JOHN103 - Whatever You Make of the Dynamic Between Jesus and Mary, Jesus is Clearly In Charge

John 2:3-4

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. And I have now graduated two kids very recently. And I was lucky enough to only have to do one graduation party. Maybe it would have been cooler if there were two, but we we did it all together. We've done everything all together for the girls. And let me tell you, I went hard on my house to get that graduation party ready. And I bet there are a whole lot of you listening who can relate because when graduation party came around, it is a very happy, blessed, joyous thing. But the run-up and the improvements and making the yard beautiful and all of the art and the food just the way it needs to be, it's a pain in the butt. It's super hard. It hopefully on balance, it is joyful, but it's it's not as joyful as the party. It's kind of stressful, right? But then when you get there, and at least for me, you look at those two wonderful little girls who are your heart, have this wonderful moment with all these people who've invested in their lives, and there's flowers in the flower garden, and the grass is green, and the things that were broken on the deck are all fixed, and everything looks pretty and magical and perfect, and the little fairy lights that I put up out in the yard are all fairy lighting just right. It's like, yeah, that's the magic I wanted for my little girls. It was worth the stress so that I could see the beauty of the moment. Likewise, this is the third day of a three-day conversation where we're getting ready for the metaphorical, beautiful graduation party. Like we're going through gritty stuff that people disagree about and read vigorously differently about this passage in John 2, 3 and 4. The passage goes like this When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, They have no more wine. Dear woman, why do you involve me? Jesus replied, My time has not yet come. Some people, as we've been discussing, look at this passage and see tension. They see the understandable humanity of Mary on display. I'm one of those people. Other people look at this passage and they see a unique relationship between the mother of God and God in the flesh, and they see an example of something that even Christians today could access by praying to Mary for her to use her unique access to Jesus in the same way she did in this passage. These are just two very, very different reads. And we have time on this podcast not to gloss over it. So I've been not glossing over it for the last couple of days, and we've got more not glossing over it to do. But why? Where does the whole graduation party thing come in that I was talking about a minute ago? The reason is because this is a happy passage in John 2 where Jesus does his first public miracle and changes water into wine. But the reality is there is a bigger conversation about this and particularly the dynamic between Jesus and Mary. And if we pretend that larger conversation isn't there, I don't think we've done the work to fully savor the beautiful graduation party. And we got a miracle coming up, and it's awesome, and it's got a whole lot of layers of important meaning. And I want to receive it the way God and John, who actually put pen to paper on this book, intended it to be received. I don't want to have a bunch of other tensions lingering in our mind that evolved over the years later on. There are very few sensitive nerves in Christian faith and historic Christianity that are more sensitive than talking about Mary in either direction. That's a pity. This is supposed to be a happy thing. I think the correct biblical read on this is that she is a person. I think the idea that Mary was somehow sinless, I think those are all later additions to make other kinds of theology fit into place. I just do not see that in the text at all. And people who say, well, that's what the church is always taught are wrong. That's just incomplete. That is what some people in the church have taught for a very long time. That is not the exclusive position of the church fathers. Those are people I read. I went to school for that. I'm I'm into history. I like this material. If you are coming at this in a Catholic Orthodox context, it's going to be really hard to read these passages involving Mary, the two that I just brought up, in a way that isn't Catholic or Orthodox. Like it's the whole system just kind of flows in that direction. You'd have to swim really hard against the current. I get it. It's why I'm not mad. Like I just get it. People see things different. If you're coming at this from an evangelical, kind of a Baptist perspective, uh, you're gonna look at these passages and you're gonna see a human with sin, like any normal person who's a pretty great human, who is a mom of at least a few kids at this point, you know, grown men at this point, who is kind of a matriarch of a family looking out for the well-being of this family that she and her husband, who is probably deceased at this point, made together, and she's at this wedding, and there's this social situation, and she's eager for people to love her kid and see in him what she sees. And so she's pushing the gas pedal on a timeline a little bit, and Jesus is doing something different here, and you're gonna see a very human dynamic between somebody who's all human, like you and me, but really uniquely blessed and who's a part of something amazing, and somebody who is all God and all man, and in that regard, not like you and me, you're gonna see an intersection here between the divine and the temporal. In my opinion, as we move forward in this passage in the coming days, what we're also gonna see is Jesus thread the needle between those two things absolutely beautifully, because again, he does the miracle, but why? If his time is not yet come, it's like the third day in a row, I've asked that question. Why does he then go ahead and do the miracle? So, look, at some point we were gonna break down this dynamic. We were gonna break down the relationship between Jesus and his mother. And at some point in the Gospel of John, we were gonna run into one or two passages that brought up this historical divide on the question of the relationship between Jesus and Mary and the nature of Mary. I always want to disclose stuff that is really important for you to know in order to take into account what you're getting from me. These are things that are definitely true. One, I can be wrong about things, you know that, but it's just important for me to say it out loud. Sometimes when you talk about the Bible a lot in front of people a lot, it could be easy for the people listening or the person talking to start to imagine, well, the Bible's authoritative. So what I say about it is authoritative. Well, only in as much as I'm talking about the Bible. Beyond that, I'm some guy trying to figure the thing out and doing my best. So there are things that we just have to take into account when we're gaming out a passage with somebody, and that is presuppositions. I have a heavy one here. It's not a sloppy one, it's one that I spent a whole lot of years in school working on. It's one that just out of my own curiosity, I've read on and thought about hard a lot. I am not lazily not Catholic. I put a lot of energy and thought into what my adult faith would look like. And I'm not Catholic for reasons that are carefully considered, and that careful consideration has landed me in a place of great respect for the Catholics and the Orthodox, but I'm not that. And as much as I try to center lane our conversations here and just be like, it's just Bible, it's just Bible, it's just Bible. There's some passages where the conversations surrounding it are so thick and so dynamic that every single word can feel loaded. And so it's just important for me to be like, hey, here, here's who I am, here's how I'm coming at it, here's where I'm coming from. And then you can take that into account. I think we've got a beautiful passage here portraying a relationship between a remarkable woman and a wonderful mother who, like anyone, would struggle a little bit to understand the fullness of what is happening here in her life and at this wedding. It's an interaction between her and the son of God, God in the flesh, who a few people suspect is who he is, but most people don't get it yet. And I think here we have a picture of one of the first people to get who he really is, or kind of get it even, wanting to mash the gas pedal and have that cathartic key-man moment where they're like, look, I told you this was true. So that's how I'm coming at it. That's how I'm going to interpret the rest of the miracle. Uh, if you read it differently, I'm sure you can easily put those lenses on and uh and this can be fruitful together. Thank you for gaming this out. Thank you for being a wonderful group of people who are just fantastic at even those of you who aren't adults, you're fantastic at being adults about hard conversations. And that emboldens me to treat us all like peers and think together without tiptoeing around and being afraid, like, oh, somebody's gonna be mad and write me a mean email or something. Even when you write me mean emails, they're pretty nice. So it's cool. Thanks for being awesome. Your awesomeness is what enables us to think hard and honestly about the text, even if we land in different places. Because of this dynamic I just described, even though a lot of us, you know, haven't met most of you, you are my friends, and I'm grateful to you. All right, we're still gonna take that other fork in the road when we're done with all of this wedding at Cana stuff, but we need to press forward on the miracle and talk about these stone water jars that right now are full of water, but they're not gonna be full of water for long. How does that happen? What does it mean? What would the scene have been like? All of that next time around. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.