Answering Nathaniel

Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the town of Bethsaida. Philip found Nathanael and told him, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and about whom the prophets also wrote—Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.”

“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathanael asked.

“Come and see,” said Philip (John 1:44-46, NIV).

Nathaniel wrote off Jesus as the Messiah before he even met Him because of where He was from. “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” As if to say,

• If anyone here has met anyone from Nazareth who was a good person please raise your hand. No one? Thought so, I haven’t either!
• Is there any prophecy about the Messiah coming from Nazareth? Nope! Not one!
• Is Nazareth mentioned in any prophecy? Nope. In fact, Phil, it is never mentioned at all.
• Have you been through Nazareth, Phil? Why would God want to honor that lousy village? Of all the places I would look for the Messiah, Nazareth is not even at the bottom of my list…it is not on the list!

Now, Nathaniel has come and gone (he’s been gone a long time). While I believe his spirit is with God in heaven, there is a sense in which it seems his spirit never left because I hear his retort repeated over and over today: “Church! Can anything good come from there?”

Church, it seems, is the number one reason people give (at least in my experience) as to why they don’t want anything to do with Jesus. “Church! Can anything good come from there? They are all hypocrites! They are more messed up than I am! The last time I walked through the door of a church all I found were people who didn’t like how I looked, talked, or how I lived my life. They didn’t care about me and my problems, they just want to make you cookie cutters of themselves. If I were going to look for God I would go anywhere but church. If Jesus is really real, why would He waste His time with people like them?”

Let me share my responses to each of those. (By the way, these are all things I have actually had people say to me, I am not just making these up).

The church is full of hypocrites. And? Is this statement supposed to shock and surprise me? Yes, the church is full of hypocrites. The church is full of hypocrites not because the church is full of Christians. It is full of hypocrites because the church is full of people. What place doesn’t have hypocrites? So come on in with me anyway, one more won’t hurt! In fact, you will fit right in!

They are more messed up than I am! Really? Well, there is nothing that is going to help you deal with the problems you have like seeing what problems you could have! There is nothing that helps me get over being miserable about my problems like seeing I am not the only one with them. When I hear about other peoples’ problems—especially ones that are worse than mine—I thank God for my problems and stop complaining so much. Not only that, maybe God could use you to help some of those Christians with their problems if you are not as messed up. Maybe you are just what they need! So come on down anyway.

The last time I walked through the door of a church all I found were people who didn’t like how I looked, talked, or how I lived my life. Now I really feel for you on this one. There is no church on the planet free of people who are going act like that. Again, that is because the church is full of people, not because it is full of Christians. If a church is really “full” of people who really don’t give you the time of day no matter what you do, go somewhere else, you have the blessing of Pastor Dan.

That said, if you walk into a church where everyone is dressed in their “Sunday best” and you are in ripped jeans and a t-shirt sporting a studded leather collar, should you really be that surprised if people look at you funny? If I took my family all dressed to the nines out to Hooters, sat down at the bar, ordered 5 large milks and said, “Hi there. I’m the local pastor, what’s good on the menu?” don’t you think people would be asking what the heck we were doing there too?

They didn’t care about me and my problems, they just want to make you cookie cutters of themselves. Legalism. I hate that. But legalism is not a Christian thing, it is a human thing. Why are you surprised to find them at church?

Now, we do have the Bible which we believe is the word of God for all people at all times and in all places. We do believe that God wants us to love Him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, to love our neighbor as ourselves and to help others do the same. If you get the feeling that you are expected to change some things to do that, you are right. But so is everyone else there. God loves us as we are, and He loves us enough not to leave us as we are. Some change is easy. But more often than not it is hard, messy, frustrating work.

If I were going to look for God I would go anywhere but church. If Jesus is really real, why would He waste His time with people like that? You should have seen some of these people before Jesus got a hold of them! You know, the Pharisees asked Jesus the same thing (Matthew 9:11, 11:19, Mark 2:16, Luke 5:30, 7:34, and 15:2). He was always seeming to hang out with all the wrong people at all the wrong times in all the wrong places.

Jesus responded saying, It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners (Matthew 9:12-13, NIV). Jesus did not come for the people who had it all together. He came for the ones that didn’t. Grace is not given as a reward for good behavior. It is a gift that is given in spite of bad behavior! No Christian deserves the grace they get. Deserved grace is a contradiction in terms.

The church is full of lousy, hypocritical, legalistic thumb-suckers because it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Some people think the church is like a gym or a Spiritual Cross Fit for healthy well-adjusted people, while others think that the church is like a hospital for sick people. The reality is that it is both. But there are not separate wings, everyone is all mixed in together and working both those angles at the same time.

Church is the place where we go because we have hit bottom and have become convinced that we are broken people. We have been learning that we are not enough. We need to be around people who know they are not enough. It is about owning the fact that we are all broken, messed up, twisted even; unable to mend ourselves or make amends for ourselves. We know we need forgiveness, and the only place to get that is from God Himself. Because if He doesn’t forgive you, it doesn’t matter who else does! We need to hear that He is enough, that Jesus is enough. Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through Him (John 3:17). All the forgiveness, grace, mercy, love, and compassion we hurt for, long for, hunger for, is there in Jesus—not the church—in Jesus! We need to be reminded that He is enough and we need to experience that He is enough. And so at church we share how God is changing and working and helping us and we see how He is helping others. It is amazing to see how God works His grace into a person or a family and brings help, healing, and hope to them in ways you never would have thought of.

Like Philip, church (when it does its job) points us to Jesus. After all it is not the people in the church that are going to be able to do anything. It should be pretty clear that that is not the case. It is Jesus who is the way the truth and the life (John 14:6). It is not church that saves, it is Jesus.

 

Now that said, I want to recommend the critique of the church given by Timothy Keller in his book The Prodigal God. As you might expect, the book focuses around the parable of the Lost Son in Luke 15. After exegetically going through the parable, Keller concludes the opening chapter of his book with these words.

The crucial point here is that, in general, religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, but those estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him. We see this throughout the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s life. In every case where Jesus meets a religious person and a sexual outcast (as in Luke 7) or a religious person and a racial outcast (as in John 3-4) or a religious person and a political outcast (as in Luke 19), the outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder-brother type does not. Jesus says to the respectable religious leaders “the tax collectors and the prostitutes enter the kingdom before you” (Matthew 21:31).

Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we’d like to think (pages 14-15).

While I think the person who writes off Jesus and church because of the above reasons can be helped through those objections, it is very troubling that the church and Christians are not the go to people for finding grace. I wrote about that at length in my post A Tale of Three Women, so instead of making this one any longer, I will direct interested readers there.