Nazareth, today
This past Monday, August 24, in the Church we celebrated the feast of Saint Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles, also called Nathanael. The Gospel passage that we read that day, which narrates the way in which Nathanael met Jesus (Jn 1: 43-51), offers some interesting lessons.
Philip, who has already been with Jesus and is fascinated by what he has seen in him, approaches Nathanael and assures him that he has found the Messiah: “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Nathanael’s reaction is charged with skepticism: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”
Historians say that in the first century Nazareth was a village of shepherds and peasants that perhaps did not exceed two hundred inhabitants, an unremarkable Galilean village where, in fact, nothing relevant had ever happened: it is not mentioned even once in the Old Testament. Nathanael, very aware of the insignificance of Nazareth, reacts to Philip’s announcement by showing his prejudice in all its plainness: it is impossible for the Messiah to come from such a place, he says.
Philip does not give up, and invites his friend: “Come, see for yourself.” And then what we wanted to emphasize takes place: Nathanael, despite his prejudice, gets up and goes with Philip to meet Jesus. Maybe he walks full of suspicion, maybe he thinks he is wasting his time. But nonetheless, there he goes. In him, the power of prejudice has not been dominant enough to dissuade him from going to check, for himself, what Philip has said. Nathanael, who shows that he has prejudices, also shows that he is able of questioning them. From the fact that he goes with Philip to meet that Nazarene, it is clear that he is willing to let reality surprise him. For him, his prejudice is not an absolute truth.
Perhaps it is almost impossible to completely get rid of our prejudices. And it is almost impossible, in the first place, because prejudices are usually unconscious. We absorb them from childhood, we breathe them at home, at school, in the neighborhood. Mario Levrero explains it quite well in a passage of his posthumous book, the original and suggestive The luminous novel: «It is quite difficult to discover our own prejudices», writes the Uruguayan novelist, «they settle in the mind as absurd dictators, and one accepts them as revealed truths. From time to time and by some accident or chance one feels obliged to review a prejudice, to question it. In those cases, it is possible to uproot it. But all the others remain standing, disguised, taking us foolishly down the wrong paths[1]». This does not mean, of course, that we should not fight to eradicate prejudices from our minds and hearts. It just means that it is a tricky and difficult business. Nathanael, in this Gospel passage from the first chapter of John, shows us a way to carry it out, when he dared to go and verify if his prejudice was true. As he walked toward Jesus, he was undoubtedly still thinking that “nothing good can come of Nazareth.” And yet he went to check it out. And as he went, he was admitting the possibility that his opinion about that unremarkable village was one of these absurd dictators described by Levrero, resolved on constructing for us a reality riddled with lies.
It is all that it takes: to have the courage to stand up, to leave the small world where our prejudices reign and dare to confront them with reality. If we did it more often, we would surely unmask a good number of blind spots that, without knowing it, we carry with us everywhere.
[1] Mario Levrero, La novela luminosa (Bogotá, Penguin Random House, 2016), p. 74
