Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute five an hour podcast, and the genre of YouTube video that my family is into right now is compilations of antiquated television commercials from decades past that quote haven't aged well. Now, there's a little bit of smuggery in that title because the assumption behind this title is everyone before us was dumb and their values were dumb and wrong and didn't make sense, and they were just all simpletons back then. But now, if you took a snapshot of how we think on today, as I'm recording this video, that is the perfect morality right now. So it's okay, look, I get it's pretentious, it's a little bit dumb in that way, but also it's so stinking fun to watch these videos and to see what made sense 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago. I mean, I was alive for a lot of these, and when they came on TV back then, I might have been like, oh, that's manipulative. I see what you're doing, even as a kid. But I just forgot how much they don't square with the values today, some of which is probably a good thing, some of which maybe isn't such a good thing. And so you go back and you watch these videos, and it's not just, oh, I can't believe somebody said that. It's that a whole team of researchers did their homework, looked at culture, licked their finger, and put it to the wind, and we're like, aha, this right here is what we're gonna gamble tons of money on to try to sell this product because this is what the world is into. Ads are a reflection of the safest values of a society at any given time. And so it really is very shocking and funny to watch these compilations of old television commercials. Now, some of them, as you would expect, are kind of madmen style misogyny from the 60s and 70s, and you know, they're they're pretty degrading. I think they have a point, but apparently they worked, and that was mostly acceptable as safe television advertising fair back then. There's other stuff where you got celebrities. I'm not even going to say the name of the celebrity, but a prominent celebrity who got in trouble for drugging people and taking advantage of them. He's doing an ad about the dangers of drugging people because you might get taken advantage of. Yikes. So some of them just hurt to watch. They're not funny. Others foreshadow horrible, tragic things. Like it's amazing how many commercials in the 1980s and especially 90s foreshadowed 9-11. I don't know quite what to make of that. But what I do know is that when I watch these commercials and laugh and cringe and am uncomfortable, you know, all these different emotions, the one through line of social observation that I come away with is that times have changed very quickly while I've been alive. And old paradigms, old ways of just thinking about stuff, old uh conventional wisdom. You couldn't just go in a time machine and go back and grab it from 1979 and drag it here and just shove it into how we do things now. It wouldn't work. We don't have containers for the ways people of the past thought. Again, maybe that's a good thing, maybe that's a bad thing, but it is definitely a thing. Paradigms are real, and sometimes paradigms shift so hard that the containers that we have just can't hold certain ideas. And that's when you see really big dramatic changes and overhauls in society, in thought, in philosophy, in religion. And likewise in John chapter two, I think the through line of what we've been looking at is just that. It's Jesus saying, you guys have these categories for how you think about stuff, like purification and provision and fellowship with God and the rhythms of religious life. And those paradigms are shifting because of Jesus. Now, everybody was comfortable and liked those things when Jesus showed up, or most people liked it the same way. Most people were very comfortable with what was normal in the 1960s in their advertisements and the 1970s and the 1980s, and every decade rolled their eyes at the decade before, all the way up until right now. Everybody who's alive thinks that what's normal is just normal, and this is just how things are going to be. And it's a little bit threatening when people come along and it seems like they want to change it. But sometimes the change is for the better. There's a better way, there's a better approach. And here in John chapter two, it seems like, again, the through line that we're seeing is Jesus is superior to all the ways y'all have been doing things forever. Jesus is not a new religion. We're not talking about something that rejects the character of God and wads it up and throws it over the shoulder. Forget that. It didn't work. I'm Jesus. We're gonna do something different and new and fresh. Uh-uh. He's just, John and Jesus are just initiating this idea that this is not just a new paradigm, but even more than a new paradigm. A fulfillment, a completion, a rounding out of these ancient ideas that God himself put in place, and a fulfillment and a better version of some of these ancient practices that God didn't really put in place and that just sort of evolved as mutations of what God had put in place over the years. So, yeah, and what do we have? Two anecdotes in John chapter two, right? Anecdote number one is the wedding at Cana. Well, the two big things we see there that are a contrast between old paradigms and this new paradigm that is Christ, is the paradigm of purification. Yeah, we wash hands, we do ritual purification. It's very much in the Bible. That's how we do things. We made up some additional rules in terms of how we're going to do that. Everybody's expected to follow these rules, but Jesus can make not just purification happen by an act of his will, but he can also make provision happen out of that purification. I mean, that's like a 14-point swing, right? Because on the one end, we're wasting clean, pure water to do ritual cleansing of the hands. You ladle that out, you wash all the guests' hands as they come into any kind of banquet or wedding or whatever. That's that isn't really provision at all. It's just purification. Now we swing that all the other way, and purification has occurred, but also it's provision. That's a new paradigm. That's these two things, provision and purification, happening at once in the same act. There's not a lot of categories in the mind of the original audience for this. It it would clang. It would be hard for them to accept and understand all the layers of what this means. We have the luxury of a couple thousand years to think about it. The disciples probably needed a little while to think about it too, but it resulted ultimately in them seeing the glory of Jesus, I think understanding this paradigm shift and a lot of the layers of it, and them putting their faith in him. Okay. The second of the only two anecdotes that we get in John 2 or pericopes for the fancy types, that's what they call these little mini stories in the Gospels. The second of the two is, of course, the cleansing of the temple. Well, what's supposed to happen at the temple? That's where God lives. That's where he's among his people. That's where you can have fellowship with God. Fellowship with God, though, requires both because of the law God put in place to deal with sin and because of a whole bunch of things that mutated out of that that were human additions. Unfortunately, fellowship with God is just very, very hard. And he's not very accessible right now. You're going to have to navigate this whole giant market. You're going to have to understand the ancient Near Eastern currency exchange system. You're going to have to know how to identify each and every one of these characters on the coins and the approximate silver value of each of these coins, or you're going to get taken advantage of, and you're not going to be able to get the right coin to pay the temple tax, to get in here and do your proper abeisance and your proper sacrifices. It's just, it's a very complicated thing. There's a tremendous amount of paperwork and time involved in this. Like you can't just walk in and have fellowship with God, weirdos. There's a lot of steps to this. So in the first story, we see that Jesus replaces the old institutions of purification and provision. In the second story, we see Jesus replacing the old institution of how fellowship with God happens. That is the temple itself. Jesus said, Destroy this temple and I'll raise it again in three days. Okay, well, you and I have focused a lot on how that's a metaphor for his body and the crucifixion, resurrection, and all of that. But also, I mean, why did he pick that metaphor? He picked that metaphor because well, the word became flesh and templed a tabernacle among us. The word became flesh, and this is God's presence. It's not so much the building, God still cares about the building. Jesus still cares about his father's house, the building. But what's the building for? Well, that's where God dwells among us. Well, right now, y'all are looking over there, but you should be looking at this guy who's making a whip because that is where the word became flesh. That is where God is seeing fit to make his dwelling among man right now, right over there. That guy, I'm not kidding. That dude in the sandals, he's all dirty, and he's making a whip, and he's got a look in his eye. You should be attentive to him as God in the flesh, and also you should be attentive to the business end of that whip. That's where people should have been directing his attention. So there's a lot of metaphors Jesus could have pointed to about his own body and getting killed and resurrected, but he went with this one because of the multiple theological layers of what is meant by temple. So what's the through line of John chapter two? Well, it seems to be Jesus replacing old institutions, purification and provision. Yeah, you got old ways that you did that, and they clang a little bit like those old commercials, but now Jesus is giving them a foretaste of what it's going to look like in this new epoch, this new age, in this new paradigm where it's it's better, it's perfect, it's a completion of the idea. Further from the second story, fellowship with God, the sacrificial system, the temple itself. All of that stuff. There was an old paradigm, is broken. It was incomplete. There is a new paradigm, it's not broken, it is complete. Now, of course, a lot of people are gonna have a lot of trouble wrapping their brains around this. No big surprise there. And it's interesting that in John, we don't get the verse or the thought that I'm about to give you from Jesus as we wrap up today, but we do get it in all three of the synoptics. To me, I don't know, I'm not the Holy Spirit, not in charge of the Bible. I didn't write any of it at all, even though my name's on this one book over here. It's a different Matthew. But to me, it would make so much sense for this thing that Jesus said to have been recorded by John right here next to the wedding at Cana or the temple in Jerusalem. But you know, John was aware these other gospels existed. Maybe he just let them record what Jesus said that I'm about to read you and assumed that you would go and find it over there. Matthew 9, starting in verse 14. Then John the Baptist's disciples came and asked Jesus, How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don't fast? Ah, here we go again. It's an old paradigm. And John, his disciples, they kind of see that old paradigm, but Jesus seems to be doing something different and they're noticing it and they don't get it. Jesus answered, How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn when he's with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them. Then they'll fast. But no one sows a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they poured new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved. You remember back at the beginning of the conversation when I was talking about the silly commercials and how the ideas and the way those ideas reflect the social values and the conventional wisdom of the day just uh you couldn't just time travel back and grab them and just put them in the social thought containers of today. It wouldn't work. It would break, it would pull away, it would rip, it would burst at the seams. The somehow the container has to fit with the message, or in that case, the commercial. Likewise here, Jesus seems to be saying well, y'all are thinking in old categories, and they're not gonna fit into these new containers. The old category being, well, you know, we fast, and fasting in a way is even reflective of mourning. Well, I'm here with you right now. Now's not a great time to do that. So my disciples don't fast. It's a new paradigm. There's a sort of an ongoing three-year feast here of celebration. God is here in the flesh. Obviously, I'm paraphrasing a lot, but I don't think I'm stretching anything. Stretching is you know, the new wineskins is accidental as a pun. I didn't mean to do that. And then he uses a double likewise to get the point across. It's like sewing a patch. Uh the patch is unshrunk and it goes on an old garment. Well, what's gonna happen when the patch catches up with the age and the wear and the shrinkage of the old garment? It's all gonna pull away. To you and me, this is not common knowledge. I don't sew a lot of patches on things. Maybe a bunch of you moms who are always trying to salvage your son's pants as they rip through, just destroy their knees constantly all the time. Maybe you're like, yeah, it's obvious to me. Well, it wasn't obvious to me. And by the way, I salute you for getting more life out of those pants, moms. Nice job. But then the second example I could track with a little bit better. Well, what does wine do? Like as it as it wines, as it does what it does, there's going to be an expansion. Well, you put it in an old rigid wineskin. There's no room for expansion. Boom, the skin's gonna burst. You wasted all that wine. Oh, I mean, look at how neatly that ties in with the first of the two stories that we get from John. I think Jesus, in this regard, gives us this beautiful likewise to read back onto what we're seeing recorded in John chapter two. What we have going on here is the beginning of a new paradigm, the beginning of a paradigm in which Jesus is the better, the perfect replacement and fulfillment of these old institutions. The old institutions feel natural the same way those old commercials probably felt normal to the people who were seeing them. But when you view them through the lenses of age and time, you realize, oh man, those paradigms, they don't transfer real well. And sometimes when you take a new paradigm and you try to drop it into an old thing, it's not gonna make any sense. If you took new ads from right now and tried to drop it into 1960, I don't think that's selling a lot of instant coffee. Probably some of you are like, ah, great. What a wonderful wrap-up to John 2. That was super. Others of you are like, was it though? I mean, it was an okay wrap-up to John 2. Well, I've got news for both of you. One, I'm still not done. We got to talk about the timeline of John 2. It raises bigger questions about the narrative of the whole thing. We're gonna do that tomorrow. And also, I think we're gonna do a thing where when I get to the end of each chapter, I'm gonna just have Jeff come in and we're gonna talk about it together as a bonus episode. So whatever the next Saturday is that we have coming up, we'll probably have one of those for you as well to unpack it a bit more and then on to Nicodemus and chapter three. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.