The Jesus stairlift
A sermon given at St Peter & St Paul, Hastings │ The fifth Sunday of Lent, 2025
John 1:43-51
The whole of John’s Gospel is essentially a journey of learning what it means to abide with Jesus, what it means to be with Him, to follow Him, to know Him, to work with Him, to pray with Him, and to hope with Him; and not just as individuals, but as communities.
What does it mean to be the community that gathers around this person?
Rooted in the Scriptures
Well, firstly, we learn from this passage that to be this community gathered around Jesus, is to be a community rooted in the Scriptures. Philip says to Nathanael,
“We have seen the one about whom Moses in the law and the Prophets wrote.”
Philip assumes that Nathanael, as a good pious Jew, knows what he’s talking about. So, he can suggest, rather boldly, that all the Hebrew Scriptures – which we unfortunately call the ‘Old Testament’ – point to Jesus. And it’s a shame that we draw such a distinction between the ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments, because they all tell one story about Jesus. Our reading of the Scriptures should always point us to Jesus, if it doesn’t then we’re reading them wrong. If we read the Hebrew Scriptures (or “Old Testament”) and see there a scorekeeping God who seems spiteful, retributive, and lacking grace, then we need to read again, and again, and again until we see Jesus. Because the God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God of the Hebrew Scriptures.
And the reason we call them “passages” of Scripture, is because we must dwell in them, abide in them, and like Moses or Elijah in the cleft of the rock, wait for God to “pass by”. Rowan Williams likens it to being a bird watcher, you sit, and you wait in the woods of Scripture, just waiting for a flash of the wing.
Open to surprise
Secondly, we learn from this passage that to be this community gathered around Jesus, is to be open to surprise. Nathanael, the sceptical student, quizzes his friend who I think he thinks has lost the plot.
“How can the person – the Messiah – about whom Moses in the law and the Prophets wrote, come from an insignificant backwater dump of a town like Nazareth?
Really, this man?”
As the people say in Matthew 13:55,
“Is not this carpenter’s boy? Is this not Mary’s son?”
We are perhaps too habituated to the faith to hear the scandal and offense in Nathanael’s question,
“Can anything good come from Nazareth?”
It’s the equivalent of suggesting that God is a car mechanic from Bexhill called Barry. It doesn’t compute. God is always turning up in the places we least expect. And as we shall celebrate in just a couple of weeks’ time, the last place anyone expected God to show up was pinned to a Cross executed as a criminal.
Strongly experiential
Thirdly, we learn from this passage that to be this community gathered around Jesus is strongly experiential, it is an experience. Just look at all the verbs we can extrapolate from this one passage, it is all about:
meeting,
hearing,
speaking,
coming,
seeing,
sharing life together,
and being amazed.
To be this community is to commune with a personal God, a God who longs to be known. He is not distant, He is closer to you than you may realise. Like Nathanael under the fig tree, He sees you in the places where you think no one else can.
Nathanael asks,
“Where did you get to know me?”
If we note the context of this passage, John 1, it starts
“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.”
An allusion to the creation story in Genesis. The word of God is Jesus, in whose imagination we have dwelt since before time began.
And don’t forget that there are no meaningless details in Scripture. It’s not just any tree that Nathanael was under, it was a “fig” tree. When Adam & Eve hid in the garden of Eden, fearing the presence of God that they once enjoyed, they covered their nakedness and shame with fig leaves. There is an allusion here to the fact that Jesus sees Nathanael’s nakedness, he sees beyond the external appearances, he peers into the darkest sin-infested shame-filled depths of Nathanael’s heart and there He sees him, there He knows him, there He loves him. And from that place, from that wasted life dead in Sin, He calls him.
Expanded through individual initiatives
Fourthly, we learn from this passage that this community gathered around Jesus is expanded through individual initiatives, face-to-face networking, and the seizing of opportunities. Philip is the model par excellence of what we might think of as “evangelism” here. Evangelism can be seen as a bit of a dirty word. We might imagine bible-bashing, hellfire and brimstone street preachers. But it’s not that. Here we see it’s summed up in these three simple words,
“Come and see.”
Come and experience.
“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
This faith, our faith, is not just some intellectual exercise, it is not simply about assenting to the right propositions about God, it is about a relationship with God in Christ through the Spirit mediated to us by a community. When I reconverted to the Christian faith it wasn’t the scientific arguments for God’s existence that got me, it wasn’t that Christianity actually made surprising sense of the world, it was the people that got me. And while this is often not the case – and there is a great and sad irony about the fact that the reason many people are put off the faith is because of the very people who purport to believe it and the sins they commit in the name of Jesus – but for me, I was fortunate enough to know Christians who showed me Christ, whose lives were lived as an invitation to “Come and see.”
Called out and hopeful
Finally, to be the community gathered around Jesus is to be called out and hopeful. In the final verse of our passage, Jesus echoes the vision of Jacob’s ladder from Genesis 28. Jacob has a dream wherein he sees upon a stairway from earth to heaven angels ascending and descending. He awakes and exclaims,
“Surely God is in this place.”
In fact, there is no place where God can not be found because the Word of God fills all things, is in all things, and in Him all things hold together. God in Christ is in this place, in every place. He will not leave us nor forsake us until he has completed His work of blessing all the families of the earth. This is the hope that we have, that the stairway is Christ. Like a stairlift slowly sloping up and down Christ is the one who not only ascends into the heights of heaven, but descends into the hidden depths of pain, suffering, heartache, and even down into the forgotten basement of death. Even there Christ is present righting every wrong. At Philip’s invitation, Nathanael is called out from hiding beneath the fig tree, hiding behind his pretence and pride, to be lifted up the staircase of Christ escorted by the Angels to be completely seen, known and loved by Christ. Christ calls us out of hiding in Sin to be known in the light, known by Him, and by the world. In the same way, Christ is calling each of us, to be known, to be seen, to be the parable of grace and hope that he is teaching to the world.
Amen.