I walk in, I sit down, I walk out, and nobody speaks to me. Do I keep showing up or try somewhere else?

“And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me: for she said, Have I also here looked after him that seeth me?”

Hagar was a slave, pregnant, badly treated, and running into the desert with nobody out looking for her. God meets her there, and she gives him a name no one else in Genesis gives him, the God who sees. She was the least visible person in that household and she is the one who is seen. Being overlooked by people turns out not to be the same thing as being invisible.

“Jesus saw Nathanael coming to him, and saith of him, Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile! Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.”

Nathanael had just made a dismissive remark about where Jesus came from, and he arrives expecting very little. Jesus greets him by describing something private, a moment under a fig tree when Nathanael assumed nobody was watching, and it undoes him. John places the scene early on deliberately, to establish something about Jesus: he notices people before they have done anything to be noticed for.