Can Anything Good Come from Nazareth?

John 1:43-51

43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” 44 Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 45 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.” 46 Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” 47 When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” 48 Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” 49 Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” 50 Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” 51 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.”

I remember the first time I realized I was from central Appalachia and not somewhere else. Of course, I knew our hollers had no skyscrapers or concrete jungles, but I’m talking about the first time that someone pointed out to me that I couldn’t sound “proper” even if I tried. I remember attending a basketball camp at a local high school when I was a kid and one of my fellow campers wasn’t quite understanding what I was explaining. While I don’t really remember the topic of the conversation, I do remember him asking me why I kept saying “Not.” It didn’t take long for me to realize that every time I said “Night” (N-I-G-H-T) he kept hearing “Not” (N-O-T). When I realized why he was confused, I blushed in embarrassment because I apparently was speaking in such a way that gave the impression that I wasn’t very smart. In my small little world, I didn’t know that other people talked differently and that other ways of talking was somehow perceived as superior to my own. This was the first time I felt like a hillbilly, but it was not the last. Most of the vacations my family has taken, someone without fail usually asks us where we are from and requests we keep saying things “because they could listen to us all day.” Certainly, these experiences aren’t the epitome of what I would define as oppression, actually far from it, but they remind me that my roots were planted in Nazareth, where supposedly nothing good can grow.

 I’m reminded every time my mom says “worsh cloth” instead of “wash cloth” or my uncle lights a “far” instead of a “fire” that what the world defines as normative determines much of our social hierarchy. Although in many ways my kinfolk are your typical middle-class family, they are often told implicitly that they aren’t much more than dumb hillbillies without college degrees or a means of social mobility. It’s within this context that Nathanael’s words have cut sharp over the years as I tried to rehabilitate the Appalachia out of my words and thinking. Few things cut us as deeply as the messaging that convinces us that who we are is not worthy or beautiful or desirable. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that our culture is hooked by the pull of curated images and unrealistic mirages as we attempt to be seen as the type of people that naturally exude beauty and grace. I think often without our permission, our insecurities of who we should be overwhelm the truth of our own goodness to the point that we dress ourselves up in conformity and respectability until we no longer recognize who we are.

In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown writes, “If we want to live and love with our whole hearts, and if we want to engage with the world from a place of worthiness, we have to talk about the things that get in the way – especially shame, fear, and vulnerability.” (36) Nathanael’s question to Philip drips of insecurity as he is seemingly trying to imply that his story and his place are at least average, probably even decent, because thank God he isn’t a dejected deplorable from Nazareth. There is no reason to expect that the Messiah of whom Moses and the Prophets had spoken would come from Nazareth of all places. Nathanael seems to make the same assumption, one that we often do as well, in that we expect power and authority to be found in capitols and imperial centers of consolidated strength, not in the forgotten hills and hollers of the weak. But little does he know that the good-for-nothing Nazarene of which he is told, is the eternal Word of God through which all things were made.

This is already a cool story because Jesus somehow knows that Nathanael was sitting under a fig tree before Philip invites him to meet Jesus. But I think the most interesting thing in this passage is the fact that Jesus doesn’t feel the need to defend himself to someone who doubts his goodness and identity. Jesus knows who he is and he is quite comfortable being God’s Beloved, even in the face of those who would say otherwise. He shows us that when we accept our own beauty and goodness, in the very person God created us to be, then we don’t have to seek affirmation and acceptance from other people. In the words of Bell Hooks, “It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering me the acceptance I was withholding from myself.”

Jesus is radically free to fulfill and embody the will of God because he has accepted for himself the love we attempt to solicit from others. Rather than play into the Nathanael’s projected insecurities, Jesus greets him with a compliment. There is something about being able to fully accept one’s own beauty and goodness that frees them and enables them to name the beauty and goodness in others, without the burden of overcompensating. It’s by our willingness to be completely vulnerable and authentic in who we are called to be that we offer others the permission they need to be completely vulnerable and authentic as well.

This is how I define discipleship. Rather than the work of discipleship being a marketing campaign where we pressure others into becoming something they aren’t, I think discipleship is the simple invitation to “come and see” the beauty of Christ that allows us to accept and live into the beauty of our own souls. Thus, making disciples is less about the work of making others conform to a specific understanding of holiness and more about accompanying each other in the process of more fully identifying the beauty and goodness of Christ that already resides within each of us. For when we identify the One in whom heaven and earth have collapsed into a single life, we are given the gift of seeing the world and our lives in light of Heaven’s beauty.

One of my favorite textbooks from divinity school is a book called Bridge to Wonder by Cecilia González-Andrieu, and I think her perspective is worth quoting at length. She argues:

“In the practice of seeing and then imagining in love, humanity is given something – an insight, a yearning for, and a willingness to work toward a better, truer, and more beautiful life. The prophetic is generally understood more readily as a call to repentance, but when we look at the terms of seeing and imagining joined in love we can see it more dynamically as a call for life-affirming transformation. Once we see, we must care … It becomes difficult to right wrongs if we hold nothing sacred, because we are unable to find beauty in anything, and thus unable to care. Without an ability to recognize the truly beautiful, we cannot mourn its absence, and thus, wrong or sin becomes difficult to identify, let alone oppose. Finding something very beautiful is to have it awaken love in us.” (36)

Just as Nathanael is awakened to the God of love in his encounter with Jesus, I believe we, too, are awakened to the beauty and wonder of love such that it melts away our inhumanity. In other words, following Jesus is less about becoming gods and more about becoming more fully human. The salvific nature of the incarnation is that we are presented with the embodiment of eternal love and beauty in the life of Jesus Christ…and when we cast our eyes upon all that he is, we cannot help but to long for that love and beauty to flood our pained existence.

This is what Jesus means when he tells Nathanael that he will see heaven opened and angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. Much as Jacob’s ladder connected Heaven and earth, it is now in the person of Christ where heaven and earth become one. Beauty and love are now no longer virtues to be imagined, but rather, they are a person to meet, trust, and follow. The Word becomes flesh in John’s prologue to make sense of people willingly accepting the invitation to follow a poor, Jewish rabbi all over Palestine. But I suspect they realized that following Jesus was not only about following a wise teacher, but it was more so about following embodied Beauty and Love into the path of their own healing.

Beauty heals us because it reminds us that we were not made to accept the ugliness of dehumanization. Love restores us because it reminds us that we were never meant to normalize fear and insecurity. The incarnation has given us permission to love the beauty that we find within us, even if it’s not considered normative or popular. I figured if God can choose an eccentric place like Nazareth as an acceptable birthplace for the Messiah, then surely I can be a proud Appalachian hillbilly who tends to draw out his vowels, sometimes to the point of others’ confusion. But I also hope my LGBTQ siblings also see that they are good regardless of those who claim being queer is some disease to be cured. I hope my black and brown siblings see just how beautiful they are even as our culture continues to idolize and perpetuate the cruelty of racism. I hope my fellow comrades working for minimum wages and no rest believe that they are worth more than the possessors of capital could ever pay them. Friends, we do not have to exhaust ourselves trying to prove our belovedness. May we follow Christ into the beauty of our own souls, and there will we find the freedom to simply invite those who oppress and dehumanize us to come and see the beauty of Christ that they have so long hoped to find. Amen.

BENEDICTION

Our benediction is the poem from Mary Oliver called “Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Amen.