NOTES for Joh 1:46

Let us imagine a scene: a person today has undergone conversion, come to believe in Christ, and joyfully hurries to a friend to announce that he has found what can solve all their problems. The friend naturally expresses distrust. The convert then says to him... and here the scene freezes, like a still frame. What can he say? Like Philip, “Come and see”? Where should he go, and what should he look at? Where and how can today’s Nathanael encounter Christ? Can we, the Church, the Body of Christ, reveal Christ to him in such a way that he exclaims, “You are the Son of God!”? For he is called not only to see Christ in us, but even more: to see heaven opened.

This Gospel passage is endlessly precious as an example of very personal relations with God. What happened there under the fig tree? We do not know, and this is very important, because this mystery is known only to Nathanael and God; here there is the sharpest personalism. And for Nathanael it was something very important. There is no need to guess what it was, but we should notice that as soon as he talked with Jesus about it, he believed. This means that this fig tree becomes a symbol of conversion.

Each of us has his own fig tree, and we treasure it and draw spiritual strength from it. But it is not the only thing that matters; what became fundamentally important for Nathanael's conversion was that he and the Lord spoke about it. Moreover, the Lord was the first to speak. This too is very important. Our prayer is always a response to the Lord's call. Until this is so, it is not prayer, but rather self-persuasion.

Few believers can say that their faith is their choice. If that is so, then it is not faith but a system of convictions. We are always found by the Lord, as the apostles were found by Him, and, obeying an unknown power, we leave everything and follow Him.

Beginning from the day of Pascha, with rare exceptions, we read the Gospel of John almost straight through, and one after another come astonishing and deep passages, each of which makes one want to speak in superlatives. Today too we read the story of the calling of the first apostles, a story that is, of course, colored by paschal joy. The most significant words in it therefore appear to be those of the apostle Andrew the First-Called: "We have found the Messiah." The apostles then could not even imagine what they would have to live through and what they would witness. But thanks to them and together with them, we too, having lived through the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, can now say: "We have found the Messiah." And most importantly, He has found us.

The news of the Messiah who has appeared in the world spreads in an interesting way. On the one hand, people follow Him in order to look at Him. "Where do you live?" "Come and see." And it cannot be otherwise, for it is not enough to hear about the Kingdom; one must absolutely see it oneself, with one's own eyes. One must spend time near the Messiah and trust Him, as one trusts a person into whose house one enters. But in order to take the first step, one must hear. Hear the joyful news that the Messiah promised by God has truly come. And freely make one's own decision about how to respond to this news.

After all, in the final analysis, a person is still free. In the fallen world each of us is bound by a thousand bonds conditioned by the laws of this untransformed world, while in the Kingdom we entrust ourselves completely to God. But God leaves to us the question of choosing in which world to live and which laws to follow.

Of course, when the choice has been made, God will intervene and help, if the Kingdom has been chosen. It cannot be otherwise: whatever we choose, we will not enter the Kingdom without God's help, without the Savior's direct intervention, however much we may desire it. But the very possibility of such intervention is conditioned above all by our own choice. God will not break into our life by force.

Of course, sometimes He can nudge, draw attention, remind, as Jesus reminds Nathanael of something. But Nathanael too, apparently, was seeking and waiting for the Messiah quite sincerely, and his words about Galilee, from which nothing good was to be expected, were a tribute to a tradition whose correctness this man sincerely believed. But he was honest before himself and before God, and such honesty opens the heart to God. Then one can nudge a person in the right direction, for he is not resisting God's guidance; he is simply mistaken. And a mistake, even the most serious one, is not fatal; only the stubborn refusal to see and correct one's mistakes is fatal. Everything else can be set right. And if the way into the Kingdom is still narrow, then we have only ourselves to address with complaints about it.

When reading today's passage, a question arises: why does John the Baptist still give no definite answer to the question asked him about his ministry (vv. 19-23)? Indeed, he had every right to define his mission as prophetic, and such an answer would have fully satisfied the commission sent by the Synagogue to check him (vv. 24-25). But John refuses on principle to speak of his ministry as something having significance of its own. He sees his mission only as a preliminary stage necessary for preparing the people for the coming of the Messiah-Christ, and outside the context of this task John's ministry evidently loses all meaning, including for the prophet himself (vv. 25-27).

And it is precisely this view of his own mission that enables John to see and recognize the Messiah (vv. 29-34). For in order to recognize Christ, it is not enough simply to see Him physically. Outwardly Jesus differed little from an ordinary person. Of course, what He said was not something one could hear every day or from everyone, but the main thing was still not in the words. The main thing was in the Kingdom that He carried with Him wherever He went. Therefore, in order to recognize in Jesus the Messiah-Christ promised by God, one had to touch and share in the Kingdom.

But one can share in the Kingdom only on one very important condition: the one seeking it must forget his own importance, forget that he, as well as his deeds and ministries, can mean anything in themselves apart from the Kingdom into which he wants to enter. Perhaps this is why John does not want to testify about himself as a prophet: all the great prophets of Israel had their own mission, and each of these missions was, in a certain sense, self-sufficient. Each prophet was a figure in his own right, and those around him always noticed this, even when, as was most often the case, the prophets themselves wanted nothing of the kind. But in those times, the prominence of the prophet helped accomplish the main task entrusted by God to one or another of His servants. Now, however, the task evidently consisted precisely in pointing to the Messiah and remaining as unnoticed as possible oneself. John the Baptist succeeds in this: he disappears in the radiance of the coming Messiah, and in the radiance of the Kingdom that the Messiah carries with Him.