St. Bartholomew: From despair to discipleship and a heavenly destiny
As it often does with the events of the Gospels, the streaming series The Chosen adds to the drama of the encounter between Jesus and Nathanael in John 1:45-51 by employing a bit of artistic license and supplying a background story.
In the second episode of Season Two, we see Nathanael, in the time before he met Jesus, thrown into an existential crisis. The roof of a building for which he had been the architect has collapsed and his ambitions have come to ruin. Nathanael, utterly distraught, goes out into the wilderness and sits under a fig tree, where he burns the plans for a synagogue he had dreamed of building and begins to cry out in prayer.
Nathanael’s prayer largely consists of an impassioned recitation of Psalm 102, which begins:
Lord, here my prayer;
let my cry come to you.
Do not hide your face from me in the day of my distress.
At which point Nathanael breaks away from the sacred text and cries out with anguish, “Do you see me?”
This backstory vitalizes the moment later in the episode when Jesus says to Nathanael, “I saw you under the fig tree.” The Lord had not turned His face. He did see his grief-stricken son and loved him.
And now the Lord was calling Nathanael to be his disciple and apostle. A poignant resolution to a man’s soul-wrenching crisis.
But we know the story does not end there. To become an apostle brings problems of its own. Just look at almost any painting of St. Bartholomew—we have one in Sacred Heart Major Seminary, where I serve—and you will see the saint either being martyred by flaying or holding his flayed skin, as he does in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.
Worldly minds, beholding the horror of such paintings, might be tempted to think that being sad under a fig tree wasn’t so bad after all. If following and proclaiming Jesus brought him to such an end, then maybe Nathanael was better off before he met Jesus?
Of course, believers know the answer to that question is a resounding “no.” First, Nathanael was not just sad without Jesus. He was lost. He was alone. He had no hope and no future except death.
Secondly, his martyrdom was not Bartholomew’s end. To borrow from the language of St. Ignatius of Antioch, it was his birth to eternal life. “In the world you will have trouble,” Jesus says much later in John’s Gospel (16:33). “But take courage, I have conquered the world.”
