JOHN141 - Our Strange Relationship with History

John 3

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Music by Jeff Foote

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History's kind of a funny thing because it does get fuzzier the further back you go, but I don't think it's a straight line. The fuzziness is uneven. And that's very interesting to me. Here's what I mean. You and I are all experts in right now history. I mean, you can interpret what's going on in the world around you so dang well, so much better than any historian from 150 years from now is going to be able to do. You can look at a tweet right now and say, I see what this person's doing. Okay, well, that person needs to get a little bit of engagement, and they're trying to show their credentials to the new team they just recently started siding with because they used to think this other thing, and they were full-throatedly wrong about this issue from four years ago, and now that clearly they're trying to gaslight us and align with this other team, and uh it's gonna kind of work on this kind of person. You can do that. The amount of nuance and understanding of a moment in history it takes to read between the lines like that is amazing, but you can all do it. You you understand your moment very well. But isn't it weird how that gets a little bit fuzzier if you go back 10 years, 20 years? Like I kind of remember what the deal was with McCain versus Obama. What was that? 08. I kind of remember what they said and what they ran on and what the issues were. I could go look it up. We got recordings of them talking and everything. I remember McCain's concession speech. I thought that was pretty classy. But it's certainly not as sharp. Like if I just went and read 2008 Twitter, I wouldn't get it as much as I get right now Twitter. Well, then take that back into the 1950s, the early 1900s, pre-American Civil War. Take it back into the Napoleonic age, take it back pre-American Revolution into the mid-18th century. We know a lot of the names of people who lived in the 1700s. And if you're an American, you know quite a bit of the politics, because that's sort of our founding era. But in terms of like having great nuance, eh, we wouldn't have great nuance. If you really want to see our nuance level fall off a cliff, go back into the 1600s or 1500s, and even there we get a little boost because that's when the Protestant Reformation happened and the Enlightenment, and we learned about that stuff probably in school, so we can name a lot of names and even kind of understand the issues and who was on what side, but it's a pretty generic understanding, it's a pretty flat understanding. The Lutherans and the Catholics were not. And you know, it's something, you might even know a bunch of the issues, but it's hard and we got to jog our memory to think of that. But you know what? It gets really tough when you get back before the Protestant Reformation, right? Like it's harder to name people from the 1400s, the 1300s, 1200s, 1100s, the thousands. I can do it, but I went, I'm cheating. I went to school for this a whole bunch of times. A lot of you can do it too, but what happens when I hit you with this? Name three people who lived in the world, the same world you live in, in the 900s AD. Just name them, and you can't just take like cheap wild swings, like uh, I mean, maybe there's a Henry during that time. Yeah, yeah, but I'm not counting that. Well, it's probably I think they used to like put little like weird umlocks and stuff over the top of E's in like English. Is there like an Aethel Aethelberg something like that? Maybe that sounds kind of like old British. Ah, we're just making stuff up. Okay, maybe, maybe more of you than what you would find in a normal community can come up with something there. You consistently blow my mind with your competence level. I take it as quite the compliment that people like you listen to this program. Every time I interact with you, I'm struck by how smart, how well read, how sophisticated the average listener, participant here is. I'm not trying to butter you up. It's really it's quite the compliment, and I choose to take it that way that you would want to pal around with me on something like this. But come on, even in a room like this, we don't know anybody who lived in the 900s AD. Settle down. Now maybe we can come up with one, maybe two, maybe some of you are like, oh, I'm an expert in that. I got, you know, 50 or 100, but it's just kind of where knowledge drops off, right? We lose all sense of nuance. But then weirdly, as you keep going back in time, it picks back up. And we know more stuff about the fifth century, the fourth century. You can come up with more names of people who lived in the 300s, 200s, 100s AD, and then we get to the first century AD, and it's crazy. We know all these people. I mean, you can name 50 people, 100 people. I mean, if we sat around and brainstormed, we could come up with so many names of people we know from the 100s AD, and quite a few we know from the 100s BC, even though BC barely makes any appearance at all in the New Testament. And then if we keep going back, you know, like you listen to this show, we can come up with the names of a bunch of people in the 100s BC, 200s BC, 300s, and we're into Old Testament stuff. We can start coming up with prophets and kings and villains of the Old Testament. You know, we're pretty good to go heading back from there. But isn't it weird how the knowledge of just people and facts is going to fall off, of course. But the knowledge of the nuance of who thought what and why they thought it and what the sides were, and really the an understanding of what the tension was, it gets pretty bad as we head back into history, but it spikes in the first century A.D. The knowledge spikes, the sophistication of our understanding spikes. The Bible has a ton to do with that sophistication and knowledge spike that we have regarding the first century A.D., but also it's I mean, the Bible describes it as the fullness of time. And in that fullness of time moment, it was so dynamic. You still had leftover stuff from old Persia and the Ptolemids and Egypt and the remnants of the things that were built by Alexander the Great, but you also have not the upstart Romans, you have the adult phase of the Roman Empire. They're way past being a kingdom and a republic. They're into being a legit Roman global empire. You've got civilizations from the corners of the world starting to come into play and factor into things. It's just an incredibly dynamic time of writing and letters and poetry and tumult and military churn and leadership churn. And then add to that Jesus of Nazareth and the stuff that we talk about here and the existence of the New Testament. And pow! It just explodes in technicolor, and we have such a better sense of what this era is about. Why am I telling you all of this? One, because I think it's incredibly interesting to just think about our knowledge and intuition relationship with the past. It is not even. And I think that's fun. But the second reason I'm telling you this is because John chapter three and this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus is written to be timeless. We're meant to understand this, but also I would contend that there are so many layers of political nuance and social nuance baked into this that the original audience would have had a field day with it pouring over everything that happens here in John 3, 1 through 21, which is this conversation with Nicodemus. They would have been able to read this the way you can read a tweet that has 10 layers of meaning, the way you can cut through the crap when you watch a cable news talking head show, and you like, ah, I see what you're doing. You're trying to cover your butt here. Well, of course you think that. You used to be the press secretary for that administration back then. You just know you're an expert. You can swim in it, and so you're getting so much more than just the spoken levels. This is this is one of the places in the Gospels, maybe the most one of the places in the Gospels, where I think the original audience would have been reading this over and over and over and over again, trying to read between the lines in every way that they can. Now, I'm also contending that this thing, this story, circulated long before the Gospel of John was finished by John. People knew about this story. John knew about this story. He's part of the original, original audience. And when I say original audience here, I do mean those who heard it before it came out in the Gospel of John, who would have been the very closest to this story. I mean, surely the disciples heard about this story immediately after it happened. Maybe a couple of them are, you know, kind of lurking off to the side, listening to this thing. The layers of nuance and their shockingly close proximity to all of the politics and all of the social pressures that are involved behind the scenes of this are fascinating to me, and we're gonna try to unpack those over the next couple days. I really wanted to get into the text today, but I got excited about talking about a philosophy of history. I'm I'm gonna I can't not read you Bible. So here we go. We're gonna do John 3.1, and we'll unpack the layers tomorrow. Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, Rabbi, we know you're a teacher who's come from God, for no one could perform the miraculous signs you're doing if God were not with him. In reply, Jesus declared, I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. How can a man be born when he's old? Nicodemus asked. Surely he can't enter a second time into his mother's womb to be born. I mean, we're right into the tension, right? There are so many assumptions behind this, and I want to unwrap the present now, but we're just gonna save it and we're gonna do it tomorrow. Our goal with this Nicodemus thing is obviously to just try to understand the Bible, try to understand what happened that flipped this guy from being loyal to Team Pharisee and coming at this one way to breaking ranks with his team, defending Jesus, and ultimately being willing to put his neck on the line to help bury Jesus after the cross. So we'll we'll work through that and we'll uh try to get into the layers as best as we can over the next couple of days. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.