St. Bartholomew and Country Kids
AM Psalm 86; Genesis 28:10-17; John 1:43-51
PM Psalm 15, 67; Isaiah 66:1-2,18-23; 1 Peter 5:1-11
Today the church celebrates the Feast of St. Bartholomew, one of Jesus’ apostles. We meet Bartholomew in the passage from John’s Gospel included in today’s readings, where he’s referred to as Nathanael. Most scholars of the Bible equate Bartholomew and Nathanael, believing them to be one and the same person.
I prefer to think of this apostle as “St. Bartholomew of the Snooty Question,” considering the rather rude query he posed, one that called upon both his fellow apostle Phillip and Jesus to straighten him out. More about that tete-a-tete below, but first a little story: In the early 1930s, my father, equipped with a two-year normal-school teaching certificate, was the sole teacher in a one-room schoolhouse on Eight Mile Ridge, so named because it was eight miles out a twisty road from my father’s home town of Pine Grove, West Virginia, population about 500 back then. Dad taught 17 students in grades 1 through 8. One day the county school superintendent came to visit Eight Mile and observe Dad’s teaching. The superintendent gave Dad this directive: “Just run the material lightly over these kids. They’re never getting out of this holler anyhow.” What my shocked Dad said in response to this quip I don’t know, but I do know he resigned at the end of the school year, never to teach in Wetzel County (and work for that crass superintendent) again.
So, when I read the story in today’s Gospel about Phillip telling Nathanael that he and the other apostles had found “the one Moses wrote about in the Law and about whom the prophets also wrote” and that this person is “Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” and when I hear Nathanael’s supercilious question—“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?”—I think of my Dad standing up for those country kids at Eight Mile School.
Phillip didn’t so much stand up for Jesus as he did point Nathanael in his direction. And when Jesus, having observed Nathanael from afar and determined that he was “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit,” Nathanael ate crow: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel.”
I’m not sure whether those kids my father taught ever “got out of that holler,” but I like to think of Jesus’ background resonating with theirs: Jesus was a country kid, a native of Nazareth, an out-of-the-way village far up the Jordan from Jerusalem. And, boy, did he show folks what a country kid can do.
Written by David Jolliffe
At St. Paul’s, David sings in the choir, assists with community meals, and helps to coordinate the Tippy McMichael lecture series. His family has lived in the same county in West Virginia since 1830.