Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast, and today is a special day because we're going to open with a crowd participation exercise. And the rules of this are very simple. I'm going to ask you a question, and then you just go ahead and answer it correctly. Ready? Here's the question: What is the single greatest original musical number from any Disney animated film in all of history? Okay, think about it. Now commit to your answer by saying it out loud to the other people who are with you, or just shriek it out loud right there where you are in the gym running in your unitard on that treadmill, just so everybody can hear you and so you're committed. Don't just say it, shriek it with confidence. All right, 5-4-3-2-1. The correct answer was obviously I'll make a man out of you from Disney's Mulan. Any other answer is something you should be humiliated about. And think about it. You don't go out to the garage and start dragging out your trimmer or your mower and be like, can you feel the love tonight? No, let's get down to business, to mow my lawn. It's just how it works. It's the catchiest thing they ever came up with. You know that's Donnie Osman singing that. I think we've talked about that before. But here's the thing: it's not just that the song is great, it's that it's a great song over the top of the best expression of a well-trod motif that we have discussed before in all of the history of ever. And this is the motif of the Motley crew, the band of stragglers and disparate people who look like they would sooner kill each other than function together. How could this clown show ever turn into something that would work? This is basically the lyrics of the first half of the song. And then what happens, of course, is Li Shang, through the power of a song written by Matthew Wilder, does what it takes to pull all of these characters together into this thing that is greater than the sum of their parts. And that is the exact same kind of situation that we are running into in Matthew chapter 10, when we get the final roster of the disciples of Jesus. And to you and me, we're going to be tempted to look at this, even if you have only the most minimal of recollection of religious things and you're not a religious person yourself. We still know these names. They've traveled through the years of history with us. These names appear in the setup of the jokes that involve getting into heaven. Everybody's heard of the disciples, maybe some of you know more than others. So to us, we encounter them in their polished form in our brain. We encounter them as the nine-foot-tall, larger-than-life, muscle-bound, almost Christian demigods that line in marble the center corridor of St. John's Ladder and Peter with his keys, everyone else with their little props and things that go with it, and we're supposed to look up to this crowd. And justifiably so. I mean, there's a reason that Christians all over the world for all kinds of time have called these people saints. But they were also indicative to the original audience of something very disparate, something that never should have worked. If you're looking to make a dream team and then you're going to say something like, all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me, but now I commission you people to go and run with this thing, this would be exactly what your dream team would not look like if you wanted to impress a first century audience with how awesome they are. Because of their jobs, their political alignments, their reputation, the neck of the woods from which they come, this just wouldn't have inspired confidence. So then why would Jesus, who clearly wants this thing to succeed and is very, very invested in it and is even going to let himself get killed to make the thing work, why would he pick the following people? Matthew 10:1. It said he called his twelve disciples to him and gave them authority to drive out evil spirits and to heal every disease and sickness. These are the names of the twelve apostles. First, Simon, who's called Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, son of Zebedee and his brother John, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector, James, son of Alpheus and Thaddeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him. Like the crew Li Sheng got dealt, this roster just doesn't seem like it's going to work out. I mean, you could have picked better educated, more articulate, more talented people, people who already brought a reputation, an audience, a following to the table, but none of these people did. So let's actually just go through and break down what we know about these characters, and this may have to span two episodes because there are 12 of them, and it might just take a minute. But here's what we got. Okay, uh Peter, obviously, we've all heard of him. Peter is the impulsive, excitable, flailing, steady leader who is the most willing to take giant leaps of faith. I mean, in fact, like the phrase leap of faith is kind of named for something he did. But he's also the guy who doesn't get it the most. So he gets it the most and he doesn't get it the most all at the same time. I think we're supposed to feel a degree of empathy for Peter. He's the character through whose eyes we can best encounter the story as though we were there ourselves. And then for me, if I was there, I saw something amazing happen, I'd be like, I am all in, I am never budging, you are the real deal. Then I get, you know, kind of a good night's sleep and wake up the next day and stuff feels different, and I'm in a haze, and I don't know, I might need to see all of that again to decide for sure exactly how I want to proceed. Or maybe somebody makes me mad and my temper flares a little bit, and I just want to cut off an ear or two to make a point. Oh, maybe it doesn't suit me one minute, and it does suit me the next minute to identify closely with Jesus. It's easy to say, well, I'd always be super faithful, but I don't know. Nobody's ever really threatened to murder me in a credible way for being associated with Jesus. I'm not sure I would respond much better than Peter did. He's up and down and he's a mess, and he's a normal guy, and he had a normal job like normal people. And he lived in a little town that was actually probably even just a little bit bigger than the little town in which he was born. He also had a wife who traveled with him. 1 Corinthians chapter 9 has Paul very specifically saying that believing wives might travel with disciples if people are going around doing what he's doing, and he specifically names Cephas, Peter, different name, but same guy, as somebody whose wife travels with him. So here we've got a guy who, to you and I, is very blue-collar and normal and approachable. To the original audience, would be a little bit hick, a little bit hillbilly, uh, a little bit from the sticks, not the kind of person you'd go to for religious or academic advice. This is someone who, you know, is more competent than maybe your bottom-rung laborer. He's uh worked his way up in terms of credibility and everything. But you would just see, uh, I don't know, you've you run to the mill, work a day nine to five, kick butt, get some calluses on the hands kind of guy. Somebody who I think most people today would respect. But again, the religious elites probably wouldn't be very swayed by what kind of person Peter was, and certainly the cosmopolitan Jerusalemites wouldn't be very swayed by what kind of guy Peter is. So it seems like maybe not the best strategic choice for trying to impress the wine sippers and movers and shakers and leaders of the day, but this is who Jesus picks. Peter didn't go to Jesus of his own volition. He showed up there under the invitation or introduction of Andrew. We don't really get, I think, anything else about Andrew from here on out. I could be wrong. If I am, you can let me know. We also know that he worked with James and John. We're gonna hear a lot more about them. James, of course, is the first disciple to be martyred. He gets killed by the psycho Herod Agrippa I in one of the most gruesome, interesting, topsy-turvy chapters in all of Acts. That's Acts chapter 12. And then he's the older brother of John, John the beloved disciple, the guy who wrote the Gospel of John, Revelation, the Johannine letters. And these two collectively were referred to by Jesus as the sons of thunder. I think that characterizes the attitude and swagger. They probably had a little bit more money, a little bit more important dad than anybody else on the roster here. And so, I mean, maybe not the most spoiled people of their day, but they certainly would have stood out from the rest of their roster, the rest of the team here. And they were maybe a little bit more entitled. They expected things to go their way. They wanted justice and reckonings right now. Hey, we're gonna go over to this uh here Samaritan town and uh we're gonna do the Jesus thing, and they're all gonna be impressed. And the Samarit are like, no, I don't know. I think we're just gonna pass on Jesus. If you guys could just not come close to our town, and James and John are like, you know what we should do? We should burn them with heaven fire. Jesus, will you burn them? Please, please, please, please, please burn them. And Jesus is like, no, we're not burning anybody. Stop stupid ideas. And then James and John later are like, hey, just like hypothetically, like, which one of us gets to sit at your right hand for all of eternity? And it's like, ah, you you're screwing up like the Trinity. You don't understand how the things are at all. You're completely wrong. You're asking the wrong questions, and he flips it all on his head, and he's like, Great, we'll be leased, and leased will be great. And they're like, I don't really get what that means. But then later it kind of seems like they get what that means because James is very much humbled in going quietly to his own execution in following his God. And further, John is softened. He's the guy who wants to call down lightning as a kid, but then gradually he turns into the guy who's the gentle grandfather who warmly and nurturingly shows care to the people who are in error or in confusion in 1 John and his other letters. So there's a whole bunch more on the list. Time is hard. Okay, those are the big ones. We're going to talk about all of these guys, though. It's only fair because I can't really get to the heart of how these people that Jesus picked and that Matthew went out of his way to name in order. I don't think we can get to how that would have struck the original audience without going through each one and how amazing it was that their Li Shang, Jesus, was able to whip them into shape and into something well that uh transformed all of the world. I mean, these are the human agents who went out with the message of Jesus and made a thing that for better or for worse, whether you're a fan or not a fan, is the most impressive religion in the history of humankind, casting the biggest shadow, having the most participants. I mean, it's a pretty amazing thing. And even from a strictly physical world sociological point of view, these people shouldn't have been able to pull it off, and yet somehow they did. And that is very interesting to me. So we'll break that down more next time around. A whole bunch of you went and left reviews because you're cool. Thank you for doing that. I saw that over the weekend. They were really nice. That stuff's really helpful. Thank you for doing that. Hit and pause here. We're coming right back to this list of names, manyana. And Matt is the 10-minute Bible hour. Let's do this again soon. Like tomorrow soon.