Snake Guile

There are lots of things about sports that one can enjoy: the play the works perfectly for your side; the home run swatted so easily into the right field seats; the 120 mph tennis serve which the other woman simply watches go by. Human beings reaching and succeeding is fun to watch. Some of the journalistic attempts at interpreting it are less edifying. Such as: “The Yankees have a lot more World Series experience than their national league opponents.” So what!. Most of the Yankees who had all this World Series experience are dead. They are not playing; they are not even coaching. Yet we hear it all the time as if baseball franchises were permanent memorials to themselves indefinitely replicating the feats of former years. People write this stuff and other people read and it and nod wisely as if some great truth had been revealed.

People know all kinds of things. Some of the things people know are probably not so.

Take the apple that Eve offered Adam in the Garden of Eden in the Genesis story. People say it was an apple. In fact apples very likely did not occur in first century Palestine. Apples came from Alama Alta , Khazakstan, which means “Father of Apples”. Russia is the largest producer of apples in the world today.

The fruit with which Eve beguiled Adam was probably a fig. A fig! Somehow this is so much less romantic, less , well, American. The fig is no Anglo-Saxon fruit. But figs are the most common fruit in the bible largely because they were hugely abundant in Palestine. And of course it was fig leaves that Adam and Eve used to make their modesty aprons.

The biblical tradition offers the fig tree, the ficus, as  the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Humans desiring this fruit led to the destruction of Eden. People became too smart for their own good by eating figs.

Interestingly the Bo tree under which the Buddha received his great ENLIGHTENMENT after six year's meditation was also a fig tree known as Ficus religiosa.

In any case, unlike the discontinuous tradition of professional sports, the Biblical tradition has some real continuity. And so it is that Jesus says about Nathanael, whom he has never seen and is just about to meet that “he is man with no deceit.” Or as the KJV would have it “a man in whom there is no guile.” Remember it was guile in the mouth of the serpent which distracted Eve and Adam from their journey in paradise after they ate the figs. This is how the biblical tradition intertwines itself on itself. There is an unconscious guile to the habit of cultural captivity or reconstruction of history. The only fruit we know is the apple; hence Eve ate an apple.

The only team which has had long-time consistent success in the World Series is the Yankees; hence they are favored because they have more experience.

Real knowledge tells us how things really are. Current day Yankees win a lot, not because they are the Yankees with World Series experience but because they have a lot of money to buy good players. While it is true some of the money came from winning in the past, the people who won the money in the past are gone. The current day players have to win just like everyone else does by hitting and fielding and pitching better than the other guys.

Jesus sees Nathanael. Nathanael may be an everyman, but actually he is a nobody. He is a nobody who is guileless, who has no deceit. Nathanael is a truth-teller, someone who calls them as he sees them. It wasn’t until Adam and Eve put on fig leaves that the truth overcame their gullibility about their condition.

Jesus said he saw Nathanael under the fig tree. He saw him under the tree of truth, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the place where the phoney, the silly, the false would totter and fall.

Sure enough, Nathanael calls Jesus, “Rabbi, Son of God and King of Israel.”

This might have sounded as silly as journalistic opinions about dead Yankees winning world series today – except, except Jesus goes on to say that Nathanael, this nobody who tells the truth, that Nathanael will see and tell even more extraordinary truth.

We have all been seen by Jesus, as if under the fig tree, as we really are. We are seen, not as the idealized baseball player or the token who announces Jesus as Messiah and King, but as who we really are.

Homework for today: Since God knows who we really are, who are we trying to fool?