Knowing Jesus When Life Still Feels Like Nazareth

From the Sermon delivered on March 15, 2026 | Follow Me

Knowing Jesus — really knowing him — doesn't always feel the way you thought it would. If you came to faith with certain hopes attached, and those hopes have gone quiet or gone sideways, you are not alone in that. In John 1:43–51, a skeptic named Nathaniel encounters Jesus for the first time and raises a question that many people in this city carry somewhere underneath the surface: Can anything good actually come from here?

Nathaniel isn't asking about Nazareth. He's asking about his own life. He's asking whether Jesus — this particular Jesus, from this particular nowhere town — can actually deliver on what's been promised. Pastor John Starke unpacked this passage on March 15 at Apostles Church Uptown, and what he found there was not a pep talk. It was something more honest and more durable than that: a vision of Jesus large enough to hold not just the good seasons, but all of them.

Philip rushes to Nathaniel with the announcement: We have found him — the one Moses and the prophets wrote about. Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph. It is, by any measure, a staggering claim. The one who would fulfill the promises of Deuteronomy 18, the deliverer the prophets described in their visions of the end of exile — found. Here. Now.
And all Nathaniel hears is the zip code.

Nazareth was a blue-collar town in the district of Galilee — obscure, not mentioned in any Old Testament text, the kind of place that didn't appear on ancient maps. To a first-century Jewish person waiting for a Messiah, this was like being told the revolution was starting in Yonkers. Pastor John Starke noted an old medieval Latin phrase: Deus semper minor — God always comes smaller than we expect.

That smallness is not a problem to be solved. It is, in fact, the point. Jesus came low enough and near enough to reach the actual bottom of human longing — not the curated version, but the real one. The version people hide on the subway. The anger in the office. The tears in the room alone at night.

One honest step: Sit with the Nazareth feeling for a moment before trying to resolve it. What specifically have you been waiting for Jesus to change?

Before Nathaniel even reaches Jesus, something unexpected happens. Jesus identifies him from a distance and speaks about him with startling precision: "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit." It is a cultural reference loaded with meaning — an echo of Jacob in Genesis 32, the patriarch whose very name meant deceiver, who wrestled with God through the night and came out renamed Israel, the one who would not settle for small answers.

Jesus is saying: I see you. Not the polished version. Not the one who has it together. The one who is wrestling, who won't accept cheap comfort, who wants something real.
Then he says something even stranger: "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you." In the ancient world, sitting under a fig tree was a way of saying someone was reading and meditating on the Torah — studying, wrestling with God's word, looking for something true. Jesus is not describing a location. He is describing a posture. He is saying: I have seen your searching. I know what you want.

New York is full of people who refuse to be naive. The reflex here is earned — this city gives you plenty of reasons to see through things. But Nathaniel's brand of hard-edged skepticism was not what disqualified him from encountering Jesus. It was, it turns out, precisely what prepared him.

One honest step: Consider what it would mean for you — not as a category, but as a specific person — to be seen by Jesus with "neighbor-like love," as Pastor John Starke put it.

Nathaniel responds to Jesus with his best theological vocabulary: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God. You are the King of Israel." He is quoting Psalm 2 — the royal psalm, the coronation psalm. He is saying: you are the political deliverer. You are the one who will finally break the grip of Rome. You are the king.

Jesus doesn't reject the titles. He just doesn't use them. He offers a different one: Son of Man. This comes from the prophet Daniel — a figure in Daniel 7 who arrives on the clouds with dominion and a kingdom that will never be destroyed. This is not a political title. This is something bigger than any empire could contain.

What brought Nathaniel to Jesus would not be able to keep him with Jesus. The orientation phase — the excitement of early faith, the sense that everything is new and Jesus is going to fix the world — was genuine, but it was not the destination. Disorientation was coming: Jesus would be arrested by the very empire Nathaniel expected him to overthrow. And when that happened, Nathaniel would need something larger than a political Jesus to hold him.

Pastor John Starke named this pattern directly: orientation, disorientation, reorientation. The disorientation is not a sign that your faith was wrong. It is the invitation to a bigger vision. The theologian Samuel Shaw, writing during the plague in England, drew a line between what he called created goodness — jobs, relationships, health, circumstances — and uncreated goodness — the beauty and permanence of God's love, his forgiveness, the excellencies of his character. Created goodness can fall apart. Uncreated goodness cannot.

One honest step: Name one thing you have attached to your faith that, if it didn't change, would make you wonder whether Jesus was real. That attachment may be exactly where Jesus is asking you to look.

Jesus's delay in raising Lazarus from the dead — a story from later in the Gospel of John — illustrates the point precisely. Mary and Martha fell at Jesus's feet, grieving that he had not come in time. He could have prevented the death. He had the power. And then he raised Lazarus from the dead. The question that lingers is not whether Jesus could heal. He could. The question is why he waited. Pastor John Starke put it plainly: because his sisters wanted a healing, and Jesus wanted to bring a resurrection. He wanted to open their mouths wide and give them something that lasts.

Apostles Church Uptown gathers on Sunday mornings at 10:30am in the Upper East Side, with community groups meeting across Manhattan — in East Harlem, Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights, Morningside Heights, the Upper West Side, and beyond. If the questions in this post are the ones you've been carrying quietly on the train or in your apartment — whether Jesus is actually enough, whether faith holds when things fall apart — those are exactly the questions this church is built to sit with. If you're curious, come worship with us some Sunday. There's no performance. Just a community trying to know Jesus more honestly.

The passage in John 1 ends with Jesus offering Nathaniel an image: angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man — a direct echo of Jacob's ladder in Genesis 28, the moment Jacob woke from his dream and said, "God is in this place, and I did not know it." Jesus is saying: that ladder between heaven and earth, that open heaven — that is me. If you have me, you have something bigger than Rome, bigger than the American dream, bigger than whatever is currently breaking you.

This is not a promise that created goodness will be restored on your timeline. It is a promise that uncreated goodness is real, permanent, and available — and that the disorientation many of us are living through right now is not the end of the story. It is the invitation to a larger Jesus.

If you want to go deeper with these questions, sign up for the weekly newsletter and follow along with the Knowing Jesus series — or come worship with us this Sunday.