Jesus, according to the information that John gives us in the beginning of his Gospel, had a strange system of recruiting his disciples. Two of John’s disciples left the Baptizer when he identified Jesus for them as "the lamb of God" and spent the rest of the day with Jesus. Andrew was one of the two, and he recruited his brother, Simon, whom Jesus immediately labeled "the Rock." The next day Jesus encountered Philip and said to him, "Follow me!" - and he did. Philip went out and found Nathanael, or Bartholomew, and gave him the good news. But Bartholomew reacted quite differently from Simon, didn’t he? He asked Philip, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" "Come and see" he was told by Philip, and Bartholomew did just that.

Jesus apparently did his homework before Bartholomew arrived; he knew his identity, and, what is more, he had analyzed his character - "an Israelite without guile." Perhaps he knew him by reputation; after all, Andrew, Peter, and Philip were all from the same town, Bethsaida, and Jesus must have known something about all of them. He must really have wanted a man like Bartholomew who was incapable of deceit. That says a lot about a person, does it not? Bartholomew must have had what Gary Zukav, in The Dancing Wu Li Masters (An Overview of the New Physics), calls "the beginner’s mind." This type of mind is found in those people "who have felt the exhilaration of the creative process (and) ... have slipped the bonds of the known to venture far into the unexplored territory which lies beyond the barrier of the obvious." Such persons have "a child-like ability to see the world as it is and not as it appears according to what we know about it. This is the moral of the (child’s?) tale, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ When the emperor rode naked through the streets, only a child proclaimed him to be without clothes, while the rest of his subjects forced themselves to believe, because they had been told so, that he wore his finest clothing." In other words, the child cannot deceive (at an early age, at least); a child is truly without guile as was Bartholomew. In this respect, he was really a child-like person, and this part of Bartholomew’s character, as Jesus perceived it, appealed to him very much. As Zukav comments: "The child in us is always naive, innocent in the simplistic sense," and this means that "the beginner is open to many possibilities."

At that point in the story, even if Bartholomew has the highly desirable quality of guilelessness, his mind actually seems closed to "many possibilities" in Jesus Christ: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Sounds like the man is steeped in Scripture, doesn’t it? Or perhaps he has been programmed by the rabbis who have mastered what we call the Old Testament. Could it be that Jesus has misread Bartholomew, and that he is on his way to losing his child-like innocence? As Susuki Roshi pointed out, "It is not difficult to attain enlightenment, but it is difficult to keep a beginner’s mind." And when that kind of mind is lost, it is tragic because, as Roshi’s son points out: "The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt and open to all the possibilities ..." As the story unfolds, Bartholomew was indeed "ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities," wasn’t he?

A Very Strange Interview

Phillip must have told Bartholomew more than John reports when he had him saying to Bartholomew, "We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph." But the record says that he simply responded to Bartholomew’s question with "Come and see." And he did, apparently hearing Jesus’ remark, since he says to Christ, "How do you know me?" What sort of an answer was it that Jesus gave him? To say, "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you," is only a partial answer at best, and yet it must have satisfied Bartholomew. Instantaneously, he took Philip’s identification - "We have found him of whom Moses ... and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth ..." - to an even deeper level of recognition, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" Such a confession must have startled Jesus at that point in his ministry, but it certainly affirms Jesus’ estimate of Bartholomew’s mind-set and character. He was open to the most exciting possibility of all for a Jew - the coming of the long-awaited Messiah! Jesus knew what he was doing when he interviewed Bartholomew for one of the coveted places among the Twelve.

Bartholomew must have said exactly what Jesus wanted to hear and find in a recruit for ministry. "Building a Team" is the title of a chapter in Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine. Kidder’s narrative of the planning for and building of a new computer by Data General Corporation contains this chapter in which the recruitment-interview process, necessary because a new group of engineers was needed, is discussed by Tom West, the head of the project, and his assistant, Carl Alsing. "Shall we hire kids?" said West (to Alsing). Kidder remarks: "To make it work they’d have to hire the very best new engineers they could find ..." They set out to do just that by advertising and "soliciting applications" from prospective engineers. "When they liked the looks of an application, they invited the young man - it usually was a young man - to Westborough, Massachusetts, and the elders would interview him one by one. If he was a potential Micro-kid, the recruit’s interview with Alsing was often the crucial one (and) ... a successful interview with Alsing constituted a signing up."

Alsing’s interviews began with, "What do you want to do?" If the recruit indicated that he or she simply exploring possibilities for a career, the interview was cut short. But if the new engineer said something like, "I’m really interested in computer design," or "I want to build one," Carl Alsing would ask, "What makes you think you can build a major computer?" And, as the interview progressed and Alsing liked the person’s possibilities, he would describe the tough competition between the engineers, the long hours that had to be worked. If the engineer was still enthusiastic about the prospective job, Alsing would comment, "We can only let in the best of this year’s graduates ... We’ll have to let you know." Then they let him or her in. When the recruiting was done, Alsing said, "It was kind of like recruiting for a suicide mission. You’re gonna die, but you’re gonna die in glory." Jesus might have said that when he began recruiting his disciples, but if he had, he might not have signed up many of the original Twelve.

But there can be little doubt that Jesus heard what he wanted to hear when Bartholomew replied to Jesus, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" This man was obviously enthusiastic about the as yet mysterious mission on which Jesus Christ was embarking. He was just the kind of person whom Jesus needed and to whom he could say, "Follow me!" - and Bartholomew would do just that without question. Maybe that’s why we don’t know a lot about his role in the ministry of the disciples, either during or after Jesus’ experience on the cross and in the tomb. And even if the legends about his death were true - that he had been skinned alive and died a horrible death - and even if he had been told that he was signing up for a suicide mission, I have to believe that he would still have become a disciple. Anyone who could greet the Messiah with, "You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!" would not hesitate to bind himself to some sort of total commitment to Christ. Bartholomew’s statement seems to have been interpreted just that way by Jesus Christ. It was a strange sort of interview, to say the least.

A Promise to a Recruit

Bartholomew was amazed that Christ knew all he needed to know about him simply by observing him "under the fig tree." He reached the right conclusion about Jesus’ identity but probably for the wrong reasons; he must have thought of Jesus as a magician or a mind-reader - but he still called him "the Son of God" and "the King of Israel." Without revealing to him more than he was able to handle at that point in their relationship, Jesus promised him that he would "see greater things than these" in the days, months, and years they would be together. And it is always that way with those who answer Christ’s call to discipleship with anything resembling total commitment, isn’t it?

A student of mine served as a missionary to Bolivia. He and his family lived in a small, rural village; conditions were primitive. One night, as the missionary and his wife sat in the kitchen talking at a table lit up by candles, one of the native Christians - Pascual and his wife, Maria - knocked at the door. Pascual was carrying their infant daughter who, it was apparent, was quite ill. The missionary and his wife could not ask what was wrong with the baby until Pascual brought it up; they immediately went into action because the child was burning up with fever. They put it on the floor and bathed it with cool water; later, they gave it a shot of penicillin. The fever seemed to diminish, but the baby’s condition didn’t improve. A doctor was stationed in the town, but he was not due back from his rounds until later at night; it was too dangerous to attempt to get to the medical clinic some hours away. The doctor finally arrived, took one look at the child and loaded father and daughter, as well as the missionary, into his vehicle and started for his clinic. Almost at once, the father said, "She is cold" - the baby was dead.

Those people had prayed and trusted in Christ, placing the life of that little baby into his hands, but she died anyway. Their grief was overwhelming, but - amazingly - they never lost their faith in Christ. They should have said, "Lord, if you had been here, our daughter would not have died," but they were still willing to trust their Lord. When the doctor discovered that the baby had died of a type of meningitis, he and the missionary went out to the home of the bereaved couple only to discover that their twelve-year-old son was also ill. The doctor wanted to take the boy to the hospital/clinic, but the parents wanted him to stay with them at home. The missionary spoke to the father, "It’s up to you, but your son may die if we don’t get him to the clinic right away." Pascual replied, "His life is in God’s hands" - a kind of, "we are sure that he will preserve his life" - and he refused to let the doctor take him away; he had to be treated there and do for him what could be done. The boy - who should have died as his sister did - actually lived. The missionary knew that he had seen one of those "greater things" of which Jesus spoke to Bartholomew that day when he was recruited and interviewed for discipleship with Christ.

For three years, Bartholomew saw Jesus’ love and compassion in action, heard him teaching people about the love of God, and witnessed God’s power working through him to cure all kinds of illnesses and disabilities and restore people to health and wholeness. He saw Jesus reveal himself as the Son of God in various ways and in all kinds of situations, and he was witness to amazing responses of faith in all sorts of people. Bartholomew was given an extravagant promise by Jesus Christ - "you shall see greater things than these" - and that’s exactly the way it was.

But there was more to Jesus’ promise than what he implied about the dimensions of his own ministry; Jesus promised him that he would witness his passion, death, resurrection, and ascension, although Bartholomew surely didn’t know what he was talking about at the time. To be sure, he probably recognized Jesus’ reference to the old and familiar story of Jacob’s dream (Genesis 28:12 f.), in which he saw a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, with "angels of God going up it and coming down." Bartholomew might even have remembered that God had spoken to Jacob: "I am Yahweh, the God of Abraham your father, and the God of Isaac. I will give to you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants shall be like the specks of dust on the ground; you shall spread to the west and the east, to the north and the south, and all the tribes of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants. Be sure that I am with you; I will keep you safe wherever you go, and bring you back to this land, for I will not desert you before I have done all that I have promised you." And the man who had said to Jesus, "You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!", must have remembered how Jacob awakened from his dream and said, "Truly, Yahweh is in this place and I never knew it! ... How awe-inspiring this place is! This is nothing less than a house of God; this is the gate of heaven."

We will never know if Bartholomew made a vow of faithfulness to Christ, just as Jacob before him had made such a vow to God after he awakened from his dream and realized what had happened: "If God goes with me and keeps me safe on this journey I am making, if he gives me bread to eat and clothes to wear, and if I return home safely to my father, then Yahweh shall be my God. This stone I have set up as a monument shall be a house of God, and I will surely pay you a tenth part of all you give me." What we do know is that Jesus became his Lord and Savior - and that he, through God’s grace, did what all Christians are expected to do: He surrendered his life to Christ and trusted him without reservation to keep and preserve it forever.