The Divine Rendezvous--January 19, 2024
"And [Jesus] said to him, 'Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man'." [John 1:51]
You know, sometimes, we struggle with Jesus' words because they are so clear, incisive, and provocative. This would include times like, "If your eye causes you to sin, you should pluck it out," or "Love your enemies, because that's how God loves, being kind to the wicked and the ungrateful." Or when I, coming into my house from the two-car garage to brew a pot of high-end brand-name coffee and watch streaming television on demand, hear Jesus say things like, "Woe to you who are rich..." or "If you want to follow me, you'll have to lose your life and take up your cross." In these times, the problem is that I hear Jesus and understand him clearly--I just find myself squirming at the implications of what he says.
At other times, we struggle with Jesus' words because we're not really sure quite what he is saying. Sometimes, we can tell that he's definitely saying something important, but we just can't quite figure out what that is--like we are straining to grasp our minds around his words, but can't get a good grip. And that's a shame, because quite often it's the times when Jesus is saying something we can't quite comprehend that there is deeply good news to be heard.
This is one of those latter times, I think. The closing sentence of Jesus' first conversation with Nathanael feels like it is important. Somehow we can tell something big is going on, and that he is saying something compelling enough to get Nathanael to change his life-plan on the basis of this exchange and to following after Jesus. The imagery Jesus uses seems mysterious, but compelling--this strange image of "angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man" sounds glorious, but maybe also very hard to picture. What does Jesus have in mind? Why would angels need to climb up and down a person? How small are these angels, or how big will Jesus have to be in order for that to happen? And... why do these angels need to go through Jesus to get where they are going?
It almost has the feel of one of those dreams you can't quite remember when you wake up: you can sort of half-recall what you saw, but the more you try and put it into words to explain to someone else, the further it slips from your rational mind and capacity for language. And honestly, maybe thinking of this as a dream-like image isn't that far off the mark, because there's another time in the Bible when someone has a dream of "angels of God ascending and descending" on something--and I think Jesus is calling our attention back to that scene.
In case you are straining to remember it yourself, let me set the scene. In Gensis 28, we get a story about the young man Jacob, the future patriarch of all Israel, who is on the run from his brother Esau. Esau is furious with Jacob for stealing his inheritance and blessing, and he is at the brink of killing his brother, so Jake goes on the lam, at first just trying to put some miles between him and his slightly-older fraternal twin, even if it leads him into the middle of nowhere. And it's there, in the middle of nowhere, that he camps out one night and has a strange dream. He sees a ramp, or a ladder, or a staircase, stretching from the ground up to heaven, and on it, he sees--you guessed it--"angels of God ascending and descending on it" (Gen. 28:12). And then Jacob hears God, standing beside him there, promising to go with him, to bless him, and to bring him back safely in time. For Jacob, this is a word of assurance that even though he's been a total jerk to his family, God's faithfulness to him remains unconditionally gracious. But the vision of the stairway to heaven (yeah, that's where the imagery from the Led Zeppelin song came from) that we sometimes call "Jacob's Ladder" (yeah, this is where that phrase came from, too) also suggests an intersection, a thin-place, between the divine and the human world. When Jacob wakes up from his dream, he marks the spot with a stone monument and says, "Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it!" He sees the spot itself, which he calls "Bethel," the "house of God", as a meeting place between heaven and earth, God and humanity. The image of the stairway/ladder with the angelic beings going up and down gives a visual cue that this is a place where the boundary between God's space and human space is pulled back, and God can come to meet him there, even standing at Jacob's side. Once he's awake, Jacob treats that spot of ground like it is a rendezvous for meeting God, a place where God is not distant or aloof, but right there beside him.
Well, anybody who grew up in first-century Judaism would have been immersed in those stories of ancestors like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with Moses, Miriam, Elijah, Deborah, and all the rest. So when Jesus casually drops a reference to "angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man," Nathanael surely recognizes the allusion to Jacob's ladder, and he surely would have understood it as a sort of metaphor for a meeting place between God and humanity. Except here's the startling thing: Jesus doesn't talk about a place, or even an object, like a stone pillar, as the divine rendezvous--he talks about himself in those terms. Jesus himself is the living Stairway to Heaven, the walking Ladder of Jacob that connects God and humanity. Jesus is trying to prime Nathanael for the eventual epiphany that to be in Jesus presence is to be standing beside none other than God, just like Jacob dreamed.
Now, for John the Gospel writer who is giving us this story, all of this fits with what he's been saying all along. John, after all, is the one who starts off his story with, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh and lived among us..." (see John 1:1-14). So what he had given us as a lofty bit of poetry in his opening prologue he now gives us in a conversation between Nathanael and Jesus--that in Jesus, we get the very meeting place between God and humanity, not in a building or shrine, not in a box like the Ark of the Covenant or a monument like the stone at Bethel, but in Jesus himself. Jesus is the walking, talking intersection of the divine and the human, in his very body, in his very life.
And all of a sudden, when we realize what Jesus has been saying all along, as John tells it, we realize what Good News has been brought to our ears! Jesus has been offering himself as the open gate, the access between God's space and ours, and he comes into our midst to bring God's presence to us without a catch and without condition. He simply shows up, seeking us before we were aware of it, calling to us without auditions or try-outs, and brings us into God's presence wherever he is.
This is the gift we are given as people claimed by Jesus. He's not simply a giver of neat insights or declarer of new religious rules. Jesus brings us the very presence of God, with no distance, no velvet rope to keep us back, no barbed wire fencing to restrict our access, right at our side already. To hear Jesus tell it, then, the place to look for God is not some celestial "Somewhere Else," but here, with us, among us, even now.
That's good news. Who that you know might be waiting, like Nathanael, to hear it offered to them, too?
Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see you at our side, and to recognize the presence of God in you among us.
No comments:
Post a Comment