"You Are the King of Israel"

This morning we reflect on a passage that draws a great boundary across the Gospels, indeed, across the whole thought-world of Jesus' time. We have labeled it simply, "the Calling of the Disciples," but we have not fully comprehended what they are being called to. Let's take a closer look.

That the scene is preoccupied with regionalism is obvious:

He wanted to go to Galilee, in the far north, beyond Samaria. He found Philip from Bethsaida. John and James, the sons of Zebedee, are also from vicinity of Bethsaida. The men joke about Nazareth, which is a regional thing — local humor.

How odd! Shouldn't Jerusalem be the center of attention? And Judah, shouldn't Judah be given pride of place? After all, the Zion Temple was the center of their universe, was it not?

Let us set the scene in the Gospel of St. John up until 1:42. We begin with the Creation of the world. Then appears an otherworldly figure "crying" in the wilderness, St. John the Forerunner, the man of Eden, that place of original purity. John declares that Jesus is the Lamb of God (that is, the "Pure One") and "the Son of God" (Jn 1:34):

Do you see the connection? John is pristine, wearing only natural clothes, subsisting on manna (enkrís, later egkrís), not grasshoppers (akrís). He lived in close to God away from the cities (that is what "wilderness" signifies). He is untainted, and the purpose of his ministry is to wash away the pollutions of the world.

Next, two of John's disciples, men who were obviously drawn to the Baptist's personal purity and holiness, went after Jesus:

Andrew and Simon are likewise from the town of Bethsaida. It will turn out that nearly all of the Twelve will be called from the historical Northern Kingdom. The sole exception is Judas (who name means "Judah"), who, of course, turned out to be a deceiver.

The two themes converge as "Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward Him." And He said,

Nathanael is stunned that Jesus knows him and says, "How do You know me?" (Jn 1:48)

Jesus replies,

And Nathanael cries out

Nathanael and Jesus appear to be speaking in a kind of code. And they are. They are quoting from Prophet Micah's great oracle:

Notice the distinction between "they" (all people) and "we." "All people walk each in the name of the his god" (lowercase "g"). "But we walk in the name of the Lord our God" (in the LXX Kuriou Theou). No wonder Nathanael calls Him "the Son of God, the King of Israel!"

The opening chapter of St. John's Gospel is all about "they" and "we," between the false and the true, between deception and the authentic.

Now, how many times do you suppose the word Israelite occurs in the Four Gospels, pointing to the true faith, pointing to the original faith? Once. It occurs only once. And how many times does the word Israel occur in St. John's Gospel. It occurs only five times. It is rare, and it is used only to communicate elevated matter. To the Church Fathers, it meant the original, in that sense the pure. Writes the Epiphanius in the fourth century, Israel is "the ancestral name of the the true religion" (Panarion, VIII.2,2).

Jesus does not say that there is no deceit in Nathanael (though that may be true). He says that Nathanael is an "Israelite indeed," and in the Israelite there is no deceit. It is the original the untainted, not the counterfeit. For how can the original be anything but true and authentic.

The true and the authentic revealed here most certainly is the person of Jesus, the Son of God, the King of Israel. But they are also venerating the ground upon which they stand: the ancient Kingdom of Israel, the other name for the Northern Kingdom. You see that was the Kingdom of Israel in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah is the south.

Israel is most elemental: first appearing in Genesis and conferred upon Jacob:

And where does this struggle take place? Near Shechem, which will be the capital of the Kingdom of Israel. The Temple on Mount Moriah will be built nearby (later called Mount Gerizim) — a place which forbade sacrifice, where Jacob's grandfather Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac, Jacob's father. It is the place of anti-sacrifice.

As I say, all around Jesus and His newly called Disciples are vestiges of the true and authentic religion in the Kingdom of Israel. But to the south is a haunting image, which casts its long shadow: Judah, the cultic center of Judah-ism, the false religion, and its temple originally built by Persians to be their administrative headquarters. They continue to practice the cult of blood sacrifice originally required by the Persian Emperor, Cyrus the Great — the same blood sacrifice which was offered to their god Marduk. You see, "all people walk each in the name of his god. But we will walk in the Name of the Lord our God Kuriou Theou."

As we fill out the historical picture, we get a sense sense of what Micah's oracle signified to Jesus and His followers.

My brothers and sister, if don't understand this, you don't understand the Gospels.

☦

It would be the century or so before Jesus' birth, that Judah-ism would come to dominate the Levant catalyzed by Judean nationalism, led by the High Priest John Hyrcanus. What do practioners of Judah-ism call themselves: Jews? This term does not go back to Abraham or to the Patriarchs. It appears with the advent of Judah-ism to signify "those who devote themselves to the Judean Torah."

How many times do you suppose the phrase the Jews occurs in the Gospel of John? It occurs 66 times, and always with a sense of antipathy:

John clearly communicates that "the Jews are not us; they are other." The festival mentioned in Chapter 5 was probably Tabernacles. More important, the Jewish Passover is explicitly called "the Passover of the Jews." If it had been John's Passover or Jesus' Passover, it would have simply been called "the Passover." It is important to note that "the Passover of the Essenes," to take one example, was celebrated not be offering a sacrificial lamb, but by offering clean hands and a clear conscience to God. This is precisely the difference singled out by Jesus in the Parable of the Good Samaritan — the Priest and Levite do not help the bloodied stranger for fear of ritual uncleanness (they wouldn't be able to offer sacrifice), while the Samaritan (an ancient Israelite) offers a clear conscience to God giving succor to the stranger. To believe that Jesus offered Himself as the Jewish sacrificial lamb is far-fetched. The Ebionites, a first-century sect, remember Jesus as a figure who sought to abolish animal sacrifice (Panarion).

We imagine these sentiments of John and the other Disciples to be fairly uniform outside of Judah. The Babylonians had carried off only one-third of the Judean population to Babylon. The exile lasted two generations — an interval calculated to effect culture change. When the returnees arrived to Jerusalem, they spoke Babylonian (Aramaic), not Hebrew; they wore Babylonian attire; they practiced Babylonian customs. And they worshipped according to a new religion mandated by Cyrus, the Persian emperor who had conquered Babylon.

Ezra, the priest who would revise the Hebrews Scriptures (he says so), declared that the returnees had undergone a "Second Exodus" .... that you could not be counted among "the people of God" unless you had been exiled to Babylon. Ezra forbade marriage to aliens insisting that those who had done so must "put away" their wives (and presumbably their children). But we should not imagine that these wives were Canaanite, Phoenician, or Philistine. It is far more likely that they were Hebrew and that he was carrying out a kind of "ethnic cleansing."

After all, two-thirds of Judah had not been exiled nor were the Tribes outside of Judah .... which is say the vast majority of the Hebrew people. And the returning deportees would have faced a general rejection of their new religion.

Judeans must have felt particularly threatened by Samaritans. For Shechem of Samaria had been the capital city of the Kingdom of Israel. And they longed to erase any evidence of the old religion. In the closing years of the second century, John Hyrcanus led a military expedition which would destroy the Hebrew Temple on Mt. Gerizim. Its very existence pointed an accusing finger at the Jews and their counterfeit temple on Mount Zion.

If the true and the authentic were standing on a mountain, pointing back to Abraham and Mount Moriah, and you had built a kind of Disneyland in the valley, every time you looked up at the summit of that mountain it would grate on you because it gave the lie to what you claim to be the most sacred.

At length their hatred rose even to Heaven and their war to the Heaven's gate. They invaded the Vineyard and

Our Lenten pilgrimage is to that place where they killed the Heir. Let us not compound the offense by calling Jesus a Jew. Let us not embrace the counterfeit and declare it be the original. Let us not imagine that the religion of angels, which He announced in our lesson, could have any part in the Zion Temple, which banned talk of angels .... in a temple He pledged to destroy.

Let us return to the authentic icons of our faith. Let us return to Father Abraham and thence to his Bosom, which is Eden.

And let us remember that the King of Israel and the Son of God declared these things at the moment He called His Disciples. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.