JOHN076 - Crossfade

John 1:35-42

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Well, from time to time I still try to put out videos over on my YouTube channel. I like making videos. Some of you have known me for a while. You're like, well, yeah, I mean, that's how we met on the internet. You were making videos about things. I watched some of those videos, and now we'd hang out and we do a podcast together. Others of you are like, what, you make videos or something on the internet? Yeah. I've had a YouTube channel for a really long time that has gone through a lot of different iterations, but the through line on my YouTube channel is it's stuff about the Bible and the historic church and what Christianity is doing and how it all works. I like the I like the curiosity side of all of that stuff. So I've made a lot of different kinds of videos and a lot of different kinds of formats. And over the last couple of years, I've been working on this book, The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible, that so many of you have been kind enough to pick up copies of and even review. Thank you for that once again. And so the YouTube channel is, I wouldn't say it's been on the back burner, but it hasn't been as big a priority as it's been in the past or as it's becoming again right now. So I got a bunch of stuff I'm working on over there that'll be coming out over the summer as I'm recording this. But I put out a video yesterday and it's an oddball, it's a weird video. I I got gifted by my pastor a 1976 bicentennial commemorative Bible. I was just really fascinated by what that said about where American Christians' heads were at back then. So I grabbed a more recent America-themed Bible and kind of compared and contrasted. And I thought it was a fun little video. But it wasn't little when I recorded it. It was like an hour and a half long, maybe not quite that long. But I just kept going and going because I had so many things I wanted to talk about. And then in post, I had to edit it down to something that would be human and manageable. By the way, if you haven't seen that video, you might enjoy it, you might get a kick out of it. But while I was editing that video down, there were a bunch of places where I had to use a technique called crossfading. And those of you who do, you know, editing and technology stuff for a living, you're like, yeah, we know what crossfading is, Matt. Thank you though for explaining. But hey, I mean, not everybody knows this, so I'm gonna explain it. Sometimes you'll make a cut and then you cram two things together that where the audio almost flows together, but not quite. And you kind of want a little bit of the end of the first clip to bleed over a little bit into the beginning of the second audio clip. And you also kind of want a little bit of that second audio clip to start a little earlier, to bleed back into the first audio clip. And somehow it works for your brain when you hear that. Well, it's called a crossfade. One thing decreases at the exact same time that another thing increases. Likewise, crossfading is exactly what we are seeing happening here at the beginning of the Gospel of John. Jesus, in the first 18 verses, in what I call the prologue, is I mean, he's this heavenly, otherworldly figure, God of God. I mean, he is uh he's the maker of all things and sustainer of all things, and he's the light and life of the world. I mean, it's he seems untouchable. And you're like, wow, this that's gonna be the pace of the whole book. This is gonna blow my hair back. I don't even know what I'm how I'm gonna get through all 20 whatever chapters of John. This is very intimidating, but all through that prologue, there's this allusion to this guy named John John the Baptist and his testimony about Jesus. And you're like, okay, we'll see where that goes. And then there's a pivot between verse 18 and verse 19, where we really pinch zoom in on John the Baptist. We go from this giant cosmic view of things. Like, I don't know how you would have a bigger, wider lens, more 10 billion foot view of reality and existence and the cosmos and God and humanity than you have in the first 18 verses, but then just all the way down to this one teeny tiny little fellow in one teeny tiny little corner of the world. We come all the way pinch zoomed in to this one guy, and he's not even wearing fancy clothes, it's John the Baptist, and we follow the story of John the Baptist out here in the middle of nowhere. And you know, it's a big deal, it's a very exciting story, but compared to what we did in the first 18 verses, it feels very human, very small, very modest, and very one guy oriented. Still, once we kind of get situated and loose and into the moment as readers in this next part of John 1 coming out of the prologue, we're like, okay, uh these are very different stakes. You know, like the first part is like Avengers level infinity war, save the universe, infinity gauntlet kind of stakes, like the biggest stakes imaginable. You know, now we're down to smaller stakes, like um, you know, a season of Daredevil or something. Like there's a fight between a couple people in a neighborhood. Okay, it's small stakes, but still we care about the stakes. And in the context of these smaller stakes, we come to care about John the Baptist, and we figure out, oh, he's very, very important in this teeny tiny little moment in this teeny tiny little corner of the world. And even though it's much smaller in scale than the big view we have in the prologue, we can kind of see how it connects, how John the Baptist connects to the very big story of the prologue. And then along comes Jesus in verse 29. We see him on screen for the first time. He's he kind of mysterious, he's just passing by the baptism site, and all we really get is John the Baptist doing the Leonardo DiCaprio snap and point meme. Hey, hey, hey, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And it's just like Jesus just sort of passes through the crowd in that scene, and that's all we get. But then, as we talked about over the last couple of episodes, the next day we actually see Jesus up close. We actually hear from him. And John, who feels like he has all the momentum in the world right now, in this little scene that we've been looking at, he feels like he's the center of the attention, he's very important. He doesn't make any effort to hold on to any of that. He just points at Jesus a second time and says, Look, the Lamb of God. It feels like he's nudging his disciples to go follow Jesus. There's your cross fade right there. John the Baptist is decreasing exactly as Jesus is increasing. As I mentioned, we have the benefit of hindsight and knowing that Jesus is the biggest deal ever. But they didn't know that during these scenes here at the beginning of John chapter one. Jesus was the unknown, John was the super famous one, and John voluntarily lays that down in favor of Jesus. A couple of John's disciples heed John's words, and they're like, Oh, okay, we don't totally get it, but we're gonna follow Jesus. And in this one little verse, John 137, when the two disciples heard John the Baptist say this, they followed Jesus. Well, there it is. That's where it all started. I know that there's a significant percentage of you who listen who aren't Christians, but there's a whole bunch of you who are. I am, and I hail directly from John 137. It's kind of like when you go up into Minnesota, if you've ever been there, if you follow the Mississippi River far enough, it's just like this tiny little nothing, like the tiny little brook that you can easily straddle. The headwaters of the Mississippi look completely inconsequential. But then you go down to the Gulf of Mexico. I'm sorry, the Gulf of America, I don't know what to call it. Like if the two years from now, will I need to come back and edit this and change it back to? I don't know. You know the Gulf, the big gulf. You can't straddle it down there. It's the mighty, muddy Mississippi. It's the most voluminous river on the continent. It's incredible. Well, it's kind of how I feel about this. You know, this is the headwaters of the entire Christian church right here. It sounds like nothing. When the two disciples heard him say this, they followed Jesus. There you go. Well, it's going to look a lot different by the time he gets to the Gulf, by the time he gets to you and me. So again, turning around, Jesus saw them and following and he asked, you know, what do you want? They said, Rabbi, where are you staying? Come, he replied, and you will see. So they went and saw where he was staying and spent that day with him. It was about the tenth hour. I think this is an important detail that we get here in verse 39. They went and saw where he was staying, and they spent the day with him. Well, where was he staying? If this was indeed uh you know, the Bethany beyond the Jordan that we were picturing, that being a few miles north of the Dead Sea, if this is indeed the Bethany beyond the Jordan that the Bordeaux pilgrims went and visited in the 330s A.D., then there probably wasn't a lot out there. I mean, it's entirely possible that where Jesus is staying is in a little valley on a little hill somewhere. Maybe there's like a little tent or like a little blanket with some sticks holding up the blanket, and that's it. I can't imagine it was terribly impressive, especially since they got there by the tenth hour, which is like 4 p.m. late afternoon. So, you know, we'd have to walk a really long ways to get to civilization here. So I think they're probably camping, which means they spent time together walking to wherever it was Jesus was staying, and then it looks like they spent time together through the rest of the day and presumably into the next day. What happened during that time? Well, I kind of think that what happened during that time was a little bit like what happened if you just go back in my Bible, like three pages to the end of Luke. So, you know, obviously the end of Luke is the end of Jesus' ministry. He's been crucified, he's been risen again. And right at the very end of Luke in Luke 24, he encounters again a couple of disciples who don't totally get it on the road to Emmaus, and they're sad because Jesus is gone and they don't recognize him, they don't expect somebody to come back to life, I guess. And Jesus listens to him and interacts with them a little bit, and then he spells it out. And then it says in verse 27, and beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the scriptures concerning himself. And then again, Jesus reconnects with his disciples a few paragraphs later, right at the very end of Luke, and he tells them, This is what I told you while I was still with you. Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms. Then he opened their minds so they can understand the scriptures. In a way, what we're seeing there at the end of Luke is kind of the other book end of what we're seeing here on the front end of John. There's two disciples, they don't really understand what's going on, they didn't really recognize Jesus when they saw him. It took a little nudging and prodding for them to connect the dots and be like, whoa, that's Jesus, that's the Son of God. But then they sit down together, and it looks, you know, there's probably like a meal involved, they go into a home, and there's time for Jesus to spell it out. How do I know Jesus spelled it out? Well, because tomorrow we're going to look at the reaction of the disciples after they've had just half a day or part of a day's interaction with Jesus. That's more than enough for them to say, Whoa, I know who I'm interacting with here, and this changes everything. We'll talk about that. Manana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Club.