JOHN118 - Up to Jerusalem for Passover Season

John 2:12-13

No Dumb Questions: What are T and O Maps? and How Would You Get There Without a Map?

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And do you ever remember a time when an adult who you looked up to, who brought stability to your life and who demonstrated restrain and calm? Can you think of a time when that kind of an adult in your life did not demonstrate restraint and calm, but they were right to do it and you looked up to him for it? I can, I can think of a time when my granddad Whitman, who was very, very restrained man, he talked about as much as Calvin Coolidge, which, if you don't understand that reference, that means he didn't talk a lot. He was a very quiet man, man of few words, very high integrity. But one time a thing got a little bit out of control, and something needed to be addressed. Somebody needed to be addressed. They were doing something they shouldn't have been doing. And my granddad, in front of everybody, he called that guy out. He got big, he got loud, he dealt with it, and that was the end of that nonsense. It did not happen anymore after that. And boy, I look up to my granddad all the more for that. Yeah, it was a departure from how he normally acts, but it made sense. It was right, and it was kind of cool to know that one, he had that in the tank, and that two, it would be okay for me to have that in the tank later on. Yeah, at any rate, Jesus is gonna do something like that here in John chapter 2. And you know, this this is gonna be the scene where Jesus goes big in response to something he doesn't like. But I've kind of been thinking about this, getting ready for the conversation you and I are having today. I've been thinking about it from the perspective of the disciples and kind of putting myself in their shoes. Because for them, this has got to be a lot like what it felt like for me with granddad. I'd never seen granddad or heard of granddad going big ever. And a a little part of me was like, man, uh I'm kind of it's kind of scary. I I want you to be nice. But a bigger part of me was like, dang, that was pretty cool. I wonder how the disciples felt about this thing. Because in the last sentence of the previous anecdote here in John chapter 2, we get them saying, you know, they see the glory of Jesus at this other festival, at this wedding, and they put their faith in him. So now they make this commitment to him. They are have publicly identified themselves with Jesus. They're aligned with him, their names are aligned with him, their reputation's aligned with him. Jesus then immediately moves his family to a town where a lot of these guys are from. Like they're in. Jesus' fate is their fate, their fate. I mean, it's all tied together now, right? And then immediately they go down to Jerusalem to like the fanciest, most formal place in their whole tradition, and something crazy happens. Jesus bows up and goes real big. Here's the passage, John 2, 12. After this, he, Jesus, went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. And they stayed there for a few days. When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now, the ups and the downs here. I like to comment on this just a little bit here and there to stay oriented. For me, as a man of the American West, the cardinal directions go like this. You go up north, because of the way maps are oriented, you go down south, you go out west. If you were to go further west from me, like California or something, you go out west, and you go back east. Now in America, we come up with the out and back thing, and it's completely derived from the order in which our continent was settled by Europeans, right? You know, the East Coast was settled first, and kind of the story of America is how it kept moving west. I don't think the out and back as a reference to west and east are a part of the ancient world, but I definitely know that the up and down is not how they thought about north and south. I'm gonna have Jeff link it for you. We just did a two-episode run on No Dumb Questions, the podcast I do with my buddy Destin, the rocket scientist, where we pick a topic and then we talk, he rocket sciences it and I, whatever this is, the same topic. We talked about ancient maps and how they were oriented. You might get a kick out of those two episodes. What you will see throughout the biblical narrative, especially as it pertains to Jerusalem, the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan Valley, all of that stuff, is up and down doesn't mean north and south. Up and down means elevation. So Cana is kind of up in the high country west of the Sea of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee sits in kind of a little bowl, a little depression. It's you know, it has a little ridge that runs all the way around it. The Sermon on the Mount is happened, you know, kind of partway up that ridge, probably looking over the Sea of Galilee. So when it says, after this, Jesus went down to Capernaum, well, from Cana to Capernaum, you drop elevation. But then Jerusalem, you know, that's Mount Zion. It's this elevated area in Judea, and whether you come from the coast or whether you come from the Dead Sea, which is below sea level, either way, you're going up to Jerusalem, which is a pretty beautiful image when you think of what Jerusalem is for. You know, it's a place that you go up to to worship God, to sacrifice. So even though the story here is moving south from Capernaum and the Sea of Galilee to Jerusalem, it's still always gonna, you always go up to Jerusalem. And the reason that people were going up to Jerusalem, Jesus and his disciples as well, was for a pilgrimage. It was a holiday pilgrimage, and there were three big pilgrimage times of year. There was Passover time of year, there was Festival of Weeks time of year that includes the day of Pentecost, which factors very heavily later in the New Testament, and then the Feast of Tabernacles or Booths. This time around it's Passover, which is a combo holiday with the Feast of Unleavened Bread. They fall really close together. And there's a reason they fall really close together. It's because they both celebrate joined events, events that happened back to back in the Old Testament. Back in Exodus, the Hebrew people were in slavery in Egypt, and God used Moses and miraculous plagues to make it clear to the Pharaoh, the leader of Egypt, you're gonna let my people go. And Pharaoh dug in for a long time over these plagues, but the last one, the plague of the death of the firstborn, broke Pharaoh. And the deal was that this plague was going to afflict every household in all of Egypt, except those that slaughtered a lamb per the instructions of God and put it on the doorpost, and then death, the plague, would pass over that home. And, you know, Pharaoh didn't play along, and the the plague of death touched his home, and he's like, fine, you can leave. And so the Hebrew people left so quickly that they didn't even have time to let the dough that they were getting ready for the next day rise. So they had all this flat dough in their bags that they were hoisting out of there so they'd have something to eat once they got out into the desert. So these combo festivals, one, Passover, the bigger of the two, celebrates that final plague and God sparing his people and breaking the will of Pharaoh and you know letting his people go. And two, unleavened bread, which celebrates the flight from Egypt and a lot of connotations that go along with that as well, because the story was far from over there in Exodus. But it all adds up to uh holiday season, and the two are really intertwined. The events don't totally happen in order. The, you know, this is 1200 or 1400 years after the events that it celebrates and commemorates. So a lot of traditions have evolved. So in the same way that we have Christmas season that has a few different holidays in it, and Christmas season also has a Christmas actual event. So Passover is connected with another holiday and has an actual Passover event. So I don't think there's any chance that Jesus and his disciples here would have gone to Capernaum to do like half of it. I don't think they went and did the first bit of Passover, or maybe just got in unleavened bread real quick with the relatives and then went down to Jerusalem. No, I think they were going to Jerusalem to do the entire thing. And here it's important to note that the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, give us a different itinerary. They pinch zoom in on different parts of Jesus' public ministry itinerary than John does. For the most part, the synoptics just keep us in the north, up in Galilee, for most of each of those three books. And then at the end of each of those three books, he comes south to Jerusalem. There's a notable exception we're going to talk about in just a second. John, however, more freely catalogs Jesus moving from north to south, north to south. Already one and a half chapters into John, we've got Jesus down south near the Dead Sea, up north by the Sea of Galilee, out west by Cana, and now back down south or heading back down south to Jerusalem. So uh for whatever reason, the way John organizes his story, we end up in Jerusalem a little bit more. But as I said, there's a big exception here, and that is in Luke chapter two. Do I have time for this today? No, I do not. I want to do this justice. So tomorrow we're gonna look at Luke chapter two, which takes us back to when Jesus was, you know, 12-ish, and we're gonna look at one key thing that Jesus says here as a boy that really relates to what we're looking at in John chapter two and this situation that's about to unfold in the temple there in Jerusalem. Okay, once again, I mentioned uh a couple episodes of the podcast, No Dumb Questions that I do with Destin. It's about ancient maps. You might find it fun, you also might not, but it's just no dumb questions is the name of the podcast. You can find it anywhere. It's the last couple of episodes, you'll figure it out. Okay, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.