omniscience set
forth as cognisant of all our inward crises and struggles, 'When thou
wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.' I suppose all of us could look
back to some place or other, under some hawthorn hedge, or some boulder
by the seashore, or some mountain-top, or perhaps in some back-parlour,
or in some crowded street, where some never-to-be-forgotten epoch in
our soul's history passed, unseen by all eyes, and which would have
shown no trace to any onlooker, except perhaps a tightly compressed
lip. Let us rejoice to feel that Christ sees all these moments which no
other eye can see. In our hours of crisis, and in our monotonous,
uneventful moments, in the rush of the furious waters, when the stream
of our lives is caught among rocks, and in the long, languid reaches of
its smoothest flow, when we are fighting with our fears or yearning for
His light, or even when sitting dumb and stolid, like snow men,
apathetic and frozen in our indifference, He sees us, and pities, and
will help the need which He beholds.
'Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Saviour is not by;
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Saviour is not near.'
'When thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.'
III. One word more about this rapturous confession, which crowns the
whole: 'Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God; Thou art the King of Israel.'
Where had Nathanael learned these great names? He was a disciple of
John the Baptist, and he had no doubt heard John's testimony as
recorded in this same chapter, when he told us how the voice from
Heaven had bid him recognise the Messiah by the token of the descending
Dove, and how he 'saw and bare record that this is the Son of God.'
John's testimony was echoed in Nathanael's confession. Undoubtedly he
attached but vague ideas to the name, far less articulate and doctrinal
than we have the privilege of doing. To him 'Son of God' could not have
meant all that it ought to mean to us, but it meant something that he
saw clearly, and a great deal beyond that he saw but dimly. It meant
that God had sent, and was in some special sense the Father of, this
Jesus of Nazareth.
'Thou art the King of Israel,' John had been preaching, 'The Kingdom of
Heaven is at hand.' The Messiah was to be the theocratic King, the
King, not of 'Judah' nor of 'the Jews,' but of 'Israel,' the nation
that had entered into covenant with God. So the substance of the
confession was the Messiahship of Jesus, as resting upon His special
divine relationship and leading to His Kingly sway.
Notice also the enthusiasm of the confession; one's ear hears clearly a
tone of rapture in it. The joy-bells of the man's heart are all
a-ringing. It is no mere intellectual acknowledgment of Christ as
Messiah. The difference between mere head-belief and heart-faith lies
precisely in the presence of these elements of confidence, of
enthusiastic loyalty, and absolute submission.
So the great question for each of us is, not, Do I believe as a piece
of my intellectual creed that Christ is 'the Messiah, the Son of God,
the King of Israel'? I suppose almost all my hearers here now do that.
That will not make you a Christian, my friend. That will neither save
your soul nor quiet your heart, nor bring you peace and strength in
life, nor open the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven to you. A man may be
miserable, wholly sunk in all manner of wickedness and evil, die the
death of a dog, and go to punishment hereafter, though he believe that
Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the King of Israel. You want
something more than that. You want just this element of rapturous
acknowledgment, of loyal submission, absolute obedience, of unfaltering
trust.
Look at these first disciples, six brave men that had all that loyalty
and love to Him; though there was not a soul in the world but
themselves to share their convictions. Do they not shame you? When He
comes to you, as He does come, with this question, 'Whom do ye say that
I am?' may God give you grace to answer, 'Thou art the Christ, the Son
of the living God,' and not only to answer it with your lips, but to
trust Him wholly with your hearts, and with enthusiastic devotion to
bow your whole being in adoring wonder and glad submission at His feet.
If we are 'Israelites indeed,' our hearts will crown Him as the 'King
of Israel.'