JOHN117 - Capernaum: Jesus’ Base of Operations

John 2:12

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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You know how you just intuitively know the difference between Hollywood, California and Cherokee, Iowa? It's okay if you don't know where Cherokee, Iowa is, you've never been there. Just picture a small town in farming community in Iowa, right? And you know, you know how in your brain, you can just feel the differences. You can imagine the differences climate-wise, even if you've never been to either of these two towns, you can imagine the differences culturally. You can imagine the difference in topography and what the rhythms of life might be like there. You just know if you're a citizen of planet Earth right now, and if I wanted to tell you a story about small town Iowa and go into the big city of Hollywood, California, you wouldn't need me to explain a lot about those two places. You would just get it. Likewise, John in his gospel is assuming, I think very reasonably, that his audience has a bit of an understanding of what the feel of Galilee, especially northern Galilee, would be like compared to the feel of big city Jerusalem down south. But for you and me, that feel is not as natural. We don't know as much about the ancient world as the ancient snoo. And so we look back on it and we tend to think of it all as pretty primitive and stinky, and it's like one kind of primitive and stinky versus another kind of primitive and stinky. But that's not how the original audience would have thought about it at all. Capernaum meant something different than Jerusalem meant. And the travel itineraries and the movement of Jesus between the communities he was involved in meant something. So starting yesterday and concluding today, we're putting a little bit of effort into understanding Capernaum and what it's about and why it matters. And at this time, I'm going to have my close personal friend Jeffrey play us some music, and then we'll pick up where we left off yesterday. They want everybody to see that they were right and Jesus was right all along. And Jesus says, you know, it's not for you to know the day or the hour, but what is your job is to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. What Jesus commissions his people to go and do is to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the whole Trinity. And indeed, that's how baptisms still work all the way to this day. So Jesus is laying the groundwork from the very beginning of his ministry, the groundwork that is for this being a global thing. And Capernaum is a great place to do that. It is, first of all, very, very Jewish. They had a synagogue, which is a very big deal. These were expensive to make and to maintain. The synagogue was kind of like an outpost during exilic Judaism. So when Babylon conquered Judea and Jerusalem in 586 BC, and then after that, you know, Persia took over and defeated the Babylonians a few decades later. During this era that we call the exile era, 500-ish years before the birth of Jesus, you got scattered Jews all over the place. Well, what are they supposed to do? They don't have a temple they can go back to. How are they supposed to stay dialed in on the scriptures after the reforms of Nehemiah and Ezra? Well, synagogues crop up as an answer to that. There are public readings of the scriptures, there's reflection and discussion of that, and there's a whole culture that builds up around it. Now, these aren't many temples, they aren't doing Jerusalem sacrifices at the synagogues, but they are a place of public reading and reflection. And according to the Gospel of Luke, there was actually a Gentile in Capernaum, a centurion who comes into play in that gospel who helped fund the building of the Capernaum synagogue. That's a gigantic deal. And so the people of Capernaum, the Jewish people there, are actually sympathetic to the guy who is leading the Roman occupation of their community. Isn't that fascinating? And in Luke chapter 4, Jesus gets up and reads again from the great scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He reads stuff about the Messiah and what the Messiah will bring about. And then he says, Today this is fulfilled in your hearing. In other words, I am the fulfillment of this. And of course, people at this synagogue get real grumpy about it, but of course, that's also on the front end of Jesus' ministry. So their grumpiness doesn't result in Jesus' execution until much later on. Maybe you could argue the seeds of that anger toward Jesus were planted that very day in that synagogue, funded by that Gentile, that caused the discontent that grew all the way into Jesus' execution at the hands of the religious leadership. You can still go to Capernaum today and get a pretty dang good sense of it. The town lasted for a thousand-ish years after Jesus. It looks like early Christians figured out pretty quick that this is where Peter lived. And Jesus, as a long-term guest in the little domus, the little compound of Peter and his family. People figured out Jesus lived there. Okay, well, that's pretty compelling. I would want to go where Jesus lived. And so excavations over the last 100, 200 years, I don't remember exactly when they started digging up Capernaum, they were able to figure out that all right, there's a grid of a whole bunch of houses that look like normal houses from the first century that are then built up over the next thousand years or so. But there's one house that went into stasis after the first century, and it was cared for meticulously, and then churches got built over the top. And so the very, very strong tradition and the very strong assumption there is that that was the house of Peter. And if you go to Capernaum to this day, you can go and probably walk around the church, the shrine, the kind of museum, it's sort of a combo of all of it, that honors the location of Peter's family's little compound right there on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. And when you're there and you look around the rest of excavated Capernaum, you can kind of start to see the strategic advantage of why Jesus would make this detour to Capernaum, either to check in at Peter's house to make this his home for his first time, or maybe he'd already kind of made this his base of operations and to check back in before going south to Jerusalem. It's strategically sound because one, uh Peter's house is right by the ancient docks, which means, well, um, when you're someone who's constantly accused of being a rebel, and when there are as many scenes in the New Testament as exist where Jesus has to sneak out or pass through a crowd, having the option to leave by water just right out your back door is a really handy thing. Another strategic advantage is that it was just right down the street from the synagogue. And Jesus did a huge percentage of his recorded teaching right in the shadows of that synagogue, in and around Capernaum. Now, the synagogue that you can go and walk through there now, that I've gone and seen with my own eyes and walked through myself, is built over the top of the synagogue funded by the centurion during the time of Jesus, where Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah. But I mean, come on, you're right there. I think it counts, even if most of the ruins that you're looking at there are from the later synagogue. But also you can see the strategic advantage of this place when you go and look at the ancient roads that crisscross everything right there. It's just far enough away from Jerusalem to be inconvenient. It's just far enough away from Tiberias, which was a Roman base of operations on the southwest shore of the Sea of Galilee, to be out of their range and out of their concern. It is also at the intersection of a whole bunch of places in Galilee. And it seemed like there was some interest in messianic things up there. Now, ultimately, Jesus pronounces a curse on a whole lot of these little towns up there for their unbelief, but also people believe from this area. This is where most of the disciples come from. It's also interesting that Capernaum is kind of the big town, but in the middle of a whole bunch of small towns where Jesus taught the stuff that changed the world. I mean, all these famous anecdotes, all these things that everybody remembers, that we got paintings of them, and it captures all of our imagination. Almost all of this stuff is happening in tiny little communities of 1,500 people, 500 people, maybe 2,000 people at the most. The demons that get cast out and Peter's mother-in-law getting healed, the paralytic being healed, the paralytic being lowered down through the ceiling. That's all in Capernaum. The centurion servant being healed as Jesus came down off the Mount of the Beatitudes. That is in Capernaum or right outside the coin in the fish's mouth miracle. Don't worry about it if you don't know all of these things off the top of your head. We'll cover a lot of them as we go along. That's in Capernaum. The stuff about new wine and new wineskins is in oh my goodness, I forgot to cover that. I was totally going to cover the new wine, new wineskins, old wineskins thing. Oh, Matthew, I was going to cover that with the wedding at Canaan. I forgot. Well, I guess we'll get to that later. The stuff about the I am the bread of life, the stuff about the little children and the greatest and least in the kingdom, the first being last, the last being first. I get saw it a couple different places, but in Capernaum, so much happens in this tiny town, and in the tiny little towns around it, you just think about the who's been more influential than Jesus. And it all happened, or so much of it happened here in in just seemingly nowhereville. Now again, I say in the you know, in the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king. In the rural community of northern Galilee, where all the towns are small and poor, the one where a centurion builds you a synagogue is kind of de facto capital. Capernaum, if you were going to go work in these little villages, was exactly the right place to set up shop. Also, interesting note, Capernaum, it looks like it's somehow linguistically related to Nahum, who was a firebrand prophet from the Old Testament who celebrated the destruction of an evil world order, that is the downfall of Nineveh and the Assyrians. And I've thought some about what the connection might be. Like, is there any significance to the community of Nahum, Capernaum, being uh where Jesus set up shop and like part of his ministry that is prophetic teaching ministry being related to that? And the conclusion I've come to is no, nothing seems immediately evident to me. I don't know, maybe there's something there. Maybe you know something. I don't know. Bottom line is this whatever we do with the exact timeline of the very early days, weeks, and months of Jesus' ministry, it is clear that somewhere in here, Jesus could feel the heat in Nazareth and made the decision to move his mother and his family to Capernaum. So that was kind of a push factor out of Nazareth that caused him to migrate. There was also a pull factor. Capernaum was just a better base of operations for what he wanted to accomplish than Nazareth was. So maybe what we're getting here is John, who was very invested in Mary and Jesus' family and cared very much about her, just including this detail because it was an important detail to him, and it's an important part of the family history. And he just wanted to kind of note like, well, you know, for anybody who's in the know or who's not, this is kind of when the migration from the Nazareth, Cana area with this family to the Capernaum area with this family occurred. It just happened right here. So, in the same way that me starting in Wyoming and going to Denver by route of Salt Lake City kind of makes no sense without an explanation. But when you have an explanation, oh, you were going to buy a used car in Salt Lake. Okay, well, then all of a sudden it makes sense. So likewise, my suspicion is that here in John 2.12, we get this itinerary that doesn't make a lot of sense when you look at it on paper, but it makes a whole lot of sense if this is the moment where Jesus relocated his family to Capernaum, or it makes a lot of sense if this is just where Jesus relocated himself to Capernaum and his family wanted to come along and see what his new life was going to look like there. It also makes a ton of sense if Peter, who was married, just had stuff that he needed to do in Capernaum before they could go south to Jerusalem, and there was plenty of time to go to Capernaum first, and then south to Jerusalem for the Passover, as we will look at moving forward. The reason we have done this two-day arc and drawn our little map that we drew a few days ago is simply to get oriented with the orbit of the northern half of what we're going to see happening with Jesus moving forward. There's a northern half, it all centers around Capernaum on the north shore of the Sea of Galilee. There's a southern half, it all happens northwest of the Dead Sea in Jerusalem. And the better job you and I can do of keeping in mind how different these two places are, how different the temperature is in these two places, how different the mindset of the common people in these two places, how different the mindset of the enemies of Jesus, the religious leaders are in these two places. The more we can keep that in mind, the more I think we're gonna track with the story that John is trying to tell us. Fun. All right, next time around, Jesus is gonna start flipping over tables and getting real mad about people doing stuff in the temple that they shouldn't be doing. It's one of my favorite scenes in the Bible. We'll enjoy unpacking that over the next few days. Hey, I appreciate you. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.