“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46)
I want to take as my text a reading which comes out of the one we have just heard as Jesus starts his public ministry in his home town.
In the football contextm ask any Manchester United supporter what she/he thinks of Manchester City, or Liverpool of Everton, or Roma of Lazio, and you would get pretty derisory responses. Rubbishing the opposition, especially when it is on your doorstep and different in ethos or religion or race, has always been one of the least attractive features of the human race. Despising those who are other than ourselves has led us from the battlefields of the Crusades to the killing fields of Cambodia and the ethnic cleansings of the Balkans of the 90s and even now to the squalid chaos of slums and camps in Syria and in the Gaza strip. And of course this next week we also commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day remembering the terrible suffering of many Jewish families still mourning the slaughter of millions of their ancestors killed for race and religion by the cruel Nazi regime. As anti-Semitism raises its head again in the wake of the terrible events recently in Paris, it is in the context of the racial and religious divides of our own day that initiatives bringing together peoples of different churches and faiths to promote inter religious dialogue in spirituality and in theology and politics are to be commended for your response and action.
But as the gospel reminds us, the Christian Church itself was born out of such tensions and rivalries. Barriers which Jesus came to break down. Communities which Our Lord sought to reconcile, Jew and Gentile, pure religious people and outcasts and sinners. You remember the encounter that Jesus has after his baptism and the calling of the first disciples. There is amazement at this Son of Joseph and his actions. It comes from Nathanael, who perhaps represents all disciples (the word means God gives), the one chosen by God to serve his purposes. But he pours scorn on the Son of Joseph from Nazareth as Jesus was pointed out by his fellow disciples. They were part perhaps of a group of disciples of John the Baptist. They were from Bethsaida outside Galilee itself. No doubt they had their loyalties and thought themselves superior. How could something special come from such an insignificant village as Nazareth? How could Jesus be someone special with such a pedigree and dubious background from such a place? Galileans in general were a despised group. An Israelite like Nathanael, an upright man with no guile, must have thought Nazareth a stumbling block in any response. John’s ministry seemed so much purer and closer to the truth than what Jesus had to offer. Nathaniel wanted to keep his moral and religious integrity intact. Jesus from Nazareth posed a threat to all that.
Yet Jesus, as John reveals, is God’s word made manifest in flesh, offering a gospel for all, irrespective of time and place, transcending barriers of race and religion, breaking the separation of heaven and earth. He offers himself as the Way to the Father. And he bids Nathaniel and the others “Come and See”. He recognizes their true worth and challenges their preconceptions. The true disciple is the one who recognizes him as the God who cannot be seen except through the Son.
Nathanael is under the fig tree meditating, the place of peace and prosperity where the meaning of the Law is revealed to those who reflect. And in Jesus Nathanael sees the One who leads them beyond the narrow limits of Jewish messianic beliefs to a greater and more profound reality of the Son of God. Jesus looks into their souls and recognizes the true worth of every person, their contributions and gifts in the service of God.
Now in the context of this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, you would no doubt want to apply these lessons to our present situation. We’d have to recognize the terrible ways in which Christians have hurled scorn and abuse and killed each other in the name of a purified religion which bears our particular interpretations, worships in our peculiar ways. John Wesley in the eighteenth century offered an olive branch to Roman Catholics in an age when political and social attitudes expected limited toleration to replace the outright persecution which still prevailed elsewhere. His sermon on the Catholic Spirit encouraged Christians to join hands with fellow Christians so that the Love of God they shared could overcome whatever the differences of doctrine and practice which divide. Charles Wesley’s hymn Christ from whom all blessings flowwhich we will sing holds out a vision of a Church where such differences were challenged.
Love, like death, has all destroyed,
Rendered all distinctions void;
Names, and sects, and parties fall:
Thou O Christ art all in all.
Many Methodists worldwide have recently had a special service which is a peculiar part of our history and tradition - the annual covenant service - when we are reminded of the obligations laid upon those who are disciples.We are chosen by God. We are invited to respond to God’s great love for us in Christ by offering ourselves in God’s service; “let me be employed for you or laid aside for you, exalted for you or brought low for you; let me be full, let me be empty; let me have all things, let me have nothing”. Now there are things which I greatly cherish in the Methodist heritage. But that does not prevent me from valuing aspects of Anglican and Catholic liturgy or emphases of Celtic or Franciscan spirituality or the freer expression of more evangelical forms of worship. I may get frustrated by the constraints of institutional dialogues on doctrine and practice which lead us only slowly forward to more practical expressions of ecumenical co-operation but I can join with many fellow Christians who love God and their Neighbour in ways of practical concern which joins hand to hand in our common expression of being part of God’s mission and the ministry of Christ in the world today.
Christ says to us “Come and See”. Don’t despise the modern Nazarenes who worship in different ways and express their religious beliefs in ways we haven’t even begun to try to understand. Get alongside them, in their places of worship and their places of work. Maybe try and join an ecumenical house group. Maybe try to understand people with different religious beliefs. Engage in campaigns to express Christian action for the poor and powerless. Hidden ecumenism is alive and well. In Christian social action through our campaigns together to promote environmental issues, to protect and respect human dignity in opposing the evils of trafficking, to reaching out to the strangers in our midst. These things help us break through the barriers our Churches put up to defend themselves. But don’t despise let us our own tradition either. Offer it to others so that we can share in the unity that is in Christ Jesus.
Can we accept, as Nathaniel recognizes in Jesus, that God works in the ordinary and despised and unexpected? Can we open ourselves to the revelation of God in others who are not like us? Let us engage with others, setting aside any thought that we possess a monopoly of truth so that we may be transformed into the likeness of Christ who prays “that they may be one”. That catholicity which Daniel Niles, the Sri Lankan Methodist ecumenist, so long ago recognized must be ours so that we become “the new community, the new world to be”, offering to the world the prospect of reconciliation and wholeness rather than division and death.