JOHN115 - Where Are You From, and Where Do You Suppose Jesus Said He Was From When People Asked?

John 2:12

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and I have a question for you that I can't possibly hear the answer to, though I would be interested if we were hanging out in person. This is something I always ask everybody, and maybe it's an old person question that I inherited from generations before me, but I really like to know. There's a reason I always get around to asking this question. That question is, where are you from? Now, this sounds very simple on the surface, right? Where are you from? Well, you just say what city you currently live in. Yeah, but that doesn't quite work because sometimes if you're from far away, nobody knows where that is, right? Depending on how far afield I am in my travels, I you know, the further away from home I get, when people ask me where I'm from, the more I reduce the specificity. So when I lived in Colorado growing up, people would say, you know, where are you from? Um, Colorado or like Denver area. Oh, it's from Fort Collins. Those of you who know know that's like an hour away. But also, if you run into somebody in France and they ask you that, it's close enough. It gets the point across. Then there's another level of confusion or challenge to the question here, and that is, well, what do you mean by where am I from? Like, where am I from from? Or where do I live right now and have lived recently? There are a bunch of you right now who were struggling with how you'd answer this question, because you're like, well, my heart is in Iowa, or my heart is in Georgia, but I live in Las Vegas or whatever it might be. And Las Vegas, by the way, is the number one place where I heard people not answer the question locally, almost all of them, except my buddy Shelby, who's like legitimately from Las Vegas. He's old school, he's grandfathered in here. But pretty much everybody else, when they answered that question, they would talk about where they used to be from. And I think the reason that would come up that way is because people want to tell you, you know, a little bit about who they are. And if somebody is from Georgia, but now they live in Kansas City, well, the Georgia thing carries with it a lot of the DNA. Here's the point in all. Well, one of the points is that it's just fun to talk about these things that make us human and that we all wrestle with from time to time, but never really discuss. So that's one reason. Another reason that I wanted to bring this up is because it would be an interesting question to ask Jesus. Where are you from? I mean, I suppose he could answer that question a few different ways, right? Way number one would be Bethlehem. That's where he was born. Okay, but for a lot of us, where we were born isn't really what makes us. It's not where we grew up. You know, we might be more inclined to say where we grew up. And it doesn't look like Jesus had a lot of connections with Bethlehem family-wise, beyond his birth. We don't see him really back there a whole bunch or anything. So if you ask Jesus where you're from, he might say Egypt. Weird, right? But that's where he grew up, at least for a good chunk of very early and some formative years. He was in Egypt. Well, we know that you know, by the time he was a preteen, he was solidly back in Galilee in Nazareth. So I guess if you asked Jesus where you're from, he'd probably say Nazareth. I mean, that's what we call him, right? Jesus of Nazareth. And we didn't just make that up. I mean, that's what he's called. But I suppose also if you asked him during most of his public ministry, he might say Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, because that was kind of his home base. That's where some of his disciples were from, and that's where he operated out of quite a bit. Further, if you ask Jesus, where you're from, and you know, the context lent itself to it, he might say, Well, I'm from my father's house, which is the temple, which I mean he mentions quite a bit, that being basically his dad's place. So, in the same way that for most of you, the very simple question, where you from, is actually a pretty complicated question. So, with Jesus, I think that's a question that has a lot of layers to it. And the verse we've been looking at the last couple of days raises this question: where's Jesus from? Specifically in the form of why are you going to Capernaum when you were already so close to Nazareth, which theoretically is where you grew up and where you at least you did most of your growing up and where you would call home. All right. So, in order to make sense of this, we got a two things. Number one, I got to read the verse to you. Number two, while I'm reading this verse, if you have a pen or something you can write with handy and a sheet of paper, I'm gonna try to describe a map to you, and I want you to draw it, and I think it'll be real fun. You know, since this isn't a visual medium, I think this little map that we're about to make together is gonna give us uh an easy, shared reference point when we're talking about geography through the rest of the Gospel of John. All right, so here we go. Here's a verse John 2, 12. After this, he, Jesus, went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days. Okay, we've been hung up on this verse because of the brothers thing. I've heard from a lot of you about that. Literally everybody has been charitable, even in telling me what I'm missing. And so thank you all for just being cool. And I mean, whatever, wherever the passages take us, right? That's where we go. Well, this passage now takes us to Capernaum, apparently. Let's find this on a map. Here's what I want you to do. On the bottom half of this map, right in the middle of your paper, I'm assuming like an eight and a half by 11 normal orient, you know, uh you know, vertically oriented sheet of paper here. I just want you to draw a long, very skinny oval. I'm just giving you a clue. This is going to be the Dead Sea. Long, skinny, north-south oval. Just whip that thing out. Okay, you got that? Now I want you to draw a line right out of the top of that oval, straight up, you know, close to the length of the oval. It's okay if it's not exactly perfect, just a straight line. And up at the top of that straight line, I want you to draw a circle, nearly perfect circle that's about the same width as your oval down below. Are you still with me? This is what it should look like. Your paper should have a long, skinny oval that takes up the lower 50% in terms of the vertical space. Then it should have a line coming out with a circle at the top. Your drawing right now should look like a children's drawing of someone with a vastly undersized torso, a crazy oversized neck, and then a head way up on the top of that neck. Okay, you got it? Now we're gonna do a little labeling. We're gonna figure this out. Okay, I'd already told you the big long skinny oval, we're gonna call that the I'm doing it too, dead sea. Great. Also, if you want to just somewhere in the negative space, you can just throw like uh an arrow pointing up to the top of the page and write an N under it because that's your north orientation. Okay. The circle at the top is the Sea of Galilee or the Sea of Tiberias. Tiberius was an emperor very early on in the time of the Roman Empire. He's the guy who is emperor when Jesus is crucified, and that particular body of water got renamed after him. There is still a town on the Sea of Galilee called uh Tiberias. It's the big town on the Sea of Galilee. Okay, now we're gonna label that line, the neck in between. That's the Jordan River. A lot of you probably already have that written in there. Okay, we have our simplified map. All right, now we got to put a few points on here, and uh we're just gonna do these in order. So, right at the top of your Dead Sea, go just past the top of the north end of the Dead Sea and just to the right of the Jordan River, make a little dot and label that number one. Number one is gonna be baptism site. You got it? Okay, cool. Now, number two for this one, I want you to go all the way up to the Sea of Galilee, the circle, the children's drawing of the head, and I want you to go straight west or left from the nine o'clock position. I just go like one width of the Sea of Galilee west and make a little dot there right in the middle. Label that number two. That is going to be Cana. That's where the wedding is happening. All right, still with me? Now for dot number three, I want you to go to 12 o'clock, maybe like 1130 on the Sea of Galilee and make a dot, like a big freckle or mole coming right off the top of that bald dude's head at 1130. So just almost exactly at the top of the Sea of Galilee, and we're gonna call that Capernaum. Um, there we go. All right, now we're gonna do a fourth dot. I want you to go back down right to the very top of the Dead Sea, and I want you to go west or left, about as far as you went for Cana, you know, one Sea of Galilee, amount west. We're labeling that one Jerusalem. And now, just for good measure, I want you to go back up to dot number two, Cana, and just go like a third of the Sea of Galilee straight south from there, and that's Nazareth. Okay, we got it. We've never done anything like this before, but I think we've had fun. Hopefully your map looks something like mine. Why does this matter? Well, because we got a curious travel itinerary going on with Jesus here, where it seems like he starts a long ways south, gets some disciples, and if John's account is to be taken as successive, you know, there's a pretty tight timeline, he then travels like, I don't know, maybe 60 miles, pretty good trip over there to dot number two, which is Cana. Now, from Cana, the next big important stop on his journey is dot number four, Jerusalem. Are you looking at your map right now? If you didn't make the map because you were running on a treadmill or you know, mowing the lawn or whatever, I'm just gonna spell this out. I'm gonna spell this out for all of you at once. It doesn't make a lot of sense for Jesus to dip over to Capernaum and then go down to Jerusalem. It would make more sense for him to go straight from the wedding at Cana down to Jerusalem. But instead, he goes down the mountain because Cana is higher in elevation than the Sea of Galilee. He goes down the mountain, and for some reason, he goes to this seemingly insignificant little town on the north end of the Sea of Galilee. It only gets one, you know, I guess you count it as two verses of time there. We don't really hear about anything that happens other than Jesus stays there for a few days. So then we got this question that's outstanding. Instead of going straight south of Jerusalem, why are you doing this very significant detour to Capernaum if you're only gonna stay there for a couple of days? Well, next time around, we're gonna work through the answer to that question. And I think it's really going to help us get our bearings here in the Gospel of John. It's also gonna raise some questions about the way John organizes his story and how much John's account of Jesus' life tends to dip back south into Judea, like you know, Jerusalem and the Dead Sea area, compared to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who tend to keep most of their story up north, closer to the Sea of Galilee and Capernaum. It is noteworthy that these little towns we're talking about, like Nazareth and Cana and Capernaum, are not a huge deal. They would be about ten thousandth on the list of places you would expect the Messiah of the world to come from in the first century AD. And I'm I might be being a little bit generous there. Certainly, to an original audience member who's thinking in the grand cosmopolitan sense of great big Roman Empire, they'd be like, What an odd itinerary. What are you doing? But in this itinerary, we get a little bit of a sense of how Jesus is thinking about home and the answer to the question, where are you from? Nazareth is just right there. But at least at this point, he doesn't duck down into Nazareth. He goes out of his way to Capernaum and then down to Jerusalem. And next time around, we'll read between the lines of what this unusual itinerary means. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.