January 18, 2015
With Friends Like These
John 1:43-51
According to Mark’s gospel, as we’ll read next Sunday, Jesus’ ministry begins when (it seems)
some stranger turns up at the Sea of Galilee one day, out of the blue, calls some fishermen to
follow him and they do. They drop everything and follow him. And we think, Huh?
However, as we read today, according to John’s gospel, there’s more to it than that. There’s
John the Baptist and his testimony about Jesus which ripples outward like a stone dropped in a
pond. Two of John’s disciples tell some friends. Excitement spreads from friend to friend and
soon there’s a whole group of disciples gathering…
It makes more sense that way. It helps us see that Jesus’ disciples were real people, living real
lives in the real world. It also invites us to think about the place our friends occupy in our lives
and the way our faith may or may not be a factor in our friendship.
We all know friends. They live near us, or work with us. We share political views, or country
club, or love of music or restaurants …There are hundreds of possible points of contact.
Sometimes contacts develop and lead further. In Albany, Georgia, in the 1930s, Wiley Pittman
owned a general store and café, and after the lunchtime crowd had gone, he’d sit down at the
piano and play boogie-woogie. A young blind boy was attracted by the music and Pittman
befriended him and helped him learn to play. The musical career of Ray Charles was born—out
of that friendship.
Interviewed in 2004, Charles said, “Wiley Pittman, he was a cat. If it hadn’t been for him, I
don’t think I’d be a musician today.”1
Charles began playing in nightclubs, and would get home around dawn, only to be woken up at 9
a.m. by a kid in the neighborhood, eager to learn about music. “I’d get up out of bed—sleep
didn’t matter anymore because it was him,” Charles admitted. “You could tell he wanted to
learn, he wanted to know. And because I was able to show him some things, that made me
happy; that’s what stirred my soul.” That kid was Quincy Jones, and his career grew from the
friendship with Ray Charles. A friendship, from commitment to music, leading to great things.
Perhaps the most popular understanding of friendship is conveyed by the theme tune of the TV
series Friends with its refrain, “I’ll be there for you.”
That was the point Bing Crosby made about Bob Hope. He once described their friendship,
There is nothing in the world I wouldn't do for Hope, and there is nothing he wouldn't do
for me....
Then he spoiled the warm fuzzy by adding,
We spend our lives doing nothing for each other.
His joke only works because we know that commitment expresses friendship.
1
Jay Walljasper, “Saving the World One By One” in Ode, January/February 2006, 33.
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And that’s what our gospel reading today is about. In some ways it’s a simple story: friends
introducing friends to Jesus. And yet in another way it’s odd. Jesus tells Nathanael he saw him
under a fig tree and that’s enough to sent the guy into Christological raptures: “Rabbi, you are
the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” As we read that, we find ourselves thinking, Huh?
Where did that come from?!!
Well; it helps to remember John’s Gospel is not as straightforward as the other gospels. John
writes decades after the events of Jesus’ ministry. He has meditated on those events long and
deep and distilled their fuller, richer meaning. When John writes his gospel, he can’t keep
himself from preaching that deeper meaning to his readers.
Here he wants to contrast Jesus with the faith of Israel. He takes the old story of Jacob, the man
whom God called Israel, whose guile was proverbial, yet who was given the vision at Bethel of
the angels of heaven ascending and descending, and John writes it into the call of Nathaniel to
proclaim that the point of access to heaven—angels ascending and descending—is now Jesus.
And this is one of a number of places where John tells a story of Jesus speaking to someone, and
the verbs and pronouns are all singular, as you would expect—one person speaking to another.
Then suddenly, without warning, John slips into the plural—as though Jesus is no longer
speaking to one person long ago: he’s now speaking in the here and now to all his readers.
John does that with the one-on-one conversation between Jesus and Nathanael. He suddenly
changes from singular into the plural. If Jesus had come from Texas (!) verse 51 (which is where
the plural suddenly appears) would read, “And he (Jesus) said to him (Nathanael), “Very truly I
tell y’all, y’all will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the
Son of Man.” John takes Jesus’ words to Nathanael and preaches them to his readers—and he
does this because he’s so caught up in the importance of who Jesus is and what discipleship
offers.
It doesn’t matter whether Nathanael saw that full meaning of Jesus at first or not—probably
not—but he’s going to! He’s going to learn that his hesitation about anything good coming from
Nazareth will dissolve before the discovery that Jesus doesn’t just come from Nazareth—he also
comes from heaven and he brings the love and mercy and joy of God to human hearts and lives.
And—to use John’s trick—if we will let him, he will take our poor and struggling lives, transform
them by his grace and, despite our shortcomings, use us in his service.
That’s always a truth I find myself affirming around Martin Luther King Day. I haven’t seen the
movie Selma yet, but I’m saddened that all the controversy swirling around it has added to the
racial controversy simmering in the nation right now.
Many Christians can’t get over the sins and weaknesses that King displayed, or approve some of
his political stands. That he was fallible, we all know. Fine; but we need to face a basic truth of
the gospel: God is often forced to work with flawed creatures and to use less than perfect
disciples. Flaws and sins are us!
But I also remember how King drew strength from his community and their encouragement to
connect with his Lord. He tells of one occasion when he was very low and his friend Mother
Pollard took him by the shoulders and said,
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“I don’ told you we is with you all the way.” Then her face became radiant and she said in
words of quiet certainty, “But even if we ain’t with you, God’s gonna take care of you.” As
she spoke these consoling words, everything in me quivered and quickened with the
pulsating tremor of raw energy.2
But our faith can also work in smaller, sometimes less visible ways.
I once had a young man come to me because his work situation was becoming intolerable. His
supervisor obviously disliked him and was making work as awkward as possible. He didn’t want
to leave. He didn’t think a complaint to HR would improve things. What should he do? “Pray,”
I told him. “Pray for her, regularly, and not just your relationship. Pray for her in her life.”
Weeks later, he came back. “Things have changed, work is getting better,” he said, “but where
will this lead?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, “and you don’t need to know. You’ve let Jesus into the situation, and
he’s helped you. Now leave him to do his work. You can leave the outcome to him.”
One of the most helpful statements that nourishes my faith comes from Jerome, the great 4th
century church leader:
Our part is to do what we can. His part is to do what we cannot.
What a friend we have in Jesus!
Dr. Norman Pritchard
2
Martin Luther King, Strength to Love. London: Fontana Religious, 1969, 125-6
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