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.”
Today’s Gospel reading from John relates how the first disciples began to follow Jesus. After Philip becomes a disciple, he finds Nathanael and tells him, “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law, and also the prophets, Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” The day before, Andrew and John began to follow Jesus and then Andrew’s brother, Simon Peter, also followed him. There is something here that sounds like how a group of friends first forge a friendship or how a rock group is formed around a common identity or aim. Unlike this, though, the disciples have no idea what they are in for in the days ahead as Jesus says to them: “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
God, help me understand what John the Baptist understood as he pointed your son out to the first disciples: he is the Lamb of God. In Nathanael’s response to Philip—“Can anything good come from Nazareth?”—I see a kind of cynicism that is similar to my own. The glory of the holy city of Jerusalem as described in the first reading gleams with splendor and has at the foundation of its walls the “twelve names of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb.” Here is the glory of God at work in his followers, the first disciples; he takes them to himself and makes them the foundation of his holy kingdom.
Lord, thank you for this new day! Sometimes the anticipation of all that must take place and should take place—its pressures—overshadow that the day itself is a gift. “You will see greater things than this,” Jesus says. Let me see in this day the radiance of your glory outshine the shadow of uncertainty and skepticism and whatever is passing and false. Be with me, Lord, and let me remember the words of the psalmist: “The LORD is near to all who call upon him, to all who call upon him in truth.”
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.