Daily Devotional • August 25
St. Bartholomew the Apostle
A Reading from Genesis 28:10-17
10 Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring, 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessedin you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!”17 And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
Meditation
The importance of Jesus’s interaction with Nathanael, son of Tholomew, in John 1:43-58 is not so much Jesus’s uncanny omniscience as Jesus’s suggestion to Nathanael that Jacob’s dream at Bethel is now to be fulfilled. That vision was that God above comes to earth below. The angels descending on the ladder from Heaven, then ascending back to Heaven again, struck Jacob that God is not so far away after all—that Heaven and earth might be more closely related than he had supposed. Jacob’s dream is thus a prophecy of the Incarnation wherein the Eternal Word of God becomes flesh. (Remember that this story of Nathanael bar Tholomew is in the very first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, which begins: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”)
The name Jacob means “deceiver;” that is, Jacob denotes a person who is full of guile. Jacob Israel deceived his father Isaac and by this guilefulness swindled his older brother Esau out of his birthright. We cannot know now what caused Jesus to associate Nathanael with Jacob. It is entirely possible that Nathanael was Philip’s younger brother, since Philip had enough authority over Nathanael to “call” him out from under the fig tree in order to meet the Incarnate Word; in the Holy Scriptures, the fig tree is often a symbol of spiritual seeking. Tradition has Philip and Nathanael bar Tholomew doing apostolic work in the same broad region extending from Greece to the Caucasus east of the Black Sea. (St. Bartholomew is the patron saint of Armenia.) Or perhaps Nathanael was to Philip like a brother.
Jesus discerns that in Nathanael bar Tholomew is a young man in whom there is no guile. In fact, there is no need for one brother to deceive another, since both young men will soon see something far greater than angels descending and ascending on a ladder from Heaven. They will see God up close—Jesus says to Philip, “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father”—and together experience “the Savior of our fallen race, the Brightness of the Father’s face, O Son who shared the Father’s might before the world knew day or night” (Hymnal 1982, No. 86).
The Rev. W.L. (Chip) Prehn, PhD, is president of The Living Church Foundation and is a principal of Dudley & Prehn Educational Consultants. He was a parish priest for 12 years before turning to school administration and consulting. Prehn writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and history.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, St. Louis
The Diocese of Ogbomoso – The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)
The Rev. W.L. (Chip) Prehn, PhD, is president of The Living Church Foundation and is a principal of Dudley & Prehn Educational Consultants. He was a parish priest for 12 years before turning to school administration and consulting. Prehn writes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and history.
