There are some notorious rivalries in football, especially between clubs in the same city. So it is hard for, say, an Everton fan to imagine anything good coming from Liverpool just across the city – at least he’s not going to admit it. Such attitudes can be amusing, until we realise that they reflect something in each of us. There are, for all of us, people and places ‘beyond the pale’ or ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’: it is hard to imagine anything good coming from them. In fact, however low down the pecking order we come, we can still find others to despise.
That attitude seems to be what Nathanael is expressing when he first hears about Jesus from his friend Philip. Without worrying what anyone will think of what he says, he exclaims, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46). For him, it was unthinkable that God’s promised king could come from such a place.
That points us to something very important. There will always be something uncomfortable, inconvenient and even ‘wrong’ (by our ways of thinking) about Christianity. It is unashamedly ‘from Nazareth’ – because it’s about Jesus and that’s where he’s from. He will always challenge, threaten and overturn our assumptions and prejudices. And if we haven’t had that experience, then we probably haven’t encountered the real Jesus, “Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Joseph.”