JOHN122 - He Isn't Safe...but He's Good

John 2:13-17

C.S. Lewis Park Video - Click Here

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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 to those of you who are new or newish around here, I haven't said it for a little while, so I need to say it now. Welcome. I'm glad you're checking it out. I hope you like it. I hope you've kind of figured out what the gist is, what we're going for here, which is we pick a book of the Bible, we chip away a little bit every day, we take as long as we want. We can chase down all the history and theology, rabbit trails. Anytime we look at any given book of the Bible, I am just looking for excuses for the book that we're working on to launch us into all the other parts of the Bible. So really the goal is to be studying the whole Bible in its big, grand historic context all the time in every season. But one book of the Bible is always our guide or our entry point to the larger picture of scripture and church history and all of that stuff. So right now we're working on John. We've done a bunch of seasons around here, and you know, we're we're just into chapter two on John. I don't know if we'll pick up the pace. I don't know if we'll keep going slow. I don't know if we'll take a break in the middle, but I'm having a blast, and I particularly like John because the further into it we get, the more Jesus we get. And we're going to get our first pretty extended speech or series of remarks from Jesus here in one more page. And I'm looking forward to that. So that's what we do. That's what we're going for. Also, welcome back to all of you who've been doing this with me forever and know the drill. But a lot of you might not know that I also have a YouTube channel that is actually older than this podcast. It was called the 10-minute Bible hour for a really long time. Then this podcast ended up absorbing that name. And there's actually even a whole bonus season kind of of this podcast that lives on that YouTube channel. Way back when I was just tiny, just a little fella, I did a whole series on the book of Acts. It's only, I say only because compared to this, you know, it's a big difference, but it's maybe 80 episodes long. And we just went through the entire book of Acts. And it was a very different time in history. It was a very different time in the history of the internet and YouTube, but it's still up there. It was kind of fun. Well, after I got done with Acts on that YouTube channel, I started this podcast because I was like, yeah, I think it would work better to be able to do this every single day instead of laboring through making a whole video, which is much harder and only getting one out a week. So it made this pivot, and I kept doing stuff over there on the YouTube channel, but you know, I started exploring a whole lot of other things, going to churches that aren't like mine, taking a camera, getting a tour from the people who run it, learning about what they believe and why they do it the way they do it, using that as an excuse to learn about church history and theology and the Bible. And I also started taking a camera with me just anywhere I went to look for church history stuff, to look for stuff almost kind of pilgrimage sites in a way. I like that. I like going to places where important things, usually awesome important things, occasionally troubling important things, but important things in the history of Christianity happened. I just like to be there. I like to kind of feel the story, and I like to take a camera along and show you. So I just did something like that. A few days ago, I posted a short on my YouTube channel where I was in Ireland with my family on a trip. And I wanted to go to this place where there was this famous thing called the Battle of the Books, like 1,500-ish years ago. And it was a Christian copyright dispute that turned bloody. It's a crazy story. It's on the short. I don't need to recap it for you. It's over there if you want to see it. But on that same trip, my family and I drove up to Northern Ireland, to Belfast, and I figured that somewhere in Belfast there would have to be some kind of monument or acknowledgement of one of Belfast's most beloved literary sons, that being the great Christian author C.S. Lewis. Now, Lewis didn't do most of his writing in Belfast. He moved to Oxford, where he worked with uh J.R.R. Tolkien and this other just slew of geniuses who worked in the area and they informed each other's work. It's a pretty cool writing scene that existed there. Well, what are we at? 75 years ago, a little bit longer, something like that, there in Oxford. But, you know, I figured it's gonna be stuff in Belfast. He grew up there, he went to church there as a kid, and you know, it's kind of a Christian pilgrimage thing. We're gonna go find out, we're gonna unwrap the present together. So took my family up there, my daughter in particular is a huge Lewis fan. She had just finished a college course where she read everything by Lewis and wrote papers about it. And so it was really cool to go and get to see this stuff that informed what he wrote. Well, Belfast did not disappoint. They have an entire square, an entire park dedicated to C.S. Lewis with an adjoining library. And it's magnificent. It's not some little small potatoes thing. They've got street art and murals and like, you know, graffiti vandalism of like Aslan, the Great Lion. I got to tell you about Aslan, but all this C. S. Lewis Chronicles of Narnia, the Lion, the Witch in the Wardrobe, it's all around this C. S. Lewis Square, just in Belfast Town. It's really cool. And to get to go and look at that with my daughter was great. Also, I took a camera and I made a video about it, and I think that comes out today. In the Chronicles of Narnia, there's a main character. His name is Aslan. He's a great lion. And as you read through the book, you figure out, oh, Aslan, he represents Christ. That's exciting. But then as you get a little bit further into the book and the whole series of the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia, you realize Aslan doesn't really represent Christ in kind of an interesting literary maneuver. He kind of is Christ. And there's this implicit, well, explicit challenge to the reader to go and find Aslan in your own world. It's a very bold literary move, but very powerful. I remember encountering that as a kid, having my dad read that to me and just blowing my mind. He's Jesus. That's incredible. So when I took my daughter to this park here a while back, of course, we want to see it's a sculpture park that has a bunch of the beloved characters from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. And of course, you want to see all the other characters, but come on, you're there for Aslan. I want to see what he's about. I want to see how they present him. I want to see if they understood the point, or if they tried to give me, you know, kind of a lame, secularized version that strips all the meaning out of it and just turns it into a nondescript YA type novel. Well, I was very pleased to find that no, I mean, it really they the people who made the park understood the point of Lewis's writings. And so you make your way through the park. Again, you can go and see all of this in the video for yourself, but you get to the end of it, and there's this big hill, and there's this huge lion sculpture up on top. And I'm not going to spoil it and tell you what it looks like. It's very unique the way they chose to communicate it. But what is incredibly clear from how the artists depict Aslan in this park in Belfast is that they understood the theme that runs through the Chronicles of Narnia that Aslan is simultaneously good and also dangerous. He's not safe. He's not a tame lion. He's a lion. Look at the muscles, look at the teeth, look at the claws. You can't have, I mean, it comes through in Lewis's writing that you can't have the authority and power and regality of that great lion without a proper amount of fear that comes with it because of all the hardware on that great lion. He's intimidating, he's powerful, and he's not tame. Nobody owns Aslan. No one dictates to Aslan. And so throughout the Chronicles of Narnia, Aslan is this father figure. He's everything that Optimus Prime was trying to be to young boys in the 1980s, but lacked the sophistication to pull it off. Aslan is warm, he's thoughtful, he's principled, he's rooted in ancient things. And every time he talks, he says very few words, but you just want to go further into what those words are about. He's a masterfully written character, obviously inspired by Jesus. So it's pretty good source material, right? But this sculpture of the lion, uh, it has an edge to it. The lion is intimidating, and yet somehow the goodness also comes through. And likewise, in John chapter 2, in these back-to-back anecdotes of the wedding at Cana and then Jesus cleansing the temple, we're seeing both sides of that character. We're seeing the regality and the gentleness and the subtlety and the touch, and even his willingness to serve people who don't even understand who they're being served by when he turns the water into wine quite discreetly. But then on the other hand, we see that Christ, the lion of Judah, is not a tame lion. When he goes into the temple, uh things get really lively really quickly. Well, you get both. They're both Jesus, they're both supposed to be there. And remember, if we're the original audience or we're a new reader to the Bible, we're just meeting Jesus. We're just figuring out what he's about and how he's wired. And John really gives us both sides of this really very early on. But it raises the question: why exactly is Jesus so angry? And why does he feel why why do the claws come out here in the temple cleansing scene? Maybe you forgot the passage, maybe it's your first time. Let me read it to you real quick, and then we'll flesh out that question just a bit more. After this, John 2.12, he, Jesus, went to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days. When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts, he found men selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle. He scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables, and to those who sold doves he said, Get these out of here. How dare you turn my father's house into a market? His disciples remembered that it is written, Zeal for your house will consume me. Okay, so the question is, once again, why did the claws come out here? There's so many other affronts to Jesus' dignity. There are so many other stupid, petty, Facebook squabble level dumb things that happen where Jesus is, you know, the butt of the joke or the one getting criticized. But the claws don't come out there. Why do they come out here? Well, we've explored one of those things, and that is that this is his father's house. He said so. We know he, above all else, treasures his relationship with the father. He that's his favorite topic to talk about, his father, his father, his father. And so he sees this as being a cheapening. It's tacky. There's probably also a degree of dishonesty here, which we unpacked a little bit over the last couple of days. But I think there's one more reason as well that is sitting in plain sight in the text that we're going to get to tomorrow that explains why we get the untamed lion version of Jesus here. And why you and I, assuming that most of you in the audience are not Jewish, that you are Gentiles like me, I think his anger is something that you and I, as outsiders, should really appreciate because I think maybe he had us in view a little bit here, and we'll unpack that more tomorrow. Again, that C.S. Lewis Park video should be out by now. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.