JOHN116 - If You Go That Far Out of Your Way, There’s Always a Good Reason

John 2:12

Matt's book, The Lightning-Fast Field Guide to the Bible is available NOW! - here's a link that gets TMBH a little kickback: https://amzn.to/4pEYSS9

Thanks to everyone who supports TMBH at patreon.com/thetmbhpodcast

You're the reason we can all do this together!

Discuss the episode here

Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

My family is very Wyomingite historically. I lived in Wyoming for a long time myself, out west toward Yellowstone and the Wind River Range and Lander, Wyoming, which is a really neat town. If you've never been there, you should go check it out. It is wild. But part of the joy of the wildness that you get there is brought on by how remote it is. There aren't a lot of places that are both A, desirable and B more remote than Lander, Wyoming in the Continental 48 of the United States. And so Wyomingites, we just get used to driving. It's part of what you do. A round trip to Home Depot from Lander is a solid six hours. If you want to go and get like a generica restaurant meal, yeah, same thing. You know, you're looking at maybe five hours round trip to get to the closest set of interstate exit, Olive Garden, Applebee's type joints. It's just a long way. And part of the fun of it is that because Wyoming topographically has so many tall mountains and also giant basins, you can just see where you're going forever. That shark fin peak, that Shoshone Peak, you're just going to have to drive toward that for two hours, staring right at it, feeling like you're never getting any closer. So you can either let this make you insane, or you can just learn to appreciate the wide open spaces and it's just part of the rhythm of life. Well, also, because of the nature of Wyoming and its remoteness and where it is relative to other bigger, more desirable places to go, sometimes you have really weird itineraries out there. You might be in Lander, Wyoming, and wanting to end up in Denver, Colorado, six hours away to the south and a little bit to the east. But in Lander, I mean, you can't really buy a lot of stuff. I mean, there's some, but not a ton of options. So if you wanted to get a used car, the most natural place to go to get a good selection would be Salt Lake City in Utah. They get a website there, ksl.com. You click on cars. It's just it's maybe the best car website in the country. And so if you were going to Denver but you needed to pick up, say, a car on the way, you would first drive very unnaturally out of the way, five hours southwest. Then you would double back another six hours east to get to Denver with your new car in tow with your second driver. Now, if you just saw that on paper, like in the style of Indiana Jones with the red lines and dots zipping around, showing you the basic overview of the itinerary with no explanation why, you would say that makes no sense. It's not a natural route. You wasted a lot of energy getting clear over there. However, the sane person would look at that route and say, well, there must have been some good reason they needed to go to Salt Lake before they went to Denver, because Salt Lake is not on the way to Denver. Likewise, if you're in Cana, west of the nine o'clock position of the Sea of Galilee, and you want to go to Jerusalem, the natural way to do that is just go straight south. The unnatural way to do that is to go north and east to the midnight position on the Sea of Galilee for a couple of days and then walk all the way back south to Jerusalem. Well, that midnight position on the Sea of Galilee, as we discussed, is the little community of Capernaum, which, given its size, plays a very outsized role in the ministry of Jesus. And today is the day where we talk about that little town and what was so attractive about it that would cause Jesus and his disciples to go on foot that far out of the way for just a few days. Here's the verse that gets us there. John 2 12, we just finished up the story of the miracle of turning water into wine in Cana. It goes like this. After this, he, Jesus, went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days. Okay. Outside of Jerusalem, Capernaum is the most prominent happening town in the Gospels. Not in terms of size or economic activity. I mean, it's not nothing, but it's not huge by any means either. But I mean in terms of a Bible New Testament heat map or a gospel heat map. If you made a gospel heat map, Jerusalem would just be on fire. But the next hottest place would be Capernaum, northern side of the Sea of Galilee. But interestingly, John is the gospel author who records the fewest explicitly Capernaum-oriented scenes of all four Gospels. Mark has us there a ton, Matthew has us there a ton, Luke has us there quite a bit, John, you know, some. It's kind of intoned that we're up there around Capernaum. John, in general, has us down in Jerusalem and into Judea more than the other three, more often than the other three gospel authors. Now, as we discussed yesterday, Jesus was born in Bethlehem, partially raised in Egypt, then did most of his wonder years in Nazareth. But it looks like right at the beginning of his public ministry, he moves his family to Capernaum. This is laid out in Matthew 4. Hang on, bear with me. Here we go. Uh verse 12. When Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee, leaving Nazareth. He went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali, to fulfill what was said through the prophet Isaiah, land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, along the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles. The people living in darkness have seen a great light on those living in the land of the shadow of death. A light has dawned. From that time on, Jesus began to preach, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near. And what we get next after that, that we're not going to get into right now, is uh another look at the calling of Andrew and Simon Peter. And if you look at all the synoptics together, it kind of looks like that calling happened over time, like there was a succession to it. And you get the same impression in John because the disciples, or five of the disciples, are following Jesus at the wedding at Cana, but they don't put their faith in him meaningfully until verse 11 after that. So I kind of see what's happening here in John 2, 11 and 12, that is John's observations about the disciples really locking in on Jesus and about Jesus being in Capernaum, maybe kind of corresponding with Matthew chapter 4. Whatever the exact timeline, Jesus seemed to understand that the tiny little village of Nazareth was rejecting him. There were probably only, I don't know, a few hundred people, a couple dozen families that lived in Nazareth altogether. It was just so tightly knit. I don't know. He was rejected in his hometown and rejected very assertively, which, given that Jesus loved his mother and his family, my understanding once again would be that he had younger brothers who were also under his care. Given that he cared about them, he's like, well, you know, what I'm doing is clearly putting them in a bad spot in Nazareth. That's a negative reflection on Nazareth, not on me. But it looks like he relocates the entire family, not just himself. Why else would Jesus' mother and brothers and disciples make this trip from Cana way out of their way to Capernaum if they still lived in Nazareth in John chapter 2? Mary and her other sons, or as some see it, cousins who were maybe under her care, would have just gone whatever it was, like five miles south, like simple little half-day walk to Nazareth and gone home. It would make no sense for them to go to Capernaum. Capernaum isn't a big enough deal for them to make that trip. So I read John 2.12 as being a little hint in the Gospel of John that this is where Jesus made the move with his family from Nazareth to Capernaum, which signals to us as readers that now Capernaum is Jesus' chosen base of operations, his chosen hometown. I also think it's really interesting the way John just cruises past this. There's a detail now, Jesus is there, now you get it. And Matthew locks in on Old Testament prophecy from Isaiah. They're doing different things here. John is obviously cognizant of the Jewishness of his audience. He's also aware of some non-Jewish participants in his audience. He's also aware of some very heavily Hellenized, that is, Greekified Jewish members who are of his audience who are scattered all around the world. But Matthew is talking to a really Hebrew audience, and he's assuming that his audience has a great handle on all the prophecies in the Old Testament that have to do with the Messiah, specifically where he's from. So in the Gospel of Matthew, we get details, you know, from ancient prophecy about Jesus being from Egypt and from Bethlehem. I mean, even Herod's advisors are aware that the Messiah is supposed to be from Bethlehem. Also, Matthew points to an unknown prophecy about Nazareth or that he would be called a Nazarene. That's in Matthew chapter 2. There's a lot of debate about what exactly you do with that one. And now that Jesus is moved again, Matthew is very concerned with letting us know that this is in fulfillment of the prophecy about the Messiah being connected with Galilee, and that the Messiah being in Galilee is connected to the idea of the people living in darkness have seen a great light. On those living in the land of the shadow of death, the light has dawned. So for Matthew, Capernaum isn't just a practical, pragmatic base of operations where Jesus ended up. It is also in fulfillment of Scripture to Matthew. Jesus is right where he's supposed to be at every turn. And well, not just to that, Matthew, to this Matthew, the one talking right now. Jesus is right where he's supposed to be at every turn, in fulfillment of prophecy, but also with shrewdness. Now there's more stuff here that we need to talk about in terms of the community of Capernaum, the map, the logistics, all of this. It's gonna make the whole story make a whole bunch more sense. And we're gonna need another day to do it. So we'll suspend operations here for a minute and pick it up tomorrow. But as we've already looked at today, understanding Capernaum and what Jesus is doing up here and how it is different than Jerusalem and the whole scene where a lot of the gospel takes place down there is very important for getting all of this. And John assumes knowledge on the part of his original audience, which means you and I, as modern readers, just need to invest a little bit of extra effort to understand what was so intuitive geographically and culturally to the original audience. And we will keep working on that tomorrow. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.