JOHN058 - You and I Are Embarking on a Pilgrimage, and We’re Not Going to Use Google Maps

John 1:28

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Old man rant inbound in three, two, no, I'm going early. I think Google Maps are kind of a turd. And here's why I think that. Used to be that you had to figure out where you were going, and there was a little bit of mystery and a little bit of adventure to things. And when you traveled places, you didn't know what it was going to look like. You didn't know what it was going to feel like. And how you would get there was something you had to solve. You had to figure it out. Now, look, obviously, you know, Google Maps are very convenient. Map apps are great. GPS, wonderful, unlocks a bunch of things that we can do now on planet Earth. But every time we unlock something new, we deprive ourselves of something that was awesome. And the adventure of exploring the unknown, even if it's known to other people, but it's unknown to you, that was a really important thing in the formation of character, in the formation of people. You get a backpack, you get a car that's probably going to break down along the way. You go on a road trip, you go on a hike, you go on an adventure. I think Google Maps has made that worse. Well, old man rant aside. Back in the day, obviously, there was no Google Maps at all. And way back in the day, before the printing press or things like that, when the world was much younger, it was hard to travel to places because you didn't know how to get there. And there were a lot of misadventures and things that could go wrong along the way, which was, you know, part of the fun of a pilgrimage. That is the kind of trip that isn't just motivated by profit or obligation, but a pilgrimage, that's the kind of trip where you go somewhere because a place has captured your imagination and you want to see it with your own eyes, and you want to go through the ordeal of getting there for yourself. There are still pilgrimage locations and routes around the world today. There's a really famous one dedicated to St. James and a later extra-biblical legend that happens on the Iberian in Spain. That one's pretty neat. And so people still want to do pilgrimage. But pilgrimages are super safe now. The risk and the adventure has largely gone out of it. Well, after the time of Jesus, interest in pilgrimage started to peak because, you know, by the end of the first century, portions of the story of Jesus and books that became part of what we now know as the Bible, they started circulating all over the place. Before we even get out of the time frame that is the Bible, Christianity has gone to the ends of the earth. Remember, that was the plot arc of the book of Acts. Hey, Jesus, you know, we're pretty mad that people crucified you. We're your disciples. Well, I mean, almost all your disciples. One of us kind of split in half, hung himself from a tree. It's another story, but most of us are still here. And then it just seems like now would be a great time for a reckoning to call it all in and to square up all the accounts and everything. And, you know, big paraphrase there. But Jesus' reply, which is not a paraphrase, is it's not for you to know the time or the dates that the Father is set by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. And that's the plot arc of the whole New Testament up until Revelation, which is, of course, the Summa Theologica of the entire Bible. All of history, all the story arcs, all the everything are completed there in the final work of Christ and the final redemptive realization moment of God. So we're not in Revelation yet in terms of life. We're still in the age of the church, the same place that the people in the New Testament were after Jesus. And it spread all over the place really fast. The last couple seasons we did on Galatians and Philemon talk a lot about that spread and how quickly it happened. Well, imagine you're somebody who hears about this. Your entire life is changed by it. Everything finally makes sense, comes into focus. Your local pagan gods that are just carved out of rock and have never done a dang thing. You're like, look, I play along with that. I do like a little pinch of incense or sacrifice a little thing at this little hut or whatever. But I know it's nothing. I know it's just kind of civic ethnic pride. But all of a sudden, along comes the message of Jesus, and you see the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, and you hear the story and the theology of how the Old Testament ties into Jesus and everything, even from nature points to Jesus. But you live in, say, Gaul. Gaul is modern-day France. Or say you live on the far side of Gaul in historic Aquitaine, Galia Aquitania. And that's a long ways from where all the stuff in the Bible happened. Nothing even made it close to you in the Bible, but you've seen the work of that God invisibly, you know, in your heart. You've seen it in the lives of people. You see it in a thriving young church that exists there. Eventually, some young, enterprising, bold kids are going to be like, I want to go see it. I want to go see where it all happened. I want to stand in the place where this occurred. I want to go see if anything's left. Yeah, it hasn't been that long. Are any of these buildings still here? What I would yo, Jesus mentioned that tower that fell over. I bet I could find that tower that fell over. There's like a pool, right? Where you could get into it and you get healed. I wonder if anybody wrote anything down or put up like a plaque or something. I want to go to that pool. I want to go into that pool myself. Not because I necessarily think I'll get a miracle, maybe, but I want to be there. It's a point of contact with Jesus. I want to go to Golgotha where the cross was. I want to stand there and imagine that moment. I want to go find the tomb where death was defeated. I want to see that. I want to see the Sea of Galilee where Jesus walked on water. I gotta go. But I don't have Google Maps. So I guess I'm just gonna have to figure it out. And really, pretty quickly after the first century, people from all around the Roman Empire start doing these pilgrimages. It's mostly on foot. I mean, I guess maybe some of them would have been able to afford horses or even, you know, kind of rental horses where you could change over along the way. That's one of the ways that people traveled within the boundaries of the empire back in the day. And so we start to hear rumors that pilgrimages are occurring and that it is a mark of great devotion and sincerity to go to the place where it all happened. But those rumors become substantiated reality in the early fourth century when we get our first account of an entire pilgrimage journey from one end of the Roman Empire all the way to Jerusalem. There's a guy or a handful of guys, I guess it's a couple guys for sure, who had some status within the Roman Empire and they decided we want to go see Jerusalem. So they set out from, well, now it's called Bordeaux, France. Back in the day, it was called Burtigala. If you're like, I think you're not saying that right, you might have a point. And they recorded this itinerary of the whole journey. Why would they do that? Well, when you go and read it and we have the full text of it, we don't have the original copy anymore. We have a copy that some friendly monks were nice enough to write down a couple hundred years, a few hundred years later. But when you go and look at it, and I have looked at this with my own eyes, you can see that overwhelmingly, this is written number one, so that other pilgrims might be able to safely imitate the route. It is playing kind of a Google Maps function, you know, but there's no picture. There's no like in 100 feet, turn right, not 102 feet. You might get into adventure if you do that. And we don't want adventure. We're Google Maps and we hate getting sued. So here's the boringest, safest, most pedestrian route to the thing where you won't grow or be changed at all. No, it wasn't like that. It's just this very simple iteration of line after line after line. You go eight miles and you can change a horse right here. They call that um mutatio. And uh also here's a place where you can stay. They call that like a manzione, like I think it's mansion, is probably the same word it's derived from that. But I told you there were two reasons this was written. Number one seems to be a verbal roadmap so people can follow the instructions and get to the Holy Land somewhat safely. But then the second reason this is written is to give you an account of what you will find when you get to the Holy Land. Now that's pretty cool. And it's a it's a vast minority of the whole itinerary, but it's a very interesting part of the itinerary because this thing was carried out about 300 years after the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. So this itinerary then is kind of like a time capsule. It's telling us what it all looked like 300 years after the fact. What could be substantiated with the eyeballs of these travelers to be like, that is the thing. Everybody here locally knows it. Generational memory is still in place, the provenance is in place here. We know that's exactly where that happened, that's exactly where that happened. But then you also get the impression that some other stuff has changed. 300 years is a long time. Stuff looks different, it's not in the same place, and you can tell that some of this is maybe a little more speculative, like right around here, this happened or that happened. So the structure of the Bordeaux pilgrimage is like a mountaintop. This is a very common way of writing until recent times. People like to use the word chiasm. You know, it sounds sounds smart, it's a fancy word. But chiasm is just basically a structure that is, it's a writing structure that's in a pyramid form. So if you imagine the base of the pyramid on the left and on the right, kind of a matching thing is gonna happen at each point as you go up the pyramid, either right to left or left to right. And then the center idea, the point, is gonna be at the middle of the pyramid. A bunch of books of the Bible are structured this way, a bunch of things within books of the Bible are structured this way. So that's how the itinerary is built. And here's what it sounds like at the beginning. If you wanted to set out from Bordeaux with no Google Maps and you were just gonna kind of rent horses along the way and make the whole journey, you might do this. An itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem and from Heraclea through Aulon and through the city of Rome until Milan in this way. So they don't make the full return trip, they stop at Milan, which the city of Bordeaux, where the Garon or the Garonne River is, through which the wide sea ebbs and flows for 100 leagues, more or less. Change at Stomata, seven leagues, change at Sirio, nine leagues. City of Vacitas, nine leagues. Change at Three Trees, five leagues. Change at Ausanium, five leagues. Then there's like five or six more entries here until you get to Toulouse. That one's pretty famous. City of Toulouse, seven leagues. Change at the ninth, nine miles. Change at the twentieth, eleven miles. Rest stop at Elusio, nine miles. So something happens here right after the very early entries, and we go from leagues to miles. I don't know if anybody knows why that is, but my theory would be that leagues, and I think a league on land and on water at this time was like two or three, probably like three miles, roughly. So my guess would be that way, way out at Bordeaux, which is you know clear out on a different sea than the Mediterranean, that maybe uh nautical units were more commonly used. But isn't it interesting how some of these places are just an acknowledgement of something that you're gonna see along the road? Like he just says city of Toulouse. So when you get to Toulouse, well, don't do anything. I mean, I guess you could eat there, go in there, or whatever, but just know it's there. And it's kind of like when you used to give directions before Google Maps, then you would be like, hey, you're gonna see like a big red barn. Uh that's supposed to be there, keep going. Okay, then you're gonna come to a park on the north side of the road. It's like a little scabby park. You don't probably want to go in there, but it's there. It's just kind of um, it's kind of like just the next grip in the rope with the knots to know that you're going in the right way. So this goes on for a very, very long time. And then after, I don't know, 25 maybe entries here, we get our first summary of the first leg of the journey from Bordeaux until Arle, 372 miles, 30 changes, 11 rest stops. At any rate, then there's another leg of the trip with even more entries. That's from Arl to Milan. That's almost 500 miles, 22 rest stops, 73 horse changes. Then uh from Milan, yeah, we go through Italy and then we're making our way east. I mean, I'm just scrolling and scrolling. I don't have a physical copy, I have uh you know just uh the full text PDF. We're still not to the Holy Land. We're just at Constantinople now. Still not to the Holy Land. We're in Galatia. Oh, we're in Antioch, still scrolling. Boom. There, we finally made it to Bible stuff. That's forever. There are so many entries, and obviously, I'm not gonna give you all of that. So we make this big long trip and we get all the way to the Holy Land. My friends, this stuff stirs my blood. Uh the call to adventure, the adventure to go and explore something that has moved your heart, that is like the main story of your life, and you want to go see it, you want to be there, and you're willing to spend money and risk and have an adventure with a friend or a group. I just think this is right up my alley. You know, I think it's kind of appropriate that day one of our time with the Bordeaux pilgrims is, you know, just the long walk, the long rental horse ride across the Roman Empire. And now we are coming up, just out in the distance, we can start to see the shadows and outlines of the topography of the Holy Land. And our heart quickens in our chest as it did for the Bordeaux pilgrims. But like the Bordeaux pilgrims, we'll have to wait until tomorrow to enter into the Holy Land with them. So tomorrow we'll pick up where we left off and we'll see what they found. We'll see what was still there, we'll see what local legends and stories were still present 300 years after the time of Christ when they made their entry into the historic Holy Land. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again.