A Reflection for Wednesday of the Twenty-First Week in Ordinary Time
“Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Here is a true Israelite. There is no duplicity in him.” Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?” Jesus answered and said to him, “Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.” Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.” (Jn 1: 47-49)
When Jesus in this passage calls Nathanael “a true Israelite,” a man with “no duplicity”, he is contrasting him with Jacob, he who was renamed Israel and who was in fact duplicitous. In the Book of Genesis, Jacob tricked his father Isaac into giving him the birthright over his older brother Esau.
But here, Nathanael, a man without guile, with no desire to trick anyone is, according to Jesus, a truer Israelite than Israel himself. Nathanael is not hiding behind wily intent, shading his true character. He is simply open to the world, to other people, to God himself. While we can think of someone “without guile” as being all but naive, easily duped, it doesn’t need to be that way. To be without guile is also to be someone who is skilled at, in the best sense of the phrase, letting things happen to him.
The fact is that Nathanael, like a skilled actor, simply let himself be moved by what he saw and heard, and responded in the moment: You Are The Christ.
A good actor should be, in a way, without guile: open, free, without trying to manipulate a scene to fit the way he has predetermined it should go.He is instead simply listening and responding to the other characters. He is completely caught up in the moment.Robert Downey Jr. is an actor you can’t take your eyes off, because you never know what he is going to do next. Limber and free physically and emotionally, his performances take him all over the place. He just follows his instincts and goes where things are going.
I think it is this same kind of limber instinct that moved Nathanael to blurt out that Jesus is the “Son of God, the King of Israel.” It was not so much that Jesus told Nathael he saw him under the fig tree that turned Nathanael into a believer. Christ could have said, “I witnessed you playing pinochle in the diaphanous alleyways” and Nathanael might have declared Jesus to be the messiah. The fact is that Nathanael, like a skilled actor, simply let himself be moved by what he saw and heard, and responded in the moment: You Are The Christ.
When we stop working our angles, when we quit forcing things to go our way and instead let God work his ways in us, then we have a chance to be opened up. Opened up and able to see Christ wherever he shows up.
