Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And yesterday, we were looking at the pivot point in young John the Evangelist's life, where he seems to have gone from being a little bit of a turd, a little bit of a donkey, to being uh, well, what he turned out to be. And I'd never thought about this before. I had to go dig through the Bible and be like, well, when exactly did he get it? What is the pivot point? And I think we're on to something here as we've been looking at John 13. This little scene right here that doesn't have any observable miracles or anything. I think this is the moment he got it. And if you haven't listened to yesterday's episode yet, you might want to do that first because where we're picking up today is going to make a lot more sense as we track the redemption arc of John the evangelist who wrote the book. Now, my theory is this. I think this right here is the incident where John went from a donkey to being a pretty good kid who got it and figured it out. Why do I think that? Well, I think in large part, this incident was crafted by Jesus in response to a lot of the stuff that had gone wrong on the trip down from Galilee to Jerusalem among his disciples, that culminated in that ugly incident from Matthew 20, where two of the disciples, two-thirds of the inner circle of Jesus' disciples, because that inner circle was James and John, the brothers, and Peter, two-thirds of the inner circle kind of revolted and tried to cheat everybody else out and box them out. They kind of tried to pull a little trick like, we want your inheritance. We're gonna sneak and trick and weasel to try to get the inheritance from our metaphorical brothers, who are the other disciples. And everybody was upset and bent out of shape. Everybody's missing the point. This crew was not in the right head space for what they were about to face. And I think, I mean, of course Jesus knew that. What do I mean? I think Jesus knew that. Of course, Jesus knew that. I mean, heck, Matthew knew it in retrospect because he wrote it down in Matthew chapter 20. They knew it was a mess, it was a bad situation, and a big part of the pressure that it caused all of this was that entitled donkey weaseliness that John, at least in part, was you know, he's a perpetrator of. He was one of the guys who was causing some problems. So Jesus clearly wants to drive home this whole the last will be first and the first will be last thing. And so he starts washing their feet. And we hear from Peter, who you know is he's big and he's brash and he's loud about everything, but Jesus makes the point that, you know, if I've done this for you, do it for everybody else. Well, when you look at John's behavior from John 13 forward, to everything else we know about him, for the rest of the Bible and all the way through church history, every tradition, everything that we know about him from this moment on, he's not a donkey anymore. He gets it. He does demonstrate that heart of his servant. He does have to grow up very fast after this. And by the grace of God, he rises to that challenge. So one reason I think John quit being a donkey after this is that this is the perfectly crafted moment that Jesus put together to address what was wrong with John and his brother. Second, I think John quit being a donkey after this because we get no more examples of him being a donkey after this. He's great. Third, I think John quit being a donkey after this because of how. Did you hear how in John 13, they're woven into it, is all this stuff about the one who will betray Jesus? That was on his mind. And I think for John, he had some sort of epiphany in here where he was like, it genuinely could have been me. Like all of us are pointing to ourselves and like, not I, Lord, I'm not the one who's going to betray you. But it could have been me. And I think John is revolted by and disgusted by the idea that one would betray Jesus, even though he also knows that he could have been the perpetrator if things had worked out a little different, because he knew that seed of ugliness inside of him was something that could have grown up into the hideous weed of betrayal that instead grew up inside his pal, his traveling partner, Judas Iscariot. And further, I think John saw what that did to Jesus. Jesus was in agony over the fact that he was betrayed. Jesus wasn't flippant about that. And the very next scene is the betrayal scene, or at least the beginnings of the unfolding of the betrayal scene. So that's a third reason. I think John quit being a donkey after John 13. And another reason I think it is that when push came to shove, and Jesus had only a few breaths of life left a few chapters later in John 19, and Jesus needs to get his house in order to whatever extent that is possible from a position of being crucified. He looks at John and he's like, Hey, you're the one who's going to take care of my mom. Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary, the wife of Clopus, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved, that seems to be how John refers to himself, standing nearby, he said to his mother, Dear woman, here is your son, and to the disciple, here is your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her into his home. We'll talk more about how that played out next time around. But come on, if this kid is still in donkey mode, I don't think Jesus is going to do that. So we have a whole bunch of evidence in the Bible, through the relationships we see in the Bible, from the books of the Bible we see written by John, from church history, and all of it indicates that he was, you know, maybe a little bit difficult in the early going, but something happened. And I do think the real get it moment for John wasn't one of the giant dramatic miracles. It wasn't somebody coming back from the grave. It was something much smaller. It was the simple act of humility on the part of Jesus to his disciples, and then him saying, You gotta imitate this. This is what I'm commissioning you to. And an interesting thing about that, and you know, you can the tagline of this podcast is it's the Bible without the sermon, right? This isn't church. If you're a Christian, you gotta go to church. This isn't a substitute for it, it doesn't count. It's a supplement, I should say. So, you know, I I don't do a lot of uh sermonizing around here, and I don't think this is one, but I do think it's a valid point worth noting. The thing that seems to have helped John to turn the corner from being his former donkey self to the amazing man he turned out to be was something that is entirely repeatable by you. Humility, washing other people's feet, probably usually metaphorically, but as circumstances may dictate, who knows? That is something that we can exactly emulate from Jesus as a Christian. That is something that we have been given that we can give away to other people, and that simple gesture, that posture that Jesus assumed before his unworthy disciples changed their lives. And if you're somebody who follows Jesus and you're tracking with the character of Jesus, as we're going through the Bible and you're tracking with the values of the kingdom and what he's going for, don't ever think that humility and serving other people is just uh you know, this is just a Christian virtue, it's just a dance step. It's just like you just gotta do it because that's just what you gotta do. But no, it it is an it is an active, powerful act of ministry and love toward other people, and few things thaw an icy heart, few things break through somebody's donkiness more than treating them with humility and kindness and serving other people in ways that can't be ignored and that don't really make sense in a world system context, but make all the sense in the world in a kingdom context. I strongly posit to you that the pivot point in this young man's life was not one of the big grand things that we think about. Those all clearly had an impact, but he'd seen amazing things before he continued to act like a donkey. Now I think the pivot point for this young man was a much simpler, much more repeatable, much less miraculous thing that he was commissioned to imitate. And that if you're a Christian, whether you've been at it for a long time or you're brand new, either way, that you and I are commissioned to imitate. What a beautiful redemption arc for John the evangelist. Okay, we got a little bit more background stuff about this book and the guy who wrote it that I want to get to over the next couple of episodes. And maybe we'll save some of the stuff about how things worked out for John in the end for some sort of epilogue toward the end of things. I don't know. We'll see. All right, a little more background stuff, and then we'll be into John chapter two in not too long. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.