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In the name of Jesus, amen. Dear saints, I think the Lord would teach us this morning, through St. Bartholomew, how to suffer with hope and with joy. We have Bartholomew, but then the gospel reading about Nathaniel, so it’s good first to just connect the two. It’s done by comparing the list of the apostles from Matthew, Mark, and Luke with the list of the apostles that John has, and we recognize that Nathaniel is also named Bartholomew.
We know a little bit about him. We know from John chapter 21, when John is talking about the disciples, well, Peter says, it’s after Easter and they’re up in Galilee. He says, “I’m going fishing.” A handful of the disciples say, “We’re going with him.” One of those is Nathaniel. From that verse, we learn that Nathaniel is from Cana.
It’s interesting to me, this is a little connection, and I don’t exactly know what it means because then when we dial back to John chapter 1, in the very early days of the ministry of Jesus, the disciples are being added to him. People are sending, calling, and getting people with Jesus. So John the Baptist says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” and John and Andrew go with Jesus. Andrew goes and gets his brother Peter. There they go, and then they go into Galilee and he calls Philip. Philip comes with him, and then Philip goes and calls Nathaniel, who was maybe a friend of his. We don’t know the connection between Philip and Nathaniel, but he goes to Nathaniel and he says, “We found the one that Moses and the prophets talked about. The Messiah, Jesus from Nazareth.” Nathaniel says, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”
It’s interesting that he’s from Cana, and Cana and Nazareth are kind of right next to each other. They’re maybe like five or ten miles apart. I think they probably had rival football teams, you know? There was some animosity between the two cities. Here, Nathaniel, the Canaanite, hears about Jesus from Nazareth. “What good can come out of Nazareth?” But listen to what Philip says: “Come and see.”
In fact, there’s a lot in the beginning of the Gospel of John about seeing. “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Then he says, “Come and see.” When Jesus is talking to Nathaniel, he says, “Look, an Israelite in whom there is no guile.” Nathaniel says, “How do you know me?” Jesus replies, “I saw you sitting under the fig tree.” Then Nathaniel confesses, “You’re the king of Israel. You’re the Christ.” Jesus says, “But you believe now? You will see greater things than this. You’ll see heaven opened, and you’ll see angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
I think it’s interesting how the early part of the Gospel of John has all of these discussions about seeing Christ. But then at the end, when Jesus is talking to Thomas, he says, “Blessed are those who believe and have not seen.”
Well, right after the call of Nathaniel, they end up in Cana, Nathaniel’s hometown, for the wedding. That’s where Jesus turns water into wine, and the disciples see it, and they believe in it. It’s all pretty amazing.
So that Nathaniel, or Bartholomew, is one of the early disciples of Jesus. He was with him from the very beginning. He traveled with Jesus throughout his entire ministry. He was a witness of the crucifixion, a witness of the resurrection. He was a witness of Christ all through the world. This is where we lose biblical track, and we have to kind of switch over to church history.
Church history tells us that after the ascension of Jesus, when the disciples were spreading out, Bartholomew, or Nathaniel, took a gospel of Matthew from the original Hebrew. It’s one of the places where we learn from church history, and we don’t have any biblical confirmation of this, but that Matthew wrote his gospel originally in Hebrew, and then he himself translated it into Greek. Nathaniel takes that original Hebrew, and he travels all the way out to India, preaching in India, and people are becoming Christian. He helps establish the church there.
Then he travels back west and north and ends up in Armenia, where he’s also preaching and helping to establish the church. It’s there that he is arrested, persecuted, and ultimately gives his life for the faith. That’s why St. Bartholomew’s day, like all the apostles’ days, are red days. We put red in the church to remind us of the blood that they spilled. It was a particularly gruesome death that Bartholomew had to endure. He was skinned alive. This is depicted in the window, by the way. It’s right to the right of the head of our Lord Jesus. It looks like a knife and a towel. It’s really, in fact, a knife and Bartholomew’s skin.
Yes, this is how he died. He was there, willing to die for his confession of Christ. Now, this is the first way that Bartholomew teaches us courage. But it’s not just the courage to endure suffering. It’s not even just the courage to rejoice in suffering.
Remember, I think we normally think of suffering in our Christian life as something that is just given to us. You find yourself suffering, and now we have to hear the scriptures that strengthen and encourage us in the midst of all that suffering. Now, that’s true. That is true. But there’s something else in the death of the martyrs. There’s something else that it gives to us.
And I don’t, I’ll just confess that I’m trying to figure out how to best preach this, and I don’t know yet. So you have to endure a little bit with me. Because there’s something about the way that the martyrs died when they didn’t have to. I mean, Bartholomew could have avoided having his skin taken off. If he would have just said, “Oh yeah, all that stuff I was preaching, never mind. Let’s do something different.”
In other words, I think that we normally think of suffering in our own lives as something that should be avoided, something that we step around, something that we make plans to not run into. The only suffering that we ever endure is the suffering that we don’t have any choice about. You know, you just get the diagnosis, or the car runs into the back of you, or whatever it is. You don’t have any choice. Okay? But here Bartholomew and the other apostles say that they’re willing to suffer even if they could avoid it.
Now, the cost was measured there, and here’s the point: the cost for avoiding this kind of suffering was to deny Christ, to deny the gospel, to deny the Lord who bought them, and that was a price that they were unwilling to pay. This is what Bartholomew is teaching us. He was unwilling to deny Christ. He would suffer all rather than fall away from the faith, which is the promise that all of us made in our own confirmations, that we would rather die than fall away from the faith.
Now, this seems pretty gloomy, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be. Here’s a picture that is stuck in my imagination since I started looking at this text this week, and I cannot escape it. Here is Jesus, who sees Nathaniel from a distance and knows all about him, who sees even what will happen—that he’ll see heaven opened and the Son of Man ascending and descending on the Son of Man.
Here’s Jesus who knows what’s going to happen to Nathaniel when he calls him to be a disciple, and still he calls him. So you can imagine these disciples sitting around the table. Here’s how I picture it in my imagination. They’re at the wedding at Cana. There’s plenty of wine. Jesus fixed the problem. They’re sitting around rejoicing in the wedding feast that’s happening. Jesus looks, and there’s Nathaniel, his disciple, and he sees what will happen some 30 years later to this man because he confessed the resurrection. He’s being persecuted and put to death. His skin’s being flailed off.
Then he looks next to him; it’s Andrew. He sees all the trouble that Andrew will suffer. He sees the journeys that Andrew will go on and the afflictions that Andrew will endure, all for confessing his name, until finally at last, Andrew is crucified on a cross shaped like an X. That’s on the other side of the face of Jesus. Jesus knows this about Andrew sitting there at the table with him. That it’ll happen in the next 25 years.
Then Jesus looks at Peter. He knows what will happen with Peter. He knows that Peter will deny him. He knows that he’ll have to restore Peter. He knows that Peter will endure all sorts of suffering and affliction, that he’s going to be arrested and thrown in jail by Nero, and that he’s going to be crucified upside down. There Peter is, taking a sip out of the water turned into wine. Jesus knows this about Peter.
Then Philip is sitting next to him, who will be whipped to death and die in prison some 30 years later. Jesus knows this about these men, and still he calls them to follow him. Still he calls them. “You will be my disciples.” Still he says, “Instead of fishing for fish, you’re going to fish for men.” Still he calls them into this ministry.
Now we might say, “Jesus, how could you do that? How could you set these men up for all of this suffering and all of this trouble and all of this affliction?” If you wouldn’t have called them, they would have probably had nice lives. Nathaniel would have stayed under this fig tree. Peter and John, they would have had a—who knows—they could buy a couple more boats for their fishing business. They would have had a nice life. They certainly wouldn’t have been murdered for confessing Christ crucified and raised.
But I… Dear saints, I promise you, if you could go back and talk to Peter and say, “Hey, would you like to not be crucified upside down and therefore not know Jesus?” he would say, “No, give me Jesus and whatever trouble comes.” If you were to go to Andrew and say, “Here’s what’s going to happen, here’s how things are going to go between now and your brutal death crucified in the shape of an X, would you change anything about it?” He would say, “Not one thing.” If you could ask Nathaniel, if you could ask Bartholomew, “Hey, would you rather have your skin on?” He would say, “Not if it meant losing Christ.”
I think this is what Jesus is telling him when he calls him right on the eve of the wedding. He says, “You’re going to see heaven opened and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” I think we don’t know this in the scripture, but I think that must be the vision that Jesus gives to him when they’re putting him to death. Remember Stephen, when he’s dying and he sees the vision of Jesus standing at the right hand of the Father? I think also that Bartholomew must have seen Jesus there, waiting for him in death to welcome him home, and that he was smiling even though he didn’t have lips anymore. He was rejoicing even though he didn’t have any skin, because he belonged to Jesus and Jesus belonged to him.
This, dear saints, is the joy of Jesus that Jesus wants us to have in the midst of our suffering. It’s not just brave endurance of affliction. It’s the confidence that the Son of Man, the Lord Jesus, has done all of these things for you. Now, Jesus knows that your life will be full of trouble. It’s been full of trouble. It will be full of trouble. Some of that trouble, maybe a lot of that trouble, comes from the fact that you’re a Christian, and you call on the name of Jesus.
He knows it. But for you, in the midst of all of this affliction, the Lord has the same promise that he gave to Bartholomew: “You’ll see heaven opened, and you will see Jesus, the angels ascending and descending, and you will be with him forever.”
So may God grant us this joy and this peace in the memory and by the preaching of St. Bartholomew. May God grant it for Christ’s sake. Amen. The peace of God which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.