The Second Sunday of Epiphany, 18 January 2009

‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’

It is tempting to sketch one or both of two portraits of Jesus on the strength of his exchange with Nathanael. It is a temptation to which both armchair theologians and commentators who ought to know better often succumb. One of these portraits is Jesus as headhunter. It is the beginning of his ministry. He is assembling his team. The former disciples of his cousin John have already proved fertile ground for recruitment. He has taken on Peter and Andrew; he has called their fellow native of Bethsaida, Philip. Now Nathanael comes along. ‘Here’ says Jesus ‘is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.’ Nathanael has passed the test. Jesus has spotted his upstanding character and that makes him worthy of inclusion in the new company.

The other portrait is Jesus as Gypsy Rose-Lee, a mystic armed with a crystal ball. Nathanael is perhaps underwhelmed by the rabbi’s assessment and the prospects he offers. He needs to be persuaded to throw in his lot with the emerging group. There could be no better way to convince him than a little magic. ‘I saw you under the fig tree’ says Jesus. It works. Nathanael is convinced. A man with such amazing second sight must be a man worth following.

Of course, both portraits are crude and erroneous caricatures. The briefest consideration of the motley crew that surrounds Jesus should be enough to convince us that character plays no part in his considerations. When Jesus makes the remark he makes about Nathanael he is not weighing him up and deciding to take a punt. He is articulating what he sees in him, both actually and potentially; he is calling the man who stands before him; he is choosing Nathanael for a task, just as he has chosen Simon who he calls Cephas. The latter is the rock; the former is an Israelite without deceit. Jesus calls Nathanael.

So the line about the fig-tree is no gimmick. It illustrates Nathanel’s calling to be an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. The leisure to tend one’s own vineyard and the freedom to sit under one’s own fig-tree are the scriptural hallmarks of ancient Israelite bliss. ‘I saw you under the fig tree’ says Jesus: I call you to be an Israelite, says Jesus, I call you to be the representative among my followers of your nation, of God’s historic people.

And the particular task to which Nathanael is called is very clear. ‘You are the Son of God’ he cries, ‘you are the King of Israel’. For an Israelite to make the first declaration is surprising. ‘Son of God’, Yios tou Theou, is not an expression unheard of in Jewish literature, but it is more intimately connected to Greek thought and Greek theology. Nathanael is the first Jew to use of Jesus the title that John the Evangelist will use throughout his Gospel. Jesus, says Nathanael, is son of God, and this only seconds after his friend Philip has introduced Jesus to him as son of Joseph.

Yet if his hearers are taken aback at his turn of phrase they are surely taken even further aback by what follows. ‘King of Israel’ is the title reserved for the Messiah, the great liberator who will restore the nation’s fortunes. In a few seconds Nathanael the Israelite has confessed the carpenter’s son to be the son of the transcendent God, and confessed this same carpenter’s son to be the one on whom his country’s hopes are pinned. Jesus calls; Nathanael answers; truth is revealed.

This is God’s pattern, repeated to countless men and countless women across the years. Look at the narrative of Samuel. God calls. Samuel answers. Truth is revealed. For those so called, those who answer, discover in the call and their response to it what or who it is that they are called to be. So Samuel is the sovereign-anointing prophet of the new kingdom of Israel. Nathanael is a son of the son of God and a subject of the new king of Israel.

Nathanael’s journey is a journey of breathtaking speed and distance. Yet it has barely begun. ‘You will see greater things than these’ promises Jesus. Professions of newfound faith, however remarkable, are not all that disciples of Jesus are called to. There are greater things: greater than the cerebral definitions of Greek philosophy (Son of God), greater than the utopian hopes of Israel’s dream (King of Israel). The coming of Jesus means more than an exercise in intellectual re-positioning, and more than a political settlement for an enslaved people. The coming of Jesus means the breaking open of the sealed scroll that no one in heaven or earth or under the earth has been deemed worthy to break open. The coming of Jesus means the joining of heaven and earth by the one who is Son of God and who is King of Israel; by the one who is both but who is also, crucially, Son of Man. Upon him will the angels ascend and descend as upon a ladder.

It is with this that Nathanael is brought face to face by the friend who invites him to come and see, with this reality that in the coming of Jesus the world has changed for ever, that in the coming of Jesus his perceptions have changed for ever, that in the coming of Jesus he has changed for ever. No longer will this Israelite sit under his fig tree and tend his vineyard; instead he will bear witness to the one who called him and knew him, to the one whose coming has wrought change for all creation.

‘You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’

We too are invited, called even, to come, and see. Amen.

1 Samuel 3: 1-10;
Revelation 5: 1-10;
John 1: 43-end.

The Eucharist of Christmas Night, 24 December 2008, 11.30 pm

'Of mans first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse'.

Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to read all twelve books of Paradise Lost .We’d be here until Epiphany, and in any case Radio 3 is making a much better job of it than I ever would.

On the four hundredth anniversary of John Milton’s birth many commentators have pondered why the work of England’s greatest epic poet has slipped so far from the public gaze. Theories abound. Its great length means that it’s not easily digestible. It could never feature as a Poem on the Underground. Its complex language means that it’s inaccessible to many. ‘Him the Almighty Power hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky’ is forbidding to a generation that has just learned to text.

But more profound that either of these hurdles to popularity is its sheer ambition. For Milton sets out to tell in verse the story of humanity’s creation, fall and restoration. Grand narratives come no grander than this. His setting stretches beyond the farthest limits of the universe; his timescale is eternity; his players are the omnipotent God and his heavenly courtiers. The scope is breathtaking, and it is that very scope that makes Milton so difficult for modern readers.

For we no longer trust grand narratives. Poets, philosophers and prophets could once upon a time articulate over-arching stories for the world with utter confidence. That confidence was dealt a body blow on the battlefields of Western Europe more than ninety years ago. Civilization, progress, liberal values: those great totems that the educated citizens of the European empires treasured and celebrated as their common story when they entered the first decade of the last century - those were left bleeding in the trenches, their humane pretensions revealed as paper-thin veneers. And in their place other ideologies appeared and in their turn these too have gone to their fate, very often deservedly: fascism perished in the rubble of Berlin; statist Marxism in the wastes of the Gulag. Unregulated consumer capitalism may have done the same in the credit crunch of 2008.

The effect of the last hundred years’ history is that we disbelieve grand attempts to interpret history. We are suspicious of authority and we are cynical about the claims made by those who wield authority. We prefer our politicians to be technocrats rather than ideologues; we worry more about solutions than visions. What matters is what will work– not what might be. Our soap opera culture, and celebrity addiction respond to this preference. They give us manageable stories about people like us, or people almost like us, and don’t pose the awkward, eternal questions that drove Milton to write. What were the national obsessions of this year? Russell Brand, Jonathan Ross, Heather Mills McCartney and Strictly Come Dancing.

‘Milton! Thou should’st be living at the hour: England hath need of thee.’ Wordsworth’s lines have never seemed more prescient.

Yet if she is true to her vocation then at Christmas the Church does the thing that some of her most vocal critics long for her to do. She takes a stand; she refuses to collude with the national trend; she rows against the tide instead of meekly swimming with it. For at Christmas the Church defiantly offers an interpretation of human history and proclaims a grand narrative. But this is not a narrative which seeks to diminish or enslave people as did the discredited ideologies of the last century. It is not a narrative which absolves its hearers of their responsibilities for one another or for the world. It is not a narrative which aims to overthrow all other narratives by force of arms. For this is the narrative of God’s love for his world, a love which compels him to become a part of his world, a love which, ultimately, drives him to suffer at the hands of his world. This is the narrative of God becoming one of us so that we might become like him. This is the narrative we celebrate tonight, the narrative of Bethlehem, the narrative that tells us that human time and earthly space matter to Almighty God, this time and this place matter to Almighty God, that this time and this place are the time and the place in which God acts, that in this time, this place and these people God is present among us.

So let us proclaim that narrative with confidence, with joy. Tonight earth and heaven are one; tonight love eternal lies in a manger; tonight we learn our place in the grand narrative of God.

Let John Milton, poet, prophet, seeker after truth, have the last word:

‘…at his birth a star
Unseen before in heav’n proclaims him come,
And guides the eastern sages, who inquire
His place, to offer incense, myrrh, and gold;
His place of birth a solemn angel tells
To simple shepherds, keeping watch by night;
They gladly thither haste, and by a choir
Of squadroned angels hear his carol sung.
A virgin is his mother, but his sire
The power of the Most High; he shall ascend
The throne hereditary, and bound his reign
With earth’s wide bounds, his glory with the Heav’ns’.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. Amen.