Blue Sky God

Last week we talked about the Blue Sky God, the God who always does what we approve of, establishes the morality that aligns with our own, whose words captivate everyone and everything. The advent of such a god, his/her/its coming out party, should be a grand spectacle that would attract the largest audience possible. This is how we imagine the world should be changed.

The angelic performance to the shepherds was a bit of a waste given the lack of credibility of the audience, but maybe long the lines of what we’re expected.

The one character that seemed to have any real clue about how a Messiah should be properly rolled out was ironically the devil.

• Turn stones to bread: solidify your financial base,
• Bow before the devil: cut deals with the movers and shakers
• Leap from the pinnacle of the temple: let the masses at Jerusalem see your angel army and what they can do. Only Jesus would have an Air force! The Romans would surrender in a day!

After his baptism, after hearing Satan’s proposal for his marketing campaign, Jesus is ready to get going.

Making the Right Friends

If Jesus isn’t going to listen to the good advice given by the devil, he could perhaps take a play from Herod the Great’s successful career. Get yourself into the right circles. Go to the right schools. Make friends with the likes of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Cleopatra and Octavius who would become the great Caesar Augustus.

Instead, Jesus starts attracting to himself Galileans, people from where he grew up. They don’t seem terribly educated, bright, or have much in terms of qualifications about them. What’s really strange is that they seem, the first ones especially, to simply be some of the people connected to him by family and village.

Going Viral

The basic methods to try to go viral are not new or secret. Satan clearly knew how to do a marketing plan, so did Herod. Why did Jesus refuse to follow both leads? Should the ends justify the means?

Perhaps there was something in the method that Jesus preferred. Perhaps there was something in Satan’s and Herod’s methods that were a poison pill to what exactly Jesus wished to accomplish.

The Spiritual Consumer

It is also no secret that the Church in the West is in a bit of a fix. There is a constant stream of complaints on the Internet about the church and multiple voices and focus groups repeatedly yield the same complaints about church and why they chose not to attend.

• The church embraces outdated thinking
• The church embraces a morality that people find revolting and regressive
• The church asks people to believe things that are unscientific
• Many others note that the church is filled with difficult people who say and do things that make them want to get away.
• And I think the largest reason for many is that in the affluent, entertainment saturated West there simply are more appealing options including movies, sports, travel and good old-fashioned bedrest.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy or obvious payoff for church. Maybe if the church offered something practical people would come like

• Food and drink
• Entertainment, sex, and romance
• political and business connections
• A platform for activism

Churches and temples throughout time have offered these kinds of things and more. Part of the difficulty that churches today face is that there are other more carefully tuned and targeted entities that provide these services in a more efficient manner. Churches appear to be outmoded generalists in an age when popular specialists can be found.

All of this implicitly casts “people” in general as consumers and the church as a provider for goods and services. The churches that provide goods and services better than others will “win”.

An Enthusiast and a Skeptic

John 1:43 and following tells the story of Jesus finding Philip, who lives near Andrew and Peter and John (who was probably already recruited). Philip is filled with enthusiasm and goes and finds Nathaniel. Nathaniel is a skeptic. Jesus will overcome his skepticism.

The Problem with the Standard Rollout Methods

Let’s think a minute about Jesus’ challenge and the people he starts with.

With every person Jesus recruits he will have to undo a host of assumptions and commitments that they come to the relationship with. If Jesus had recruited the elites they would already have imagined their recruitment to be self-congratulatory and would have tried to shape Jesus into the form of their own agendas. While this same dynamic is present with the “nobodies” that Jesus actually recruits the situation would have been far worse with the elites. Elites would have come to the relationship not only affirmed of themselves but with a host of other powerful people in the cultures looking to leverage their advantages for the sake of their own agendas.

One of the main things Jesus needed to do in his work was to re-define what “Messiah” would mean.

It seems that Andrew, his brother Peter, John and Philip all begin their relationship with Jesus from their relationship with John the Baptist. That means that their assumptions about Jesus are already formed. They come to Jesus with John’s agenda, and as we saw last week, John’s agenda may be an OK place to start but they can’t stay there.

Fleshing Out the Fig Tree

Nathaniel came to Jesus as a skeptic but Jesus engages him quickly with him “seeing” him under the fig tree. What the fig tree reference means has drawn a lot of speculation over the history of interpretation of this passage

• The fig tree is connected with the fig leaves of the garden, Jesus saw Nathaniel’s sin and his attempt to cover it up
• The fig tree is emblematic of Israel’s adultery towards other gods. Nathaniel is a “true Israelite” that must be converted.
• The fig tree is the place where the Rabbis trained their students. Nathaniel is a student of Torah that Jesus will bring into his way.

And the list goes on. Whatever this has to say about Nathaniel’s prior state the implication is that life with Jesus will shape and mold him.

“Seeing” in John

The Gospel of John is an intricately told story with a lot themes and literary devices weaving the story together. “Seeing” is one of the themes. Just as Jesus saw Nathaniel under the fig tree and on the basis of this called Jesus the Son of God and King of Israel, so Nathaniel and others, (“you” is in plural) will see heaven open and the angels ascending and descending on the “Son of Man”.

Now this is probably one of the most difficult verses to figure out in a book full of them. Again the challenge isn’t so much a lack of connection but too many of them.

The “Son of Man” comes from Daniel 7 where the Ancient of Days after defeating the imperial beasts hands over a kingdom to a “Son of Man” that will never end. This is Jesus’ favorite terms of self-designation.

The angels ascending and descending connect us with the story of Jacob or Israel (remember Nathaniel is a “true son of Israel”) who when fleeing from his brother is ambushed by God at night with a stairway with angels ascending and descending. Jesus as “Son of Man” will be this ladder or stairway now and Nathaniel and the other disciples will see this and believe. This new “Bethel” or “house of God” will be the center of new life, communion with God, worship and re-creation.

Son of Man Lifted Up

This all must have sounded pretty good to Nathaniel. He is being offered a space on the “ground floor” of this new miracle working Messiah who will reconcile heaven and earth.

John’s use of “Son of Man” is particular, however, compared to the other gospels.

When Jesus will talk to Nicodemus at night (more dark and light imagery) Jesus will say this.

John 3:13–15 (NIV)

¹³ No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven—the Son of Man. ¹⁴ Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, ¹⁵ that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him.”

When Jesus is sparing with crowds that want to cast Jesus as a miracle worker who will satisfy their consumerist demands he will say this which like our passage here begins with one of John’s “amen, amen” emphatic statements:

John 6:53 (NIV)

⁵³ Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

When Jesus is disputing with the religious leaders he will say this.

John 8:28–29 (NIV)

²⁸ So Jesus said, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. ²⁹ The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.”

In John’s version of the Triumphal Entry Jesus says this about himself.

John 12:23–26 (NIV)

²³ Jesus replied, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. ²⁴ Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. ²⁵ Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. ²⁶ Whoever serves me must follow me; and where I am, my servant also will be. My Father will honor the one who serves me.

To which the crowd responds

John 12:34 (NIV)

³⁴ The crowd spoke up, “We have heard from the Law that the Messiah will remain forever, so how can you say, ‘The Son of Man must be lifted up’? Who is this ‘Son of Man’?”

And the last one in John

John 13:31 (NIV)

³¹ When he was gone, Jesus said, “Now the Son of Man is glorified and God is glorified in him.

What we see is that in John the Son of Man title is specifically linked to Jesus’ death.

Who Would Follow A Path That Leads to Death?

So now we see Jesus’ dilemma.

• Jesus is the king of Israel, the son of God, the true Messiah, the Son of Man. He’s all these things and so he rightly retains these titles.
• When the people of his day, including the disciples, identify him with these titles their biases and imaginations lead them in the wrong direction. Their imaginations are filled with the nationalistic and consumeristic images they desire. They don’t know or want what Jesus wants, they want to shape Jesus in the form of their desires.
• Jesus must begin with them where they are at, and lead them to a place they probably wouldn’t wish to go, initially.
• The irony is that it will be one of his disciples who will in fact finally set up the drama of the cross.

Should the Church Try to Grow by Appealing to Crass Consumerism? 

Churches are anxious about their institutional survival. In the American scene they see an increasing disconnect between their values and assumptions and those of the culture at large. This tends to result in two approaches:

• Try to narrow the gap between the assumptions of the surrounding culture and the church. Have the church mimic what is going on around them.
• Take a reactive stance against the culture. This might seem counter-intuitive but it actually is a successful growth strategy as fundamentalists of various stripes experience and demonstrate.

Jesus teaches us to

• Be more honest than any bait and switch strategy
• have more integrity than simply trying to appeal to people’s moral and consumer demands
• be less reactive by trying to begin with people where they are at

Jesus Invites Us Where No Consumer Wishes to Go

The disciples probably imagined that following Jesus might involve a bit of struggle, that it would yield the kinds of benefits they and their neighbors easily imagines exclusivistic access to fame, reputation, power and wealth. Jesus was both more inclusive and more sacrificial. He would deliver on exactly what he described to Nathaniel and others but it would come at enormous cost. While the cost was high, however, Jesus saw it, as his followers eventually would to, as more than worth it for the reward.

Come and See

In the end Philip’s invitation to Nathaniel is the basis for any evangelism we do. We might initially imagine that what we have to invite people to is less dramatic or attractive than Philip had, Jesus in the flesh. That impulse is both right and wrong at the same time.

Yes, following Jesus would yield a flesh and blood disciple a front row seat at stilling the storm, feeding the 5000, raising Lazarus and countless healings and exorcisms. Plenty of drama.

It would also expose that person to hunger, deprivation, mob violence and political threats.

What you have to invite them into in your church context is probably more tame on all fronts.

What you might ask, however, is why you’re already in. What do you find from Jesus that keeps you in the church. What about this body of Christ that you are a part of makes it worth the degree of sacrifice you have already committed to it? What part of Jesus have you begun to experience and what has lead you to want to enter more deeply into his life?