Disciple Bible Study 19, Gospel of John Part IV

And I did this with the fifth graders yesterday and I realized how rare this is that we that we sort of get it.

You know, um I don't know that we ever say this in church.

You know, one of the things that is maybe helpful to think about here is why is it the Jewish people are called Jews anyway?

Where does it come from?

What does it mean?

And I want to do that by talking about Christians first.

So, you know, in general, we have this symbol in Christianity that's the cross, and we'll talk about this in about four weeks, how that's actually not historically accurate.

Crosses did not look like that ever.

And then the name that we go by, right, is Christian, which I hope is really helpful to say.

This really is a diminutive form here of the Greek word Christ.

So Christian really means little Christ.

Like in Spanish, I would say, like if I was talking about a dog, I would I would say it's perito if it's a small boy, or perita if it's a small girl dog, right?

And that's sort of it.

The neutral one, the neuter gender of Christ.

Well, um, Christ is is the Greek equivalent of the word Messiah.

So it's like you're the little Messiah.

And in that word really just means anointed one.

So these all three mean the same thing.

Christ means Messiah, means anointed one.

And reminder for you that in the Bible, and particularly in the Hebrew Bible, when a king, and there were no queens, well, there's only one time there's a queen of Israel, and she wasn't anointed.

She was considered a usurper.

When a king is coronated, it's not with a crown, it's with oil on their head.

So kings are made with oil.

Curiously enough, the monarch of England is anointed with oil by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

I don't know if you knew that.

So Queen Elizabeth was anointed with oil on her coronation.

That's a private religious ceremony in addition to the crown.

Okay?

So again, um, Christ basically means king.

And what's interesting to think about is that Jesus isn't the king of kings with small k's, but the capital K of all kings, not because he's a typical expected monarch, but because of his way of living.

So Christian people are then called to be little Christs, little messiahs, anointed by God to bring good news to the world.

That's that's what all that means.

Curiously enough, I told you this symbol is not the oldest one, not the oldest one.

Um there's two challenges to it.

Uh, the first is this sort of Greek letter alpha that could also be a fish.

You see that all over on CARS.

And you know, there's a little acronym to it.

This is uh the way that you would spell the word fish in Greek, ichthys, which means just fish.

And uh this is like an acrostic poem.

The first line starts with the I, and the next starts with the the chi.

And the way this has sort of worked is this is this is Jesus.

This is the chi is for Christ.

The theta is for Theos, like God.

So Jesu, Christos, Thaos, Wias, which means son, and sigma is uh, which means Savior.

See, this is meant to be this sort of acrostic about the identity of Jesus as the Christ, as the confession of faith, and um earlier symbol than the cross.

Also earlier than the cross is this symbol, and we get to hear it today, of Christ the Good Shepherd.

Predates the cross as Christian symbol.

If I asked you what is the symbol for uh Jewish folk, do you know it?

I would say that was the cross of David, right?

The Star of David, right?

Yeah, and let me tell you that the Star of David sure is Jewish, but it was really imposed on Jewish people when they were put in ghettos.

So curiously enough, probably the more archetypal symbol of Judaism is the menorah.

I mean this is good that you know that this is not a Hanukkah.

So during Hanukkah, the candle stand holds nine.

Well, Mike, there's eight, eight days of Hanukkah, that's right, but you use the Shamesh, one of them, to light the other eight.

So the Hanukkah has nine, the menorah has seven, and if you've ever been to Rome, you'll see on Trajan's victory column, Trajan was the general under the Emperor Vespasian who crushed the Jewish revolt back in the year 70 of our common era.

You'll see the menorah is being looted from the temple and taken to Rome, and that's the symbol.

This one honestly started to become predominant in the 1930s in Germany when Jewish people had to publicly label themselves.

Curiously enough, they didn't wear a menorah, they wore the David's star.

No one knows what this has to do with David.

Nobody knows.

It's just sort of associated with him.

I just want to make sure you know that.

That's the symbology, and then there's this word Jew.

And you know, we talked about our history when we started the class.

Remember, Israel is shaped roughly like that.

And there's this Sea of Galilee, also called Gennesaret.

That's the Greek equivalent of Galilee, sometimes called the Sea of Tiberias.

So it's got three names.

Down comes the Jordan River and drains there into the Dead Sea.

Um, remember about there's twelve children of Israel.

One of them's a girl, so she doesn't get property.

Alright, so there's really 11 sons.

The way you get 12 is instead of there being a tribe of Joseph, Joseph's two sons, one replaces the girl.

Does that make sense?

And those are Ephraim and Manasseh.

So there's 12 tribes, and one of the tribes occupies this land that ends up later having Jerusalem.

So initially, the tribe of Judah does not have Jerusalem in it, belongs to a different people group called the Jebuzites.

But when David, uh, who is a Bethlehemite, uh captures Jerusalem, he makes it the neutral capital.

Anyway, Judah ends up kind of swallowing it.

And as we talked about, the Assyrians come down and get rid of the other 11 tribes, essentially.

They're all gone.

And then there's just the tribe of Judah.

Well, this is where the word Judean comes from.

Judeans are people from the area of Judah.

So initially it's a tribe, but that starts to get a little confused, and now it becomes a geographic term.

These are the Judeans, and that gets shortened to the Jews.

So it goes from being a family tree, a genealogical identity, and then it goes to being a geographic locale.

It's sometimes religious, but it may not be.

So, and this is actually pretty interesting if you know anything about modern Judaism.

I gotta be careful because I'm recording myself here, but fair estimate that 95% of contemporary Jews are atheist.

And don't you see it's a geographic ethnic term as much as it is a religious term.

So we have to be really careful about what Jews believe.

Which ones are we talking about?

Orthodox, conservative, reform, and even people who go to synagogue may do that as a cultural identity and not as a religious identity.

I would tell you, Christianity is not much different, to be honest with you.

I hope that's okay that I said that.

These become rites of passage.

Now in John, John uses the word the Jews, and it's got a lot of ambiguity to it.

He could be saying the Judeans.

More often than not, what I want to tell you, I think John's doing, and most scholars think this as well, uh, he's talking about what we'd say, he's really talking about Jewish leaders.

Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, people with influence.

He could be also talking about Judean leaders, that means public officials.

It was interesting when I went to um when I went to Catholic seminary, I took a class called Anti-Semitism in the New Testament.

This is sort of interesting.

And um, this is one of those developments that we often conflate in church because we hear John say the Jews.

Now, I don't know if you've ever noticed, we don't read a lot of John.

He shows up during the 40 days of um of Easter.

So right after Easter is when we read the Gospel of John.

When I read the Gospel, I always say the Jewish leaders, even though it says the Jews, because I really think that's what he's talking about.

Um some things that we didn't get just to throw out.

Every Friday night, when there are three stars visible in the sky, which is a variable time each week, right?

Because the days lengthen and then they shorten.

The oldest woman in the house lights two candles and blesses them.

The oldest man in the house takes a cup full of wine and says a blessing over the cup, and then it is the children who bless the bread.

Hey, we have two candles on the Lord's table, and we have a cup that we call a chalice instead of a kiddish, and sometimes we eat leavened bread like chalah, and sometimes we eat unleavened bread like matzah, and all of that's Jewish.

All of it.

So there's this false idea that Christianity is in opposition to Judaism.

The historical root of that actually came because during the Roman Empire, uh Jewish people were tolerated in not sacrificing gifts to the emperor because their religion was old.

In the old world, old was was better than new.

Now, when you're buying a car, new is better than old.

But in general, when there's a long, long-standing religious tradition, it tends to have more respect.

I actually think that's pretty true now because new age is not really a good moniker for what you do.

Neither is self-help for some reason.

Super strange that that's like deprecatory, but um so the Romans tolerate the Jewish folk, and then Christianity comes out of Judaism.

It's not even called Christianity for the first 30 years, it's called the way.

And um the Christian people said, no, no, we're Jewish.

Like we're a reform movement of Judaism, so we don't have to sacrifice to the emperor.

But many of the Jewish establishments said, no, you're not.

So, particularly when there's this Jewish rebellion, that, as I mentioned, Trajan is the general who totally suppresses it along with Vespasian.

That's when Christians say, you know, you're right, we're not Jewish.

We're not rebelling against the emperor.

So it's been this um conflagrated history.

You know, the the Christians in Jerusalem observed Jewish practice.

Like they observed kosherut or kosher food laws, they went to the temple to pray.

Obviously, Christians in places like Smyrna and Laodicea in modern-day Greece didn't.

So there's been this kind of was this early confusion about identity, and then both sides actually ended up saying, no, we're not the same group, and that's really when the split he's talking about started to happen.

And it had to do with expediency and politics more than it did with my religion is not yours.

I just want to make sure that's that's clear.

Now, over the centuries, what we've done is we've read, hey, the Jewish people killed Jesus.

How interesting though, because we celebrate that death.

So it's been this really strange bit, right, that we say Jews are bad they killed Jesus, but I'm glad they did.

If you've been to a synagogue, I mean, interestingly enough, it's pretty similar, depending what kind of synagogue you go to, to what many Christians do when they go to worship.

You hear a sacred text, you hear a sermon about it, you pray.

Sometimes there's chanting, sometimes there's swaying.

Um, we're a little worried about those holy roller people.

There's lots of holy roller Jewish people, though, because they nod their heads or they sway when they pray.

But you know, in general, they're pretty similar.

The way the building's set up and what it is we do.

Um some Christian folks, like in the Deep South, ladies wear bonnets when they go to church all the time.

Well, you know, men wear a head covering, but that's not so different.

You know, anyway, I hope I hope it's helpful just to explore really the roots of this.

Um, again, anti-Semitism and kind of where it comes from.

It was more accidental than it was intentional, and it had to do with toleration or um uh f fear of being identified as a rebel during the Roman Empire.

And um yeah, so that's what I wanted to say.

Did I did I miss something or any questions about that information or the presentation about Judaism in the video?

Of course I've been to the Passion Play in Germany.

To Oberamagau?

Once there, and then once uh just visiting my family, and I couldn't get to one.

But in both places the Jewish uh people wore these head gear, they couldn't look like horns, and I can decide is that a symbol of Jewism or is that added later as a these are bad people or what?

Yeah, I don't know the answer to that.

In general, I think um if you've ever been to a um or if you've ever seen uh Orthodox, like patriarchs or orthodox priests, they tend to wear black with this like black hat with a veil, and that seems to be the Pharisaic tradition, the early Pharisaic tradition.

Of course, now you know most uh Jewish people are stylized in worship in a couple of different ways.

I mean, essentially everybody wears the kipah, that's the Hebrew word.

The Yiddish word is yarmaka, those are equivalents, but yarmulk is Yiddish, not Hebrew.

There's a third word called Ladino because the Jewish company uh in Spain uh they merged Hebrew with Spanish, and we're just rediscovering Ladino language right now.

Um now, you know, in the synagogue, all the men must wear that, but they also pull up their their talit, that's their their prayer shawl that's got the strands, and there's exactly 613 knots on those strands, one for each of the mitzvot, the commandments.

You have to know all those to have your bar mitzvah, you see.

Uh if you've seen fiddler on the roof, or if you know Jewish folk.

Now I mean I'll tell you, most reformed Jews don't wear this.

Orthodox Jews always wear their little shawl under their clothes, and those little knots come out.

Those are called the tzitzit, the tassels, the fringes of their garment.

When we read about that woman who's hemorrhaging and she touches Jesus on the fringe, she touches the tzitzit, the tassel, the 613 mixed boat.

She grabs that.

So, in general, that's the modern attire.

Now, if you are like an Orthodox uh Jew, particularly if you're um well, I should just say, in general, in the 1800s the Polish nobility were all black and they wore this black-rimmed hat.

And that's become the moniker for Orthodox Jew, but see that's new.

That's from the 1800s in Poland, and that's sort of now plain.

If you go to New York and you see somebody with a beard and a black-brimmed hat, all black, ah, that's a Jewish person.

It is, but only for 200 years.

It's sort of like thinking about neckties, right?

The neckktie is also about 200 years old, and that comes from a hung Serbian military uh attire.

People didn't wear neckties before Serbian military officers.

They invented that, and that's now become mainstream.

So we sometimes lose the change of the clothes.

And there's a big difference, you know, um there's there's two major traditions of Judaism.

There's the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic, and they worship differently.

You know, the Ashkenazi are the Jews essentially on the west side, uh, and then and then the Sephardic are like Poland, Russia over.

That's I thought we have friends.

I thought it was the opposite.

Because our friend, we have friends from from Ladino.

Yeah, from Turkey.

From Turkey.

That's weird they speak Latino in Turkey.

That's weird.

And and he he we were very good friends.

And and when he first picked her, he said, I don't know.

I said, Yes, he's honest with Latino.

And and so we there were I've spoken to his mother who come, they live in Israel, they come from Israel, and they've carried that that that uh with them, and that's been and I was I'm really interested that that you said so.

There's that thing about the language about the Latino.

The other thing is I want to ask, when I was a child and a woman in the Catholic Church, I don't know about anybody else, but you even you put a Kleenex on top of your head, you covered the top of your head.

Whereas in the in the uh Jewish religion, it seems like the men have to have the head covered.

I don't know if that has anything to do with it.

Well, keep in mind that if you're orthodox, you don't sit with the men if you're a woman.

And if you're really orthodox, you may not go to the synagogue at all.

I mean, in general, at an Orthodox synagogue, there's two tiers of seating, and women sit up top and they look through a screen so that they're not a straction to the men, because women are not technically allowed to study the Torah.

There's a whole movie about it called Yentl.

It's terrible.

Barbara Streisand looks nothing like a man.

Sorry, point that out.

And how is it she fools those men?

It's just you really have to suspend your disbelief.

Because Barbara's beautiful, baby.

Okay, anyway.

Um interestingly enough, if you were a married Orthodox woman, you must cover your hair all week when you go out of the house, especially.

And it's on Friday night on Shabbat that you can.

Here comes the idiom, let your hair down.

The the Jewish woman wears something called a shedl.

Uh, this is like the equivalent of a hijab, if you know the Arabic word.

Notice the Virgin Mary is always wearing a hijab.

A shedel, if you're Jewish, actually could just be a wig, but you don't show the world your hair because it's your glory.

You only show that to your family, particularly on the Shabbat.

Mike coming back to the uh so uh what I had understood was that the Sephardic Jews were from the Iberian.

In other words, when the Jews moved out into the uh away from Israel, uh they went throughout Europe.

And that the Sephardic Jews ended up in the Iberian area, and the Ashkenazi were up in Eastern uh uh uh Europe.

You know, I think the Iberians were forced out.

I I always I always struggle with this because there's geographic.

And then there's like the consideration of this as well.

Like how it is that Jewish people sort of get this.

So in general, I would say, and this is at least the so I it always goes back to me because in general I want to say Ashkenazi are east and Sephardic's west.

That gets really muddled.

The truth is, I think maybe the easy way to consider it is in modern Judaism, the Ashkenazi are the ones who tend to have resources, and the Sephardic are the ones who tend to come from poorer backgrounds wherever they're from.

And so in the land of Israel today, there is an Ashkenazi majority, and they tend to look down on Sephardic customs.

So one of the things that's interesting, and I actually went to a Sephardic synagogue when I was in Israel.

When you were what?

When we went to Israel, I went to a Sephardic synagogue on Shabbat, you know, and it's shaped a bit like this, and uh unlike uh so there's a there's this place over here called the Tabernacle, and the Torah sits there.

It doesn't matter whether you're um Ashkenazi or you're Sephardic, that's what happens.

But in the Sephardic synagogue, there's a platform in the middle of the pews called the Bhimah, and that's where the chazan, the cantor, gets up and cants in the middle of the people, sort of like how we read the gospel in the middle, you know?

And um, it's all oriented around the bhima.

The the rabbi actually gives the sermon from up here, but the the cantor does it from the bimah, and that's a Sephardic Ashkenazi difference.

I I mean I like it myself.

Um but I think the terms are very confusing in terms of simple East-West.

I mean, I I I think what you're saying is right in the sense that yeah, you know, the Sephardic tradition has some Spanish roots, but it also has some Eastern roots.

So so maybe it's it's just really complicated, but I think the way it's really come to play out has to do with influence and worship style, maybe even more than ethnicity.

And and it seems to maybe it seems to be family too.

How you were raised, and maybe even I I think.

I this is just the impression I think.

Yeah, it's it's still relatively important.

I mean, if you're an Ashkenazi, you probably will categorically not marry a Sephardic Jew.

Right.

Because that's important that you stay within these ethnic but also religious traditions, and I think that's where it becomes important to say, like, if you're Catholic, particularly 50 years ago, you didn't marry Protestants.

It's changing now in this country.

But you know, it's really important you married within your faith life, and I think that's similar between these two.

Now, listen, there, you know, Catholics and Episcopalians are both Christian, and Ashkenazi and Sephardic are both Jewish, but there are nuanced differences.

It's sort of like saying in Islam, Shiites and Sunnites tend not to marry across that line.

Kill one another.

Yeah, it's really straight, it's a bit strange.

Now, for us, we say, what's wrong with those people forgetting that during the 30 Years' War, Christians killed more Christians than died in like successive world wars?

So I don't want to turn this into like a Jewish one-on-one class, but he touched on the video, and I think it's really, really important to at least have this brief conversation about it.

Sorry.

Well, I was just gonna say that that that um the Inquisition, yeah, which did that occur throughout Europe or just in the um the south southeastern area.

Well, the first Inquisition was not in Spain.

The first Inquisition was in France, and it was against they're called either the um, they're usually called the Qatars, and that was like the Dominicans went, these are in southern France, and they obliterated these people.

I mean, they wiped them out completely.

They were Christians?

Yeah.

They were heretical Christians because they believed in like non-hierarchical church structures, among other things.

And so it was really important to wipe them out in the jiffy.

Um, they're also called the Albigensians.

And so you can hear about the Albigensian heresy if you want to, but they're the Catars, Q-A-T-A-R-S.

And again, that was the Dominicans who were credited with that.

Genocide, sorry.

I mean, that's sort of it.

But then it then they came up with the city.

But then they go up to Spain, of course.

Well, it wasn't just it wasn't just Jews, it was also Christians who had false understandings.

And that actually became, I mean, this is interesting how Ladino started to be wiped out, is if you spoke Ladino, which is again like Hebrew mixed with Spanish, you were immediately suspicious.

So 1492 was the year that Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue.

It's also the year that the Jews were driven out of Spain.

And that's when they went to Portugal.

I mean, Portugal, when they went to Turkey.

That that's what they're talking about.

Well, they went all over the they went wherever they could go, that's the bottom line, right?

They and and remember that there were lots of Jewish people living in Germany and places like Spire, peaceably, but during the Crusades en route, the crusaders said we're going to kill the infidel in the Holy Land, let's let's kill the infidel in Germany, and there were these huge pogroms, that's the word, um, in places like spire, um you know, in in in the 11th century.

Couldn't a Jew, if you will, um not be um killed if they were baptized?

Well, that's during the Inquisition.

During the Crusades, it didn't matter.

Yeah, yeah, I was thinking Inquisition.

I mean, those are just the Crusades, really, you've got to think about, or sort of like the LA riots where people just loot and kill.

I mean, they just like lose their mind completely.

And and they do it with the church's blessing.

You know, it's sort of sort of nuts.

Yeah, you could, but if you turned out that you were you still had Jewish articles.

You know, again, you gotta think about Inquisition as like a witch hunt, really, and there's a lot to profit from killing people because you loot them.

I mean, so get their stuff.

You get their stuff.

So, you know, there were lots of accusations about people who'd baptized over practicing their secret Jewry.

I mean, it it's yeah, it's it's a little nuts.

Somebody on an interview was uh was a Muslim thing, I'm not sure from that area, but he said, when we hear the crusades or the Christians are coming, I mean, this is terror because they they were not Christian at all.

They killed and looted and everything.

And I mean you realize that we're not always the good guys.

Well, I think it's an interesting contrast to think about being the king of kings and being the king capital K, right?

So in general, I think what we've done is we've made Christianity a national religion, which it never was intended to be.

And that brings us maybe right into John.

Is that okay?

I I hope I didn't linger too much on this.

Can I ask one more question?

Yeah, of course.

Okay, so you mentioned that we have the two candles and we have the chalice.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, and it's strictly Jewish.

Is that why you don't see much of those trappings in what I'll call the evangelical church?

I don't I think what the evangelical church has done is they've said all that formal stuff, people were worshiping the ritual and they weren't like worshiping the thing the ritual is meant to support.

So what they did is they threw out the baby with the bathwater.

And um, you know, now what's interesting, supposedly, is it used to be contemporary worship was like the growing thing, like screens and praise songs, and supposedly now there's this interest in cathedral style worship where the former screen people are like, no, we want candles and we want neo-gothic architecture, and somehow they mix that with screens, and it's very confusing.

I mean, I don't go to one of those places, but um, I'm really happy that we have a candle altar now because Christians have been doing that for a long time because it's like it's meaningful.

That's why we've been doing it.

And so to not do it is uh, I think to our loss.

There are truths, there are many garments in the faith closet.

And listen, if you try it on and it doesn't fit, put it back, but don't burn it.

There may be a time later where it's better fitting, you know.

Yeah.

Sorry.

That one's not going away though.

That's we're not gonna put that in a closet.

It's really quite beautiful if you've not seen it.

Uh it's it's lovely to behold.

When can we light this?

Uh Sunday we'll we'll bless it and start going.

Yeah, but you can light one.

Listen, if you're ever up here, and this is what it's gonna say in the in the bulletin, but if you're ever up here and you're like, you know, like my uncle's in hospice, go in there and light a candle, you just leave it.

It's not gonna do anything.

It's it's a tea light in a glass, but it's available all the time, and that's really like how we make our sanctuary a house of prayer for all nations.

You know, I mean all of the Catholic churches, uh it doesn't seem to be in modern as much, but in my growing up here, and anywhere in Mexico, anywhere it's the same in Europe, same, same in Europe, everywhere.

The difference between those ones and this one is that this one's beautiful and those are dysfunctional.

So it's it's both.

I don't mean to be bad, but it is.

It's beautiful.

It's a little box or you can put a quarter.

No, we're not doing a donation box.

Listen, you can buy a thousand tea lights for$30.

So you can donate for your donut, which costs a lot more than a tea light, but if you want to make a donation, put it in the plate, you know.

But I I I didn't want to nickel and dime people as they worship when we don't need to do it.

You know what I mean?

Flowers cost money, yeah, but tea lights cost nothing.

Nothing, yeah.

Okay, so let's pick up in the reading.

Um, and now I'll ask ask my awful question now that we did this red herring around Judaism a little bit.

Um was there anything particularly that jarred you or held you, gave you some insight?

Um who you think John is trying to trying to point us to?

It seemed to me that everything had to do with seeing the light.

Or how do I put this?

Um it was um I'm the light following.

Um and even every um example, or every story, everything intended to be that um I'm the light, follow me, and you would have eternal life.

That was kind of seemed to be throughout the reason I because I missed a couple of these, I would have to read the whole thing.

And so that seemed to be throughout.

In John, there is a lot of the I am I am basically saying that I am part of God, and I was there at the beginning.

I am greater than Abraham, uh I was here with Moses, and in the synoptic I suppose we don't get any of that.

You get it one time.

This is a critical thing in John, and it happens exactly one time in the synoptics, it happens in Matthew, and um, this is sort of what Jesus says in Greek.

Um He says, echo in me, which is translated, I mean this actually means uh I am, and sort of anyway, I I am, right?

And this is sort of what John really wants you to read is capital I, capital A, capital M.

Now remember, this is really John's attempt to do something he can't do linguistically, which is to take God's name in Hebrew, the Y word, and put it into Greek.

Now you can't do it.

You can't.

Because in Greek, ego and me appears all over the place.

But in Hebrew, God's holy name never appears unless it's God's holy name.

So the the the languages don't support this transference, but that's what John's trying to do for an audience that clearly doesn't speak Hebrew.

Now, remember that God's name in Hebrew really just means I am, past, present, and future tense.

And sure enough, it happens a whole bunch of times in the Bible that that gets appended to some other sort of mode.

Like you've heard of maybe, and I'm just gonna use this fake word, like you've heard maybe God's called Jehovah Jirah or Jehovah Sabaot.

So Jirah is like the provider.

And Saba'ot, this is actually the sort of one of the oldest words for God, is the Lord of hosts.

A host is like a legion, it's a troop quantity in the ancient world.

So God of the legions is sort of is sort of that.

Or there's Jehovah Rapha, my healer.

There's lots of these appendages.

So what John does is he does this in Greek, what's already happened in Hebrew, and says, I am shepherd.

I am vine, I am bread of life.

An appendage like that is in holy God's personal name as revealed in existence, expressed through a modality.

It's literally nuts, right?

It means you gotta you gotta hear really what John's trying to quote Jesus as saying is hey, listen, Jesus, I mean, are you trying to say you're older than than Abraham, our ancestor?

And Jesus says, before Abraham was Jehovah.

Which is blasphemy.

You didn't say that name.

And Jesus does.

Now, the one time it happens in the synoptics is when they come to, oh, actually, you know what?

Maybe it is in John.

Maybe it's not.

You know what you're right.

It's in John.

It's in John that the gang comes to arrest Jesus and they say, Are you Jesus of Nazareth?

Then he says, I am, and they all fall backward.

It's only in this gospel.

Yeah, Matthew would have never had him say it because Matthew's writing, the Jewish people don't say this word, right?

So, really, what Matthew is trying to emphasize is Jesus' identity, and that this identity of God is expressed through things like bread and through wine and shepherding and the gate.

So that is a unique way.

The I am sayings are very unique.

And keep in mind, again, if you're Jewish, this is this is really like blasphemy, what he's doing.

But John's saying, no, no, this is actually piety.

Mike, you said two things.

One, you said that this was written to people who didn't speak Hebrew.

Absolutely.

Hebrew is like Sanskrit is today.

I mean, even at the time of Jesus, no one really spoke Hebrew.

They spoke Aramaic and they probably spoke Greek.

Hebrew was essentially a dead language then.

Aramaic was the lingua franca or Greek, because Alexander the Great introduced Greek throughout the world.

And here's a clue for you about that.

Um, sometimes the gospel writers will say, um, you know, Jesus said to this person, Eloi Eloi, lama sabakthani, which means, the gospel will tell you which means.

That's because no one who read it knew what it meant.

No one spoke Aramaic.

I mean, just I want you to hear.

It was a dead language then.

So again, and again, you just can't do this linguistically, but it is sort of the linchpin for John.

If John is, I don't know, when was this written about?

We think somewhere around, and they should be conservative, somewhere between 100 and 120 of the common era.

Okay.

So that's like 30 to 50 years later than Mark.

If he used I am, was he a Jew?

I I mean it would be very, very hetero.

I mean, I it's not really believable, is what I want to say, that Jesus intoned God's sacred name.

It's just it's not really believable because nobody did that.

You could have been stoned for that.

I understand that John is written by the written individually, and then someone adds to the truth.

I don't know about that.

I mean, it depends who you read.

Um, I I think probably, Tim, the more the more common idea is is this John the disciple?

Who knows?

He would have to be 130.

Everything's possible with God.

That's what I learned in youth group.

I mean, again, remember the you just ain't say this.

I'm sorry, just we said dumb things like that.

I'm sorry, it's just crazy.

As if like God only, like authenticity only comes through strange, superfluous miracles.

In general, what people say is like this represents the Johannine version of Christianity.

There's competing versions.

We knew that really early on because you can read it in Galatians.

Some people are baptized by Paul, and some by Peter, and some by Apollos, and some by Jesus.

I mean, there's these different people saying this is what they do.

And listen, denominationalism has always been a reality.

I don't care what religion you are.

Now, Christians are especially good at it, but it's always been a reality.

It really has.

Remember that Jesus' own name is Yahshua, the divine name and salvation.

So, can you get these appendages that are meant to guide us?

I mean, and again, these are these are metaphors.

I do want to take on the shepherd.

Can I do that?

And if you were here for the icon, bitch, you've already heard what I have to say, but it goes like this: there is a huge difference between wild animals and domesticated ones.

And keep in mind that a tame animal is not domesticated.

There's actually a DNA difference between the wild and the domestic.

So this is why people argue that cats are not domesticated, they're tame, because cats can live without you.

Dogs, on the other hand, really pretty much need you.

Now there's feral, there's feral dogs, and they're feral because they eat your trash.

But if they didn't have your trash, they would have a really difficult time surviving, quite honestly.

One of the differences between a wolf and a dog, and this is probably a prime difference, is that a dog will put up with eye contact with humans, and wolves find that challenging.

So this is a mark of domestication.

Again, there's a DNA difference, and here's how it goes with sheep.

A wild sheep, that is like one of these bighorn things living out in the place, they pretty much can take care of themselves in the sense that they don't uh exceed the carrying capacity of the land.

So you learned about this probably in the tenth grade when you studied um biology in school.

There's something called carrying capacity, and that is, you know, uh when grass grows, you can eat the blade of the grass and it'll continue to grow blades of grass.

But when you eat the root, it won't grow anymore.

You've killed it.

So if you have, for example, too many deer on an island, they will kill themselves because they will eat the root and then they will starve, which is why they need predators to make sure they don't overdo it, right?

Well, wild animals uh they naturally cull out their weaker offspring because those get eaten by wolves.

They also are less, uh they produce less frequently.

Just to give you an idea, a wild chicken, do you know how often they lay an egg?

Once a day.

Once a month.

A domestic chicken lays in general once a day or every two days.

Now they're genetically different, right?

Humans have selectively bred them to do that.

It's the same with wild sheep.

A wild sheep is way more nomadic, which allows the land to regenerate itself.

Domestic sheep are, it's not fair to say that they're dumb.

They've been bred to rely on.

On shepherds.

And if the shepherd doesn't move them, they will exceed the carrying capacity of the land by eating not only the blade of grass but the root.

They will eat themselves to death because the land can't regenerate itself.

They also have become especially reliant on the shepherd to find things like water and to move around in safety.

So consider that wild sheep actually do okay against wolves.

They figure it out.

Wolves don't commit sheep genocide in the wild because the sheep have things like horns, big horns.

We don't want those in domestic sheep because they could attack the shepherd, don't you see?

So we've selectively bred smaller horns than sheep and then we trim them.

You know, this is sort of the deal.

So a constant read that I've heard growing up is God says we're like sheep because sheep are stupid, and um, and we are too.

And I just I I just think that's really tragic.

In Luke, when you hear about the sheep wanders away, that's the shepherd's fault, it's not the sheep's fault.

It's the shepherd's job to watch the domesticated sheep because the sheep have been bred to trust the shepherd.

So in John, you get to hear, I'm the shepherd, which essentially is saying, if you're a sheep, it's my job to tend to you.

And there's fake shepherds out there who won't really tend to you because when the wolf and the lion and the bear come, they'll leave you to death.

But I'm the real shepherd because I'll contend against your predatory enemies, which are not really lions and bears.

They're like sin with a capital S and death with a capital D.

Don't you see?

This is what Jesus is saying is that God is committed.

The God of the universe is committed as our shepherd.

Jesus says, I'm the gate.

I'm the one who, you know, if death wants to get to you, it has to go through me.

This is sort of the metaphor that that John is using.

And the good shepherd, again, is willing to lay down their own life.

Bad shepherds, we read this in Ezekiel, they feed themselves, not their sheep.

I mean, code speak for tyrants.

Code speak for Jim and Tammy Faye Baker.

So I mean, that's a fundamental bit about what Jesus is saying here.

And I just want to remind you, as John said, the following the light leads to eternal life.

John is not talking about when you die.

John's talking about following the light in this lifetime.

That's eternal life.

What other thoughts did you have about Christ the Good Shepherd?

It's real critical because remember, this is one of the earliest signs in Christianity.

And again, I just want to I want to remind you, we have a unique stained glass window here because there is a very old icon of Jesus holding a sheep, and they both look rather grumpy to me.

But in our window, notice the sheep is willingly jumping into the arms of Christ.

And that's really a lovely picture, isn't it?

That's why it's in that chapel, right?

Because the chapel is where we trust that those who are departed have gone joyfully into the arms of Christ the Good Shepherd, who's not put out to hold them.

But instead is always at the ready to to to carry us.

And um I have the uh thank you well because you're not opening as I don't have to fear one way or another, you can tell me.

And as long as I'm open to that, and even when I'm not open to it, uh keep trying.

Yeah, I I think it's worth teasing this down a little bit though, if you don't mind.

Am I okay if I do this?

So, so um, because I think this is a rich image, and honestly, I think it's in my own religious upbringing, and yours might be different.

I hope it is, it's been rife for abuse.

So, again, I I think it is important how we consider the shepherd.

Um again, is the shepherd like disappointed when we wander off because we're dumb sheep?

Or is it that the shepherd is committed to our sustenance wherever we go?

And when we wander, that's just what we do.

We're just domesticated sheep, that's what we do.

So God chases after us.

That's what real shepherds do and doesn't chase after us, say, you dummy, you worthless, you sinful thing, but there they are, come on back.

I mean, I it's really critical for our imagination because it makes a difference between God being deeply disappointed in us because we've done something errant and us being who we're made to be.

Domesticated sheep.

So, how do we trust the shepherd?

Do we trust the shepherd is mad and put out and tired and disappointed, or that the shepherd has this relationship with sheep to care for us?

The other thing I think we've got to be really careful about is the shepherd's care for us may not spare us from wild animals, but the shepherd is willing to go there with us.

And I think that's really, really important because you know, I I I really cringe off often at the phrase like God's got your back, or God's gonna go there with you, whatever, because I just you know, sometimes bad things happen as well, God would have had your back if you'd believed more, and and that's crazy.

So I look, I just think it's always important to say this and and then renuance it.

And then the last thing, and I almost wish we'd done this in the window, you know, because we sort of grew up and we got these things that we are like sheepdogs in the flock, you know, and that this, of course, is the collar and the bishop holds the leash.

And we we mix metaphors so much.

But don't you see the good shepherd is a sheep?

That's the point of the incarnation.

Jesus didn't come as a man with a crook encrozier, and we're just different animals.

In the incarnation, Jesus comes as a lamb, the lamb of God, the Agnes Day, to join the rest of the flock.

And Jesus' leadership is way different than what we normally think of.

He's not there with the crozier to like yank us off the stage, don't you see?

He's saying, follow me in our own language.

And the way he leads is, hey, I see you wandering, I'm one of you, come after me.

Way different from a human over sheep.

And we never become humans over sheep.

We're just sheep.

That's the that's the picture here.

And our shepherd is also a sheep.

I've got more empathy for sheep when I was in Australian because you know, I've grown up around here where you can't mix cattle and sheep and all that kind of stuff.

And I went over there, they were they were outside by side pretty much so.

But and in that case, they were being kind of dumb.

It didn't um it wasn't a judgmental thing.

It was like it was more of an empathic thing, you know, or I can see why, how we do things like sheep.

None in a bad way, but that's just our nature to go off in the wrong direction or you know, stuff like that.

I I think the reason we fundamentally misunderstand things like this is because, show of hands, how many of you have raised sheep?

We're a post-agricultural society and we have zero understanding about that.

Just honestly.

And and I would tell you, if you want to go hunt a sheep, if you ever get a sheep permit, it's pretty hard to get a sheep, like a wild one.

They're they're pretty wily.

Uh I mean, they skunk most hunters because they take pretty good care of themselves.

And you can watch these videos where like leopards, leopards cannot get them.

I mean, it's like a miracle for a leopard to get a mountain goat or a mountain sheep because they're they're they're wily and they're nimble, you know.

Even the babies.

You you can watch a baby deer smoke a wolf.

You know, I mean, they're just they're they're born pretty well able to take care of themselves, but domesticated animals are different.

They fundamentally rely on humans, and we made them that way.

Yeah.

And they can climb in amazing places.

Oh, I just watched a video today.

I looked at this travel video because I was thinking about going somewhere.

And there's a tree in Africa.

It's a good bush tree.

It's full of goats.

They just climbed up in that tree.

Um they're pretty wily things, you know.

Um, but again, we're not those things, is what Jesus is saying.

We're domesticated sheep bred by God to fundamentally rely on God to take care of us.

I don't mean in a silly way, like, oh God, I'm hungry, give me a sandwich.

I don't mean like that.

And this is where, you know, if we if we hold the metaphor too tight, we totally blew it.

You know?

That's when you talk about a relationship with God.

In other words, like God gave me a sandwich.

But the thing is to be with God and work with God.

And the kind of help that usually is something that I say, I just have to let this go.

And then it just comes out so simply and so beautifully.

And you know, so that comes from a relationship with God.

Thanks.

Why did God send Jesus to?

It's a great, it's a great question.

I mean, we've got lots of different answers in the Christian tradition.

I mean, some people say Jesus like took the spanking we deserve.

I I tell you, I'm not really satisfied with that answer.

Some people because you know you start to ask, well, like, I mean, really, it comes from this idea that somebody has to be spanked when you do something wrong, but like, it seems like God's big enough to take the spanking away without this.

So, I mean, I think in general, um, it comes down to like what I think a lot of people really come around to on this is that um it comes back to the sacraments.

Is it something God needs for us to do, or is it something we need to do to understand and live into God?

Well, if you go back to what you were saying, pre-um uh I guess it would be 70 uh AD or of the common era, they didn't say they use the term the way.

Yeah.

Because that's what Jesus says, right?

I I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Yeah.

Which is which allowed, which which in my mind is, you know, it comes back to things like um let me see, uh wound taking care of the wounded and the sick, the poor.

Yeah, that sort of thing.

And I don't know, and and I my thinking is that that it was like um perhaps God needed this to uh send a message or to uh to reset uh human life, if you will.

Um I I taught I mentioned this the other day.

Um it's almost like God was not happy with the way we were um operating, so he um had um he he uh what am I trying to say here?

Uh he had oh Noah built an ark.

Yeah.

Killed everybody.

Right.

Now, okay, there's a problem down there.

I need to send somebody now, so send Jesus.

Like almost another reset.

Yeah.

That is one way to read it, and a lot of people have read that.

And I will tell you that again, like I think one of the ways that really has been expressed in Christ's tradition is like basically God made a great world and people messed it up.

So Jesus is like God's get-out-of-jail card.

But there is a really great theologian named Duns Scotus, from which we get the Dunce cap.

He was actually pretty influential, he wore a cone hat.

And um, he sort of said, actually, Jesus was God's plan before the foundation of the world.

So even if the first people didn't eat that fruit, Jesus was still gonna come here because his idea was that God was fully incarnate.

So God's plan was always to bring human experience into God's own self.

And I think his real idea there is that there is nothing we do outside of God.

So nobody dies alone because God died in the person of Jesus.

Now here's another riddle for you, right?

I I just want to pose this to you, it's gonna sound really heretical.

But wouldn't you say most Christians believe God is omnipresent everywhere all the time?

Fair enough?

Does anybody push on that?

Well, I think that we think that whether or not we're very conscious of it.

We confess that it's true, but we clearly don't actually believe it because we say, God be with us now.

Well, that's already happened.

Instead, we should say, right, make us aware that you are already with us.

The other thing that we don't do well, right, is we say God's not in hell.

Well, that doesn't work.

If God's omnipresent, then hell is in God.

But here's another thought.

If God's fully present, how could God be more present in Jesus than God is in you?

I know that's strange, isn't it?

No, my first comment was he's not.

If if God's not fully present.

No, no, no, I mean he wasn't ask your question again.

I remember what the question was.

It was God more was God more present in Jesus than God is in you?

Well, and I would say he's not more present in Jesus than in us.

So then is Jesus the the person that helped us realize God's presence in the world?

I mean, say I get there's a million ways we can spin this out.

Well, I was gonna ask, so did Jesus, is Jesus more, if you will, for us, or more for God?

That by that what I mean is if did God create Jesus so that God could understand what it is to be human, or did God create Jesus to help us understand more about God?

Yeah, now you see, in the church, Jesus was not created.

That's really important.

Not created is actually God.

And this is a really good thing, right?

Do we confess our sins in church because God needs us to do that, or do we do it because we need to do it?

It's a great question.

I don't have an answer for it, because there's nine million answers, and the one I just introduced may sound really heretical, and maybe it is, but I think it's worth thinking about.

Was God more present in Jesus than God wants to be in you?

Or is God more present in all?

I mean, I you're gonna read this in Lentz.

Great, great saying, right?

Iminence means like next to us, transcendence means above us.

Great Jesuit theologian says God is more present in us than we are in ourselves.

The part of God's presence we're aware of is God's imminence.

The part we're not is God's transcendence.

Well, when you stop and think about it, where did we come from?

We came from God.

That's what Luke says.

We took human fall.

Okay, and so if that is true, then what I'm saying is that our responsibility in this life is to become more aware that yes, divinity and wealth and we need to nurture it and foster it and let it grow in us so that we are transformed into another Christ.

This is a little bit wild, but you know that the major proponent of the Nicene Creed, St.

Athanasius of Alexandria, said, God became human so that humans could become God.

So who is it for?

Was it for God or was it for us?

This is a great question to put before you.

I I don't dig, I don't want to like stop this, but I want to make sure we talk about this incident, which is definitely not John's.

It's put in John, but it does not belong here.

And that's the woman caught in adultery.

It does not sound like John at all, and here's the proof.

He doesn't talk about what he said for two chapters.

The rest of John, anytime Jesus does something, he talks about it forever.

Now, I do want to say, right, the other Gospels in some ways are different, but I don't actually think they're different.

And the other Gospels often actions speak louder than words.

In John, you get the action and the words.

But this incident, Jesus does not explain it to his people.

And let's think about it, because we talked a lot about gender issues.

Here's a woman caught in adultery.

Where's the man?

But this is but this is that story is added later.

Well, I mean, we don't know when it was added, but it doesn't sound like the rest of John.

It mustn't be in the original.

We don't have the original.

This is really important.

We don't have the original, but it doesn't read like the rest.

I mean, that I think that's so it's later additional.

And and who knows who put it there or when or when this bit got written at all.

We don't know that, but yeah, it's fair.

Most scholars would say, just even based on the writing style and the syntax and the diction, this is off-kilter with the rest of the gospel.

Now I would tell you this, sure sounds like Jesus to me.

But to be honest with you, it sounds more like Luke than it sounds like it doesn't even matter.

I'm grateful we get this little nugget.

Because here's the nugget, right?

This woman's call in adultery, she might even be naked.

They might have just dragged this woman out of anywhere.

And what does adultery even mean?

Well, it means the man might have been married, but she may not have been.

Adultery is not between unmarried people, it really only affects either a man's property, so the woman's married, and and this man is doing something with another man's property.

Actually, that's the only thing it affects.

Because if the man's married, it doesn't matter who he sleeps with.

It does not matter.

So here's this woman, and by the way, we don't know if she's forced to do prostitution because she has no money and no means to survive.

We don't know if she's being raped.

We don't know that.

We see, as typical, the man is not brought to justice at all.

Uh and uh again, she may have been dragged out wearing no clothes.

Well we don't know what's going on here.

This is a lynch mob.

It's really important.

And um and they say, you know, what do we do?

And and Jesus bends in the dirt, and who says, Who knows what?

You know, in John, we're not convinced Jesus is literate because he doesn't read from any scroll.

Now, in Luke and Matthew, he goes to the synagogue and he reads from the scroll of Isaiah, but he still may not have been literate.

He may have been quoting what he'd been told.

It's important to know.

So there is like, I've heard sermons where Jesus writes down the sins of all the other people.

That's poppycock.

It's just crazy.

You know, how would he know that?

Well, he's God, but then he wouldn't be a human being anymore.

I just, you know, the point is he just takes his time, you know?

And um, and then what an interesting thing.

Whoever's without sin, throw the first stone, and then they and then they leave.

Woman, uh, has nobody stayed?

Well, then I don't condemn you either.

Go and sin no more.

And and remember, he's not saying live a perfect life.

Um sin is an archery term that means missing the mark.

The prayer book says it's separation from God.

Um it quite a scene, though.

I mean, this is like social justice, Jesus at his best.

Right?

I mean, this is the banner story for social justice here.

Yeah.

I hope you're quite taken with it.

I mean, I really do.

But the thing is this, when Jesus writes in the sand, he doesn't, he did not level an accusation against men.

He did not level an accusation against the women.

He was sort of like this neutral thing, and what and you know, if he wrote in the sand, uh, maybe he didn't know what those individual guys did, but you could put generality dealing with adultery and what they had to do.

So, you know, they resonated with whatever you wrote.

But he made everybody equal.

And equal claim because nobody got convicted.

Both sides got convicted, and the woman the woman was raised up.

I don't know.

I don't know actually if both sides got convicted.

I mean, I don't know, I don't know.

I I I think when we read scripture, we get a story, and then there's what do we do with it?

And there's many things we could do with it.

I I do think it's interesting to imagine what he could have written, but I want to say he may have been illiterate, so we don't know.

I mean, just I think it's helpful to hold out both possibilities.

And as for convicting the woman, I don't know.

I mean, again, if she did this because she was starving, if that's that's a possibility, what is she gonna do different?

Starve?

You know, I mean, now on the other hand, if she was like some some wild middriff girl from the 90s, you know, okay, well, just like cover your midriff up.

You know, but but I mean, there's there's so many possibilities.

And I think what what becomes helpful for us to imagine is as we track what could have happened, we also track what that might mean.

And this is where Bible reading becomes, it's called polyvalent.

There's many values that are possible at the same time, and we have to track which ones are life-giving and which ones aren't.

I mean, I think that becomes the important bit.

I I actually don't think that the the the the uh the woman, if you will, had I think she was an exam, she was she was a an imagery, an example.

I don't think she had a lot to do with the story.

The idea was that somebody sinned and that um they would stop sinning and and and and no longer sin again.

Uh what she had said earlier with the having to do with the blind man, right?

Um I wish I was better articulating this.

I I I I I only and and I think this with the message was more important than the incident.

Yeah.

Well, I think you're right.

And I I Meg, I'm actually not opposing you.

I'm I'm I like you're really stimulating my thinking.

So I'm sorry if I'm coming across really weird.

I mean, this story is really what Jesus says there in the Gospels.

Don't pull the speck out of your neighbor's eye when you have a plank in your own eye, right?

I mean, this is really similar.

And in some ways, right, I mean, I think this is an interesting thing.

You think about lynch mobs in the United States, they kill people for the crime of being black.

And and so uh, which is a little crazy to think about, and and I don't know that there's much of a message for the person being lynched, other than like, you shouldn't be in this position.

It's really for I think the mob, you you know, because what's the black person going to repent of?

I'm sorry, I'm black.

No, you shouldn't be.

And this it's so hard to know what was going on with this particular woman.

So hard to know.

But but so we have to just go, what is the main point of the story?

You know, because we can talk it to death.

But the thing is, this it has a message, and so what is that, and how does it speak to us?

If you asked me the message, and maybe you've got a different one, the message is that in the middle of our judgment, we all make judgments, we need to avoid condemnation.

What what else do you draw from this story?

Why was it stuck in there, do you think?

I think because it's powerful.

Yeah.

Remember, what we're getting are the strongest memories of Jesus, not all of them.

It's a strong, this is a strong story.

Yeah.

And it has to do with injection, also.

Because, see, the men the men involved in idolatry were supposed to be strong, also.

Absolutely.

See, so but so Jesus really does raise her strong up because he he doesn't condemn her, and he tells her, don't go and don't do that anymore.

So apparently, if she's trusting Jesus, then something has to open up good for her.

I think that's similar though to about condemning people.

Yes, you you know, yeah, right.

Does anybody have a different read in this story is about condemnation?

Well, yeah, I agree with you on the condemnation, but there's more to it.

But uh, and we're really bad about condemning other people when we don't dig it about their lives a lot.

Yeah, and that's why I think, you know, I think I really appreciate this bridge here, right?

Because again, if the woman's doing this because she has no economy to care for herself, well, again, that's like chopping off a starving person's hand because they stole bread.

It's treating a symptom we don't like instead of a fundamental disease of poverty.

So we've got to be careful before we condemn.

Yeah, um, I think that's oh, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, yeah, I I think, you know, with the placement of the story right before, you know, um, you know, John 8 and then on through 59, I I think um what stuck out to me was uh you know, Jesus says everyone who sins is a slave to sin.

And it's kind of like yes, you know, maybe this woman did commit adultery, and who said regardless of why she did, all of those other people were ready to commit a sin because of her sin, and it's kind of like this chain of sin, and we're all slaves to each other, and it's like this feeling those are the chains, and so for me it just it was just uh in contrast in the politicus.

That was kind of a hard way for me just to mention.

Yeah, yeah, that you're supposed to stone people to death.

Yeah, when they make a mistake and when I was over the car to live, there wasn't any man and wife, husband and wife.

And they were just on each one around and the really and the re and the religious song.

Both of them were stoned together.

Man and wife?

We can talk about stoning some more next week because it's different than you think it is, probably.

Um on that bright note though, next week we're gonna talk about believing.