JOHN101 - “See, I Told You It Was Real!”

John 2:1-4

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And I got a couple things I I have to tell you on the front end. It's important for the context of the program. One, my son is unloading bags of dirt from my big, rusty, awesome old work truck right behind me, and it's making a bunch of noise. And I thought about going out there and being like, Vlad, don't you know I'm making a self-important podcast for literally dozens of people? But then I thought, or I could just let him do it, and we could just hear the sound of a young man improving his work ethic and contributing to his household. And I could not get in the way of my kid when he's absolutely crushing it, and he's got his earbuds in and he's locked in and he's in the workflow. You don't mess with that, man. You just you leave it alone. So you're gonna hear some racket in the background, maybe a wheelbarrow. I think that's awesome. Thing number two, we need to talk about on the front end. Dang, I must have pulled a thread with all of you on the whole thing about my time is not yet come. Because I thought that at the end of our last conversation about Kevin Costner being Clark Kent's dad, he waved off Superman. It was like, no, your time has not yet come. And I thought, there, we kind of, you know, we covered that. We'll get to that more as we get through John because that theme keeps repeating, and we'll get on to the relationship between Mary and Jesus. But I heard back from more of you about the whole Clark Kent, what is like, why is time not yet come? Let's go further down that road. So now I got a conundrum, I got a bona fide, fork in the road, where I can do what I promised and press forward with the miracle and the dynamic between Jesus and Mary, or I can take the path that you nudged me toward, which is tackle more of that stuff about the time has not yet come motif that runs through the whole Bible. And I have decided for once to just stay with my plan and move forward with my thing. Know this, my friends, there is give and take in this podcast. I hear from a lot of you every day in one format or another. I don't always catch all of that, but a lot of times you raise great questions, and I appreciate everybody's feedback. And ultimately, I decided we're gonna take both forks in the road. We're just gonna do one and then we're gonna do the other. All right, that's way too much on the front end. Whatever. It's nice to catch up. It's been a weekend for me. Here we are. We're back together. Lovely times. I went and saw the new live action He-Man last week or a couple weeks ago, which as I'm recording this, everybody's making fun of. I don't know why. As my buddy Destin put it to me before he took his kids to go see it, he was like, It seems like the internet wants me to hate this movie, so I want to give it a chance. I'm like, dude, that's why we're friends. I like the way you think, man. If the internet is trying to tell me to feel a certain way, like you know, lefty internet, righty internet, what it whatever, if it's trying to tell me to feel a certain way, it just kind of makes me curious. Like, well, what do I make of this for myself? So I felt the same vibe as Destin, and I went to the movie, and it was really stinking funny. Then it made fun of a whole bunch of the tropes from old school cartoons. So I look, I don't know why they made the movie. I'm not sure it made a lot of sense, but it was so much better than people thought. And I laughed out loud a whole bunch of times. And one of the things, the the tropes that they made fun of that I just delighted in, we're gonna talk for a little longer today, by the way. It's just you can, you know, me, I know you, you can tell when it's gonna be a little bit longer day. So, you know, buckle up. The one of the tropes that I liked in this show was, you know, in like fantasy movies, especially like for young men, where the fantasy that the young man is supposed to relate to with the male character on screen is he looks like a normal guy, people underestimate him, but he has the heart of a hero. There's something secret about him. I mean, this is everything, right? I mean, this is Harry Potter and Percy Jackson and I don't know, all the young adult things. And yeah, it totally gets a little tired. But I get why this genre exists, and I get why it appeals to a kid, to a boy, to a young man. Because it's like there's more to me than you see. I just don't know how to wield my power yet, but there's something to me. And then on these, you know, fantasies, the kids get swept away on this wild ride to like a magical land with powers where they really matter and people see their value, but then always there's this yearning to go back to the world you knew and get the people who were there and be like, see, like I wasn't lying. There really is something. I really did see the magical creature, I really did venture into this realm of magic, or you know, whatever the thing is. Well, in this movie, they just straight up do it. Yes, I'm just going to spoil one joke. You can fast forward 10 seconds if you really care about the He-Man movie. But there's there's this one joke where there's this guy who's like, I don't think probably you are from a mystical realm. And he's like, No, I totally am. And then in the end, for no reason, he's like, just brings the guy there and he's like, Look, see? And the guy's like, Wow, you really were telling the truth. And it was so funny to me. There's so many layers to that joke and that trope that had to be set up for it to work, and that's what I feel like is going on emotionally for Mary in John chapter two, and maybe a couple of the disciples in the background as well. There's no evidence of that. I'm just talking about human nature. We're at this wedding at Cana. Mary has known since before anybody, like Elizabeth and Zechariah. Remember, we talked about them, the parents of John the Baptist, who's just a touch older than Jesus. They kind of knew stuff about their own son and kind of connected the dots with Jesus. But Mary was the first to really know this is happening. The culminating person, the culminating moment in God's redemptive plan is here. And I'm gonna be the mother of God in the flesh. I mean, she gets it. That language in the Magnificat in Luke that she poetically uses to respond to the angel when she gets the message and says, May it be unto me as you have said. I mean, it indicates a deep knowledge of who Jesus is and who he's going to be. Now, she's still a person. I think we do see a little bit of fluctuation in her understanding of what that means. John the Baptist fluctuates and wobbles in his understanding of who Jesus is and what he's doing. All the disciples do the same. Matthew seems to acknowledge that at the end of Matthew, like everybody's really excited, but some doubted. John is very open about the fact that there was doubt. James and John look like dopes at times in the Bible, as we've discussed. Peter looks like a dope constantly in the Bible, as we've discussed. Look, everybody, it's no shade to Mary, that she wobbles a little bit like everybody else. This is a hard concept. I don't know why we would be surprised that it was a little difficult for even people who were seeing these miracles happening and seeing his authority and hearing the way he taught. I don't think there's any reason for us to be surprised that it was hard for them in real time to totally register what was going on or understand the ground rules of it, especially because he kept saying, My time has not yet come, and he'd give them a little bit more, but then withhold his full glory. Again, that's the other fork in the road. We'll go and talk about that in a few episodes or whatever. So you could understand it if Mary, mother of Jesus, who's been seeing who he is for a very long time and knows uh what he's supposed to, it's been miraculously confirmed. And so she's she's got her antenna out for that for Jesus' whole life, and she's like, here it is, here it is. Now, I don't know if she'd uh ever seen anything miraculous since uh his birth. I mean, I would think the moment at the end of Luke in the temple when he's just a young boy, but he's uh teaching the religious leaders who later them and their descendants would kill him. I mean, maybe that was enough for her to say that just doesn't happen. That's that's a miracle, that's supernatural. Maybe she saw other stuff, maybe she is still gliding along on the blast of wind put into the sails of her faith by the visit from the angel and by the virgin birth. And even though you know it's 30 years later, she's just like that was plenty. She is convinced, and so you could understand if, in light of all of that, she would be at this wedding and just be on pins and needles to have Jesus show the thing. Maybe a couple of these disciples. We know they got like that later. Maybe they're like, do the thing. But she comes up. We speculated about what the conversation might have looked like yesterday. She comes up and she's like, Hey, they have no more wine. And then it looks like we get a grumpy rebuff from Jesus. I don't think it's like that. Dear woman, why do you involve me? Jesus replied, My time has not yet come. Now, there's another seemingly grumpy rebuff that we get from Jesus to a woman in Matthew 15. Oh, I turned right there. That was great. Page turn, Whitman. That's one for the ages. I need to mark that and put it in my little audio trophy case of great moments in the history of the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. There's this lady, they call her a Syrophoenician woman, and Jesus has gone up north to kind of get away from the hubbub. We'll talk about why he was always trying to get away from the hubbub when we get to that other fork in the road later. And she comes up and she's saying to him, Lord, son of David, have mercy on me. My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession. And Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us. He answered, I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel. But then the woman came up and knelt before him. Lord help me, she said. He replied, It's not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs. Yes, Lord, she said, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. Then Jesus answered, Woman, you have great faith. Your request is granted. And her daughter was healed from that very hour. Now when I did season one of this podcast back a few years ago on Matthew, we did a deep dive on this because it is like maybe one of the two passages where it looks the most like Jesus is just kind of randomly being a jerk to a woman. He is not. First of all, he's using the same address in both places. Dear woman, why do you involve me? Or woman, why do you involve me? That's in John 2. In Matthew 15. Woman, you have great faith. To what can I liken the use of the word woman here?

unknown 11:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:04

Have you ever gone to Texas Roadhouse? And have you ever listened a little bit to the words in the background of all of those songs? And if you ever hear a song that starts with anytime you got snaps and claps from a country song that a dude's gonna sing in the last 20 years, you're gonna hear the word girl. I don't know why they do it. I don't think anybody actually talks like that in the country, but wowie are those country music artists really committed to using girl that way. I think for most of us, we just kind of shrug at it. And it's like, yeah, in that in that style of communication, this is a thing that is used. But we also have hey, hey man, what's up, man? Like I use that all the time, right? That's not derogatory. There's another place where we just use the gender of the person as an address to the person. And if I was like, hey man, you might think, oh, that wasn't very formal toward that person. You could have been more formal, but I don't think anybody would be like, oh, that's so rude and disrespectful. Why would you use that phrase? So times change and things morph. I just don't see any offense here. I don't at all. I think what we're seeing here is a first century Galilean convention for how you would address a woman of age. The reason that I think this is the case is because in both of these examples that people point to and say, That's where Jesus was kind of mean. You've got somebody who, like the He-Man thing, sees in Jesus there's something more to you. I see it. A Syrophoenician woman. Maybe she'd heard stuff, maybe she listened to him teach, maybe she just watched for a long time. I don't know, but she was right and Jesus affirmed it. Mary, she could see it. She knew that he was special. I I mean, I have my guesses as to how she knew, but at the very least, you know, the angel showed up in the virgin birth, like we talked about a minute ago. For both of them, there seems to be this sense of, I see what's behind there, I know this is real, I have a sense of who you are. Well, and it doesn't just affect them. They have a concern for it being made manifest in their lives in front of other people. In the case of the Syrophoenician woman with her daughter, in the case of Mary, I think people just like you know, any good mom, she wanted people to see what was special and awesome about her son. See, I told you so. Okay, okay, okay. Uh, programming note right here. So in my brain, I know everything I want to talk about here on a topic that I think is a little more loaded than it gets credit for, the dynamic between Jesus and his mother here. And we're just about to get to the part where I begin to peel back the layers on where it gets sticky and where Christians disagree. And I don't think I want to quite pop open that can of worms until tomorrow. I don't want to leave you with it overnight. So we're gonna pause here. I am just gonna keep going and immediately record the next part of the conversation here. And we're just gonna unpack this thing. And over the next couple days, we are going to be incredibly honest about how Christians see this differently. I am going to disclose what I see going on here relationally and what the implications of that are. And if all of this just sounds terribly cryptic to you and you're like, I don't know, I'm just learning about the Bible for this first time, what are you talking about? You're acting like I should know. Don't worry, it's all going to come into focus. So we're hitting pause there. I think we can do so saying safely that no matter how anybody comes at this particular passage, a reasonable person could look at it and say, this is a mom who's proud of her kid. She thinks that he is something very special. She is right in that. And like most good moms, she wants to press the gas pedal on people, seeing what she sees in him. Even though Jesus seems to have a different way that he intends to come at it. More on that tomorrow, Flo, and right into the next part of the conversation. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.