As I explained in my last post I am combining my interests in liturgy and the Historical Jesus of Nazareth by blogging through the Revised Common Lectionary’s Gospel portions every week. Hope you enjoy.

John’s gospel, being the last Gospel written, is clearly different from the three that preceded it. Here’s why. John’s purpose was to show his audience that Jesus was divine, and in fact God himself. John’s Gospel is highly theological, explaining almost every event after he writes it. John wants his gospel to be extremely simple, with no room for confusion about Jesus’ divinity. So John’s Jesus is more cleaned up, very powerful and very much in control than the Jesus we find in Matthew, Mark and Luke. When we understand John as an evangelist, and not a historian we can see John’s purpose for this was not to try to change history. He did this because he needed to demonstrate Jesus’ power and divinity to a persecuted Christian community facing a constant threat of survival that made them question Jesus’ power and divinity.

This brings us to today’s text: John 1:43-51. Jesus recruits Phillip as his disciple and Phillip tries to recruit Nathanael, saying “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael responds: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

New Testament scholar, Reza Aslan describes Nazareth like this:

Ancient Nazareth rests on the jagged brow of a windy hilltop in lower Galilee. No more than a hundred Jewish families live in this tiny village. There are no roads, no public buildings. There is no synagogue. The villagers share a single well from which to draw fresh water. A single bath, fed by a trickle of rainfall captured and stored in underground cisterns, serves the entire population. It is a village of mostly illiterate peasants, farmers, and day laborers; a place that does not exist on any map…It is, in short, an inconsequential and utterly forgettable place.

Mark 6:3 says Jesus was a carpenter in this village; tekton in Greek, which did not mean carpenter in any way that we understand carpenters today in the modern world. Tekton is better understood as builder, or a day laborer. John begins his Gospel by saying that Jesus was the Word of God made flesh, but as a tekton, that flesh belonged to the second lowest social and economic class; just below peasants, and just above slaves and beggars. Upper-class Romans even used the term, tekton as a swear word to refer to illiterate peasants. Mark’s the only one to refer to Jesus as a tekton. Matthew refers to him as the son of a tekton. Luke and John don’t mention it at all.

So if you are an evangelist and want to convince people that this guy is the Messiah it definitely would not help your argument to include where Jesus was from. Of course it helped a little for John to not include the part about Jesus being a tekton, but you couldn’t be much else if you were from Nazareth. This was the man who the Jews expected to liberate the Jews like Moses had, and free the Jews from the oppression of the occupying Roman government.

Like I said in the last post: as evangelists the Gospel writers’ main purpose was not to write about what happened, but to show us how this story of Jesus can show us what’s happening. I think it’s incredibly fascinating that when God became flesh and blood to live among us, he chose to be born as the last person you would ever want to be. Imagine God becoming flesh in the 17th century as a Native American, who had witnessed thousands of his own people massacred by English and Dutch mercenaries. Imagine God becoming flesh in the 18th century as an African slave, abducted and thrown on a ship to America. Imagine God becoming flesh in the 19th century as an Irish farmer, forced by the British onto the shores of Ireland to starve after a genocide of 2,000,000. Imagine God becoming flesh in the 20th century as Jew, being tortured in Auschwitz.

Through what oppressed group would God become flesh today in 2015?

Nathanael changes his mind about Jesus after discovering that Jesus supernaturally saw him sitting under the tree before they met. Jesus responds to Nathanael’s praise of him with a promise: “You will see greater things than these. Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

This verse is the first example of something extremely interesting that John does all throughout his Gospel that usually goes unnoticed in our English translations. Several times in John’s gospel we see Jesus, in the middle of a conversation with one other person, suddenly change the singular ‘you’ (sy in Greek) to the plural ‘you’ (hymin). This isn’t Jesus starting off talking to one person and then turning to address multiple people. This happens several times in John’s Gospel even when Jesus is alone with someone. Understanding John as not a historian, but an evangelist helps us see why John does this. Wherever there is a plural ‘you’ John is having Jesus continue to the conversation in the story, while simultaneously having Jesus speak to the community that John wrote it for.

Since the Gospels are always talking about what is happening we can also say that John is having Jesus speak to us as well in these moments. The verse I just quoted contains the plural form of ‘you’ each mention of the word. John has Jesus tell Nathaniel and the persecuted community he is writing to “You will see greater things than these. Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

Jesus’ promise at the end of this passage is a promise to Nathanael about the journey ahead, it’s a promise to the readers of the story that Jesus has greater things planned in the story if you keep reading, but it’s also a promise to a group of people that struggled in seeing God as able to show them something greater. In the middle of suffering this promise is the hardest thing to believe.

Today we celebrate Marin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, in memory of his honorable and holy fight for the advancement of civil rights and racial equality. It’s been almost 50 years since his tragic death and several Americans still don’t see the racial equality that men and women like Martin Luther King Jr. fought so hard for.

Today I hope we can remember that Jesus arose from within one of the most oppressed communities within one of the most oppressed nations in history. And that incarnation has continued ever since. God did become flesh in those massacred Native American tribes, those African slaves, those starving Irish, those Jews in concentration camps, and all those that are under the same type of oppression today. God is on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the exploited and abused wherever they are in the world and God chooses the flesh of the least of these to make himself known. And that is what the season of Epiphany is commemorating: the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles; to those who were not under the same oppression.

I hope this promise that was originally given to a threatened community unsure of survival can comfort those who also feel threatened and without hope. Martin Luther King Jr. and those like him brought us far, and let us praise God for that. And I pray today that you will even have the faith to believe Jesus’ promise that he gives Nathanael and us in the midst of praise: “You will see greater things than these.”

So trust Jesus’ promise to you that John gave us 2,000 years ago. The story isn’t over. There will be suffering, and pain, and misery, but there will also be joy, and peace, and miracles. The miracles are coming and it starts with trusting that they will actually come.