If You Have Seen Me

​​The significance of Jesus’s interplay with Nathanael, son of Tholomew, in John 1:43-58 is just not a lot Jesus’s uncanny omniscience as Jesus’s suggestion to Nathanael that Jacob’s dream at Bethel is now to be fulfilled. That imaginative and prescient was that God above involves earth beneath. The angels descending on the ladder from Heaven, then ascending again to Heaven once more, struck Jacob that God is just not so far-off in spite of everything—that Heaven and earth could be extra intently associated than he had supposed. Jacob’s dream is thus a prophecy of the Incarnation whereby the Everlasting Phrase of God turns into flesh.  (Keep in mind that this story of Nathanael bar Tholomew is within the very first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, which begins: “To start with was the Phrase, and the Phrase was with God, and the Phrase was God.”)

The title Jacob means “deceiver;” that’s, Jacob denotes an individual who’s filled with guile.  Jacob Israel deceived his father Isaac and by this guilefulness swindled his older brother Esau out of his birthright. We can’t know now what brought about Jesus to affiliate Nathanael with Jacob. It’s totally potential that Nathanael was Philip’s youthful brother, since Philip had sufficient authority over Nathanael to “name” him out from beneath the fig tree as a way to meet the Incarnate Phrase; within the Holy Scriptures, the fig tree is commonly an emblem of non secular in search of. Custom has Philip and Nathanael bar Tholomew doing apostolic work in the identical broad area extending from Greece to the Caucasus east of the Black Sea. (St. Bartholomew is the patron saint of Armenia.) Or maybe Nathanael was to Philip like a brother.

Jesus discerns that in Nathanael bar Tholomew is a younger man in whom there isn’t any guile. In actual fact, there isn’t any want for one brother to deceive one other, since each younger males will quickly see one thing far larger than angels descending and ascending on a ladder from Heaven. They may see God up shut—Jesus says to Philip, “When you have seen Me, you could have seen the Father”—and collectively expertise “the Savior of our fallen race, the Brightness of the Father’s face, O Son who shared the Father’s may earlier than the world knew day or evening” (Hymnal 1982, No. 86).

The Rev. W.L. (Chip) Prehn, PhD, is president of The Dwelling Church Basis and is a principal of Dudley & Prehn Instructional Consultants. He was a parish priest for 12 years earlier than turning to high school administration and consulting. Prehn writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and historical past.