John and Mark (and Nathanael)
John and Mark (and Nathanael)
Second Sunday after Epiphany, Year B; John 1: 43-51
Moving between Mark and John is a feature of this lectionary year. Part of this is Mark’s brevity, which strains to provide a year’s Gospel readings, but the reason for this particular jump is not just Markan gap-filling.
In the old one-year cycles (the old Roman lectionary and the 1662 BCP) there was a tradition of reading the Wedding at Cana passage—found in John only— on this Sunday every year, and it’s not hard to see in older hymns and sermons that Cana (where Jesus performed “the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory” John 2:11) has been long regarded as a third Epiphany story, along with Magi and Baptism. The architects of the three-year lectionaries have nodded to this by having a section from John 1-2 read on this Sunday each year of the cycle, culminating in the familiar one: last year (A) it was John the Baptist’s testimony to Jesus, this year (B) the encounter with Philip and Nathanael, and Cana is read now only in the last of the three years.
Reading John is self-evidently worthwhile, but these two Gospels may even seem the least alike of the four., and the jumps may at times seem to give the reader and preacher interpretive whiplash. Mark is sparse, almost ragged in form, free of unnecessary detail in its insistent picture of a mysterious powerful figure who speaks little and does more, insisting on secrecy about his identity and his mission on his way to Jerusalem. The tone of John, this “spiritual” Gospel (as Clement of Alexandria puts it), is very different; Jesus is voluble, completely open about his person and work, manifestly glorious from the start.
Yet there are some resonances, when we read a second or third time. Scholarly colleague Ivan Head pointed out to me in correspondence:
… John’s Jesus, like Mark’s, is all along known by the Evangelist to be the Son who alone exegetes the Father, and who will with that Divine authority, rise from a death over which he ruled. Yet the disciples [in John] remain in some ways like the struggling disciples in Mark in that they do not queue at the Easter tomb in anticipation.
I will come back to this insight below.
The episode with Nathanael will remain mysterious—part of its value is to wrestle with what is left unsaid—but there are some things we can say. Nathanael is told about Jesus and scoffs about Nazareth, since Galilee was often regarded as a borderland, or as culturally hybrid, barely Israel at all. Yet of course Jesus really is a—the—true Israelite (note by the way that John knows about the tradition that he comes from Bethlehem; see 7:42).
Jesus says ‘Here is truly an Israelite, in whom there is no deceit!’ (1:47; my trans.). This is humor I think, but with a serious purpose. The NRSV does not quite convey that Jesus says Nathanael is “truly an Israelite”, not just someone whose lack of guile is being emphasized. This is where we start to sense an echo of Jacob, the archetypal Israelite but also something of a trickster (Gen 27:35)—Nathanael is both like and unlike the patriarch. So Nathanael’s scorn for Nazareth is met almost with a wink by Jesus. Yet this identification of Nathanael as a true Israelite will take on more significance in what follows.
Much ink has been spilled on the reference to a “fig tree,” and the various suggestions can speak for themselves or allow more speculation. Perhaps simpler but easily overlooked is its place in the interaction between Jesus and Nathanael, regardless of what had happened before. It is the fact of Jesus’ foreknowledge that makes most difference here. The reader doesn’t know what happened under the fig tree, but does know that Jesus knew, and this serves to underline the point that will come next. Nathanael’s response emphasizes again the Israel question, Jesus now acclaimed by Nathanael as its king—quite a step from his Galilean scepticism a few moments earlier.
The climax of the scene, it’s “epiphanic” moment, is the closing verse which has a curious, almost stand-alone quality. This is the first of many (twenty-five) times that in John’s Gospel (and only there) Jesus begins a statement with the repetitive “Amen, amen I say to you”—translated in the NRSV with the rather flat “very truly I tell you.” These sayings are signposted as having a particular weight.
When Jesus speaks, apparently to Nathanael, he nevertheless uses a plural “you,” perhaps playing with the reader (imagine him turning to camera) and suggesting this has to do with more hearers than Nathanael. The scene he evokes is a fairly clear echo of the famous dream of Jacob—the original “Israel”—who at Bethel sleeps and sees a vision of angels ascending and descending (Gen 28:12). This is the reason for all the “Israel” language hitherto, so that the reader can understand their own participation now in a vision like that of Jacob, in which Jesus plays the part of the mysterious ladder. The Hebrew of Gen 28 actually allows, grammatically at least, the reading that the angels were descending on “him” (Jacob) rather than “it” (the ladder). While this doesn’t make much sense in Genesis, it hints at something for John.
To what does Jesus refer here? What will people see, when, and how? At one level this is like the Synoptic promise—or warning—of the coming Son of Man, who will indeed open the heavens and connect them to the earth (see, e.g.., Mark 13:26). Yet John’s vision of Jesus as the ladder hints at something slightly different.
So in both Mark and John, for all their differences, the Cross is the point at which the identity of Jesus becomes clear in a new way, and at which his mission is fulfilled. In Mark, no one other than demons can identify Jesus between his baptismal epiphany and the Cross. In John, although Jesus speaks openly about his identity throughout, he is met with incomprehension and still has something “epiphanic” to accomplish at the Cross. Jesus foresees himself “lifted up from the earth [to] draw all people to myself” (John 12:32); this is the vision he promises to Nathanael, where heaven and earth are joined, and where he will proclaim “it is accomplished” (19:30).
Nathanael does not yet understand this; although the words are correct, he is a bit like Peter in the Synoptic Gospels, who can say that Jesus is the Christ but does not know what he says. Nevertheless the true Israelite, without guile, bears true witness to the king of Israel here. And in time, like Jacob, he will see the “house of God and gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17), but understand these are not a place, but a person.