The Feast of St. Bartholomew, Tuesday, August 24, 2021

John 1:45-51

Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law, and also the prophets, Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” But Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him, “Here is a true child of Israel. 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.” Jesus answered and said to him, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than this.” And he said to him, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”

In the lists of the Apostles contained in the other Gospels, Bartholomew is always linked with Philip, and so from ancient times the Church has understood the names “Bartholomew” and “Nathanael” to indicate the same person.  Indeed, “Nathanael” is a typical Jewish first name, meaning, “God has given”.  At the same time, “Bartholomew” is a proper Jewish surname, meaning, “the son of Tholomai”.   He came from the town of Cana and was a friend of Philip, who was called by Jesus before him.  After hearing Jesus preach, Philip went and found Bartholomew even as Andrew had gone to tell his brother Peter about him.  We hear little of Bartholomew during the Lord’s ministry.  St. John does tell us that he joined six other Apostles in going to fish in the days after the Lord’s Resurrection and assisted in a miraculous catch of fish.  Some of the Fathers and later writers held him to be a rabbi or a philosopher.  Certain traditions tell us that he preached the Gospel in India, though he might have been confused with Thomas, who did preach there.  The Armenians claim him as well as St. Jude as having brought Christianity to them, and consider both Apostles their patrons.  According to an ancient tradition, Bartholomew was skinned alive and beheaded by a king in Armenia.

St. John tells us that after his Baptism in the Jordan, the Lord lived an acetic life near the river and that John the Baptist pointed him out as the Lamb of God.  Andrew and John spent that evening talking with him, and the next day the Lord “found” Philip, and Philip, in his own excitement, went to his friend Bartholomew and announced to him that, “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law, and also the prophets, Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.”  Philip is referring to Deuteronomy 18, 15-19, where Moses says to the Hebrews, “The Lord your God will raise up to you a prophet of your nation and of your brethren like unto me: him you shall hear, as you desired of the Lord thy God in Horeb, when the assembly was gathered together, and said: Let me not hear anymore the voice of the Lord my God, neither let me see anymore this exceeding great fire, lest I die. And the Lord said to me: They have spoken all things well.  I will raise them up a prophet out of the midst of their brethren like to you: and I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I shall command him. And he that will not hear his words, which he shall speak in my name, I will be the avenger.”

Bartholomew famously asked Philip the rhetorical question, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”  Not that Cana had any greater importance than Nazareth.  This reminds us of how the chief priests said later, “Search the Scriptures and see that the Prophet does not arise out of Galilee” (John 7, 52).  But Philip is insistent and so Bartholomew goes to see for himself.

“Here is a true child of Israel. There is no duplicity in him.”  The Greek word here translated as “duplicity” has the meaning of “treachery” and “deceit”.  The Lord may have spoken ironically here, for the original “Israel” — the name given by an angel to Jacob, the son of Isaac — was deceitful in gaining the blessing of his father.  This would be in answer to, “Can any thing good come from Nazareth.”  Bartholomew would have gotten the Lord’s point, but he challenges him further: “How do you know me?”  The Greek verb here means “to know” in the sense of “to discern”, “to make a judgment”, and “to perceive”.  This may be Bartholomew’s come-back to the Lord’s observation, that he is a true Israelite.  To this, the Lord answers, “Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.”  This astounds Bartholomew as well as tops the exchange.  While it was true that he had been sitting under the fig tree when Philip called him, presumably some distance away, perhaps even out in Cana, the fig tree was an image of Israel in the way that the bear signifies Russia and the eagle signifies the United States.  A man sitting “under the fig tree” would be seen as an image of a son of Israel.

“Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.”  Bartholomew identifies Jesus as a rabbi, and then as something much more, “the Son of God . . . the King of Israel.”  Probably he did not mean “the Son of God” as possessing the divine nature but rather in the way that in former times judges, kings, prophets, heroes, and angels were styled “sons of God”.  When he calls him “the King of Israel”, he is acknowledging him as the Messiah, the son of David.  The Lord, for his part, answers Bartholomew with, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”  In revealing to Bartholomew that he will see these things, he speaks of his future blessedness in heaven.

Likewise, the Lord says to us, who have come to believe in him as the Apostle Bartholomew did: “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”