JOHN102 - Not Quite My Tempo

John 2:3-4

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And did you ever see the uh that Whiplash movie with the guy from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? And that he's the farmer's guy, like from the farmers insurance ads, J.K. Simmons. I think that's right. He's got a great voice. He's a funny actor. I really like him. Oh, he's he's uh Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man universe. He's the news guy. In this movie Whiplash, there's this delightful scene where he's trying to get this prodigy drummer at his musical conservatory to be on the part of the beat that he wants him to be on. They both want to make music, they both want it to sound awesome, but this conductor, this music teacher, is like, no, there's multiple parts of the beat. There's the front end of the beat, and then there's like the middle of the beat, playing it square, but then there's kind of the back end of the beat, and he it's almost imperceptible as a viewer to figure out what the difference is between their vision for the music, but the drummer is not quite where the conductor, where the teacher of J.K. Simmons character wants him to be. So there's just this delightful thing where time and again it sounds pretty much right to you. It seems like we're on the same page, but then the conductor is like, nope, nope, not quite my tempo. Run it again. Nope, stop. Nope, nope, not quite my tempo. And like you feel the anxiety build as you watch it. Uh I don't, it's been a while since I've seen the show, as is the case with all shows that I mention on this program. I don't recommend anything. All shows are bad. Don't watch any shows. They're all bad. And if you do watch them, it's totally not my fault when bad things happen. But like that scene in Whiplash where both characters want to do something beautiful here, and they really are pushing in the same direction. Only one of the two characters has total clarity and vision for what that is. Like that, in John chapter two, both of the main characters in view, Jesus and his mother, are trying to make something beautiful here. They want to do something great. She wants people to see the glory of her son. Maybe a little bit also. She wants people to be like, You were right all along, Mary. You've been telling us, and you were right. Maybe I wouldn't falter, blame her for that if that were the case. But we get this little exchange. When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, They have no more wine. Dear woman, why do you involve me? Jesus replied, My time has not yet come. Not quite my tempo, Mary. Jesus doesn't just verbally nuke her or disrespect her, in my opinion. They're moving in basically the same direction, but she's not quite in time with him. And much like Miles Teller's character in Whiplash, she doesn't understand why she's not quite in time with him. He's got the clearer vision for how this beautiful thing is to be made. So we feel tension intuitively here between two people who are working on the same thing, but the one who's in the following position isn't quite following the tempo of the one who's in the lead position. We started talking about this yesterday. We're gonna get into the deeper water with it today. I'm gonna have my friend Jeff play some music, and then we're just gonna keep rolling with the conversation. Here we go. This is the next step in the conversation here that causes me to say Jesus isn't being disrespectful. Jesus knows his mom really well. And they're having a shorthand conversation here between two people who know each other very well. And it doesn't look like they have to waste a lot of words buttering each other up or trying to frame the pitch a certain way, like, oh, hey, I'm very sorry to bother you. I know you have a lot going on right now, but I did see a thing, and I just wondered, you know, like if for you, if it there's none of that cloying, groveling, so sorry to bother language. Like she's his mom, and she walks up, she's like, they have no more wine. Jesus, who is a man of age in this culture, is more than comfortable saying, okay, I'll put my hands on the wheel here and make decisions. Uh noted, also, mom, we're playing two different games here. Uh, how many times in your life, no matter who you are, if you're blessed enough to know or have known one or both of your parents and have done some life with them, or if you've been blessed enough to do you all of your life with them, how many times with the parent of the opposite sex? So if you're a boy, your mom, if you're a girl, your dad, have you had a shorthand conversation like this where they're quickly trying to communicate to you as a parent kind of what they see, maybe even as an adult parent? Like, hey, there's an opportunity here. Like, hey, that young lady's looking at you. You might want to, you know, that they see something and they're trying to nudge you because they're good parents. But you're playing a different game. You're doing something, you're reading the room differently, you're doing something different, and you have to be like, Mom, okay, thank you. But my mind is over here. I'm trying to accomplish this other thing. Yeah, give me a second. Come on. We've all had those kinds of conversations. My kids respect me enormously, but even as kids who are still more or less in the household, still, there are moments where they're, you know, I can tell my feedback isn't on the same page with their objectives for the moment. We're trying to accomplish different things. And usually my feedback is just, oh, go do it. You can do it. I believe in you. Oh, you could really, you could really shine here. I'm trying to push them to the forefront. Like I want to have that, you know, he-man catharsis moment. Look, I told you this kid was great. But sometimes they see a different thing that needs to be accomplished in that social situation, the situation, whatever it is. That is the dynamic that I see here. And so it pains me when I from time to time read or hear people suggest that Jesus didn't maybe like his mom that much because of how curt this exchange is. There's this whole tension, and we're going to keep unpacking it, but historically, somewhere in the mid-second century, we start to pick up the trail of people heavily venerating Mary, some of them even as a perpetual virgin. Now, I don't think that's what the Bible teaches about here. I mean, the Bible, I think, clearly says that Mary and Joseph did not have relations with each other until after the birth of Jesus. But there are other traditions, particularly the very ancient traditions that have grown and evolved into other things. The Catholics, the Orthodox. They're like, no, no, no. That through line is right. Okay, I disagree with them. That really irritates some Catholic and Orthodox types and some Protestants who hold to the same. Others are pretty chill about it and they're like, okay, well, maybe I see it the way you do. But here's why it matters. We're not sorting out the perpetual virginity of Mary or what level of veneration Mary deserves in this podcast at all. Here's why it matters for you as a Bible reader, because the noise and the chatter around passages in the Bible goes to from like a two to a 10 when certain hot button issues come up that different groups of Christians feel very strongly about and that have had their feelings hurt over in conversations with people who they think are dullards and aren't respecting or understanding their position. Mary's stuff is supposed to be beautiful throughout the Bible. You're supposed to look at it and be like, what an amazing woman. Look at the role she played, look at what she did, look at her relationship with her son. However you frame it, it's supposed to be a happy thing when Mary's around, but there's enough historic tension over it. And some people have been dullards and dopes and how they've talked about this and have just been mean and vindictive. And as a result, sometimes it's not a happy thing when passages involving Mary come up. I think that is a pity. I could maybe do a video about the top 10 passages or topics in the Bible that are supposed to be happy, but are ruined by us fighting with each other for a long time. This might be number one. So here's what the deal is some people in like the 16th century in particular look at what and 17th century and then Baptists on my continent later look at the levels of veneration for Mary that are happening within Christianity and they say it's too much. I agree. I think at times it has been too much and crossed over from veneration toward things that look biblically like worship and just practically like worship. So there's full disclosure. That's where I come down. But where I do not agree is the stupid Twitter-like overreactions that happen in the conversation about Mary. So some people look at some of the veneration of Mary that maybe what they would call accretions or things that are added over the centuries to Christian theology, and they go, that's not a good idea. And instead of just being like, that's not a good idea, and Mary is awesome, they take shots at Mary to support their theology, like cheap shots, weird from like just dumb stuff. I think it's tacky. I think it's a bad look. I think it's unnecessarily provocative. And I think it's dishonoring to, I mean, if you believe Jesus is God in the flesh, and that is what the Bible is teaching, it's dishonoring to the mother of God. Now, a lot of times Protestants don't want to use that language, evangelicals don't want to use that language, because that language, Theotokos, Mother of God, sounds loaded. It sounds like you are trying to elevate Mary, maybe even above God. And I do think that's some of the clumsiness of that language. So there's kind of two ways to use it. You could say mother of God as an attempt to elevate Mary to a position of veneration. But come on, we have eyeballs. Look at practices that have happened around the world and still happen today. Worship. It happens. Some people cross that line very carelessly. Other people ride that line a little bit better. But sometimes the phrase mother of God is used to, I think, inappropriately elevate Mary. But other times the exact same phrase is an affirmation of Mary's awesomeness that also affirms Christ's deity, the second person of the Trinity. He is God in the flesh, in which case, was Mary the mother of God. Well, do you think Jesus is God? Well, then, yeah. There is so much more that we can get into with this. But I guess what I'm driving at is that I'm trying to get everybody up to speed and on the same page here to just acknowledge there is an existing tension here that affects how people talk about this passage and how people interpret it. There are people who have a preconceived bias to say Mary is kind of intrinsically automatically right about things. And what Mary is doing here is using her unique access to Jesus to get him to do something that he otherwise wasn't going to do. And those same people would tend to say, and you can pray to her, though she is a person, an elevated person, you can pray to her across the divide of death, and she will use that same special, unique access to Jesus on your behalf. To I'm not being super charitable here, but this is what it is, to try to get Jesus to do things that he might otherwise not have done if you just asked on your own. So some people are gonna come to this text and be like, this is beautiful because this passage shows how Mary can go to Jesus and get him to do stuff that he wasn't gonna do otherwise. Other people are gonna react really hard the other way and say, no, this passage demonstrates that she didn't get it and their relationship was even a little bit strained over this. Now, in support of that idea, is that we do get some accounts, one in particular, of Mary and the rest of the family showing up in Matthew chapter 12. I turned right to it again. I'm on fire. Matthew chapter 12. While the Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside wanting to speak to him. So they didn't even come in. Someone told him, Your mother and brothers are standing outside wanting to speak to you. He replied to them, Who's my mother and who are my brothers? Pointing to his disciples, who said, Here are my mother and my brothers, for whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. So other people are going to look at this passage and be like, Yeah, Mary was great, but she was like everybody. She wavered on things. And those other people, by the way, like to some extent, this is me. Mary was great, but she wavered like every other character in the Gospels in relation to Jesus. Kind of looks like maybe she was there to collect him, to protect him from himself. His response certainly is not warm. He doesn't just go right out at her beckoning and do that. So we kind of have two examples here in terms of like, does Mary get special access to Jesus and get to tell him to do things? On the one hand, people will look at John 2 and be like, yeah, look, it wasn't even his time. He didn't intend to do it, and then she came and said, do it. And he was like, okay, then he did it, you know, if a bit discreetly, and the water turned into wine. That's kind of almost a Mary miracle, even though it used the power of Jesus. Mary's the, you know, the engine behind that. I don't think that's the best interpretation of the passage, but people think it. Okay, on the other hand, though, you've got an example of Mary showing up in Matthew chapter 12 and being like, go let him know I'm out here. Like in the middle of a speech. He's in there talking to crowds and stuff. And not only is there no indication that he does what she says, but also it sounds like there's a bit of a rebuff there. Okay, just like yesterday, we have arrived at another inflection point. A place where I could, on the one hand, just keep going with the next important, like deep, weighty thing that might step on toes or be awkward. Or we can just hit pause there and pick up where we left off. And obviously, if you're if I'm saying this, we're gonna hit pause so that you got a little time to digest, and then we can pick things up next time around and kind of land the plane on the biases that I'm bringing to this passage. I want to finish disclosing that and laying it out for you so you can take that into account. I also want to go a little bit further down the rabbit hole of the tension between the two big historic positions on this text as it pertains to the relationship between Jesus and his mother, and you know, kind of flesh out just a little bit more the different layers and how something as simple as, well, how do you read this conversation? What's the dynamic here? I want to flesh out a little more how that has a ripple effect theologically into how you think about a bunch of other stuff regarding the Bible and how you live out church and Christian faith. So this is kind of a unique little mini arc we're doing here with John chapter two, verses three and four, but I think it's important. And I also think it's gonna bring us with a clean slate to the actual miracle that is about to happen so we can appreciate it the way John is appreciating it and receive it the way John wants us to receive it, to point to the glory of Jesus. I mean, this is supposed to be celebratory and awesome, and I think we're in the process of earning that right now. We'll finish that earning process tomorrow. Thanks for trusting me to talk with you about delicate things that good people from multiple perspectives feel strongly about. I am grateful to you. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.