Philip's News and Nathanel

The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 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.’ Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ 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’ John 1: 43-51.


Today is the day that God meets us. Today and no other. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow does not exist. The day is today. We are not called to be good enough to meet God. We are simply being called to be open to God’s making God’s Self known to us in some way, shape and form. The point of the religious life is not to earn our way into heaven or into God’s good graces but to prepare ourselves...our very hearts...the centers of our being...our very souls… to experience thr only God that there is, the Living God. Philip declares to Nathaniel ( otherwise known as Bartholomew) that he has met the Messiah-the One who reveals God’s kingdom of salvation. Nathaniel, of course, has no time for Philip’s news. Nathaniel is incredulous and has no qualms about telling Philip that nothing good can come out of a place such as Nazareth.

Yet, when he meets Jesus he is able to see past his pre-conceptions and prejudices and encounter God’s self-revelation in Christ. His heart tells him who Jesus is. Not his intellect. Not his reason. Not his five senses. Not his emotions. But his very being. His heart reveals to him that Jesus is the Messiah. It is Nathaniel’s epiphany. The sudden and blinding revelation that God is present before him in the person of this humble carpenter from Nazareth. He may have questioned his friend’s wisdom when Philip claimed to have found the Messiah but when he met the Messiah himself he knew the truth. Jesus found Nathaniel prepared to receive him through Nathaniel’s life of reading the Holy Scriptures, his life of worship, his life of good deeds and his life of prayer. It is no less for any one of us.

What we truly believe lays down deep in the core of our being. The question is-what is it we believe deep in the core of our being. Those things that we hold to be true may be of God or may not be of God. They affect our reason and our emotions and not the other way around. The religious life is about learning what is truly true and not about acquiring facts about God. The religious life is about the preparation of one’s true self to encounter and experience God and not about getting right with God or storing up merit in order to earn a place in heaven. It is about creating in one's self, in one’s own soul, the capacity to recognize God in all the ways possible in the lives that we are living. The reason that this is so important is that the transformation that Christ desires to accomplish in your life and in my life happens from the inside out; from the depth of our being out into the world at large. The Kingdom of God is not an alien place but a state of being that resides in that interior space where you truly live and where God is meant to dwell-your heart of hearts. It is Nathaniel’s heart that is able to see God in Christ. His eyes simply would have seen a humble carpenter from Nazareth but his heart, his truest Self, saw God-The Reverend Adrian A. Amaya.