From lowly insights to high visions

 A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (John 1: 47-51) sees Jesus encountering the apostle Nathanael for the first time. The briefest of exchanges occurs, following which Nathanael professes his belief in Jesus’s divine sonship. It is an extraordinary moment of faith, and Jesus promises that Nathanael will see greater things, the very concourse of angelic traffic between this world and the next in the service of the Messiah.

The nub of this passage, however, lies in the first exchange which passes between them. Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit! says the Lord. How do you know me, Lord? replies the future apostle.  When you were under the fig tree, I saw you, Jesus responds. It is these words which trigger in Nathanael a profession of fervent faith.

What is it that the Lord perceived in Nathanael? What was it in those words an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit which told Nathanael that the Lord knew him through and through. Perhaps this little exchange dramatizes for us the tensions with which we live daily. For who among us can say that there is no deceit in their soul?

The best spiritual authors commend to us knowledge of God and knowledge of the self. But, as we observed on this blog last week, we are often strangers to ourselves. Our capacity for self-reflection is often undermined by the hall of mirrors within us which distends our self-knowledge, sometimes flatteringly and sometimes to our detriment. As one might say these days, objects in these mental mirrors may appear better or worse than they really are. On the one hand, we suffer the wounds of original sin, and pride stalks our good works to such an extent that the Lord tells us not to let our right hand know what our left hand is doing; pride takes fire like dry leaves. On the other, we hardly understand our own inner psychological wounds, the fruit of our unpurified experiences, which leave us clinging to bitter shards of misunderstanding and disappointment, the things that make us embrace deceit not usually out of perversity but for the comfort they appear to bring. It is hard sometimes to know which lies the world is telling us, and our neighbour is often full of subterfuge, perhaps even without knowing it. But, knowing ourselves and seeing our own capacity for deceit – which we choose sometimes as a tactic and sometimes as a false refuge - that is a life-long challenge. The Psalmist himself asks God to cleanse him from his hidden sins.

And, yet here is Nathanael, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. Here is a man who, to quote one hymn, has already been reclothed in his rightful mind. We might almost say that poor self-knowledge – self-knowledge of the distorted kind that we have just considered a few moments ago - is in fact a form of being out of one’s rightful mind, for the mind is made to know truth - the truth about God and the truth about the world and ourselves. In contrast, we have the Lord’s word for it that Nathanael’s mind was not clouded with error; not for him the deluded ambitions of James and John, nor the empty braggadocio of Peter. He was, as the Lord observed, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.

What is even more striking about Nathanael’s self-knowledge is that it matches the Lord’s knowledge of him. How could it be otherwise? To see the truth of things, to see the truth about ourselves, is to see things and ourselves as they are seen by the author of truth. This Nathanael intuits simply by dint of the Lord’s having claimed to have seen him under the fig tree. We cannot know what was on Nathanael’s mind at that very moment, but what we see in the moments that follow is a grand convergence of hearts: a human heart that is ready for divine love because it dwells in the truth about itself and God, in freedom from all deceit, and a divine heart that pours itself out passionately to share the goodness of the eternal truth. It is perhaps the happiest of all the encounters that Jesus has with any of his future apostles, and Nathanael might have said, anticipating St Paul: Now I know even as also I am known.

And what does the Lord promise Nathanael? He promises a glimpse into the true relations between heaven and earth. Heart spoke to heart, faith affirmed belief, and the Lord of gifts promised Nathanael than he would be able to see the celestial mysteries surrounding his incarnate presence on earth.  We can trace now a path in Nathanael’s journey that goes from honesty and self-knowledge to divine encounter, and then from a profession of faith to mystical illumination. Nathanael’s path is firm, and the way before him was paved with clarity of vision leading to the truth of God and the truth about himself.

And the promise was extraordinary that he would see the ministry of angels to the Christ, the coming and going of divine messengers about the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, now incarnate in flesh and walking the earth. We never think about this beautiful angelic gift promised to Nathanael, although it is one that is echoed in the lives of many saints who lived and interacted with the angels around them. We do not know when it began, nor how he lived its reality later on. And yet we know it must have given birth in him to an awareness of, and reverence for, the messengers of the Most High, those spirits who see constantly the face of the Father in heaven.

Such blessings were not the choicest gift of Nathanael’s life: that was the intimate friendship of Christ. But those high privileges began where that same friendship began also: under a fig tree where Nathanael was sitting, humbly letting go the vestiges of self-deceit, like a fall of autumn leaves.