John 7:1-9

Hey, everybody. Welcome back.

Thanks for joining us on, Tuesday.

A little bit chilly where we live.

Hope it's nice if you're somewhere else.

And we are in chapter seven today, leaving chapter six behind after a while

and continuing here, moving into some new direction.

But some common themes and an interesting

and an interesting story today, one that I again,

I think John gives us a unique perspective and unique viewpoint.

So let me read a few verses and we'll come back and we'll try to

to work through them with you.

After Jesus went about in Galilee,

he did not wish to go to Judea

because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him.

Now the Jewish festival of booths was near,

so his brothers said to him, leave here and go to Judea,

that your disciples may also see the works you are doing.

For no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret.

If you do these things, show yourself to the world.

For not even his brothers believed in him.

Jesus said to them,

my time has not yet come, but your time is always here.

The world cannot hate you, but it hates me

because I testify against it that its works are evil.

Go to the festival yourselves.

I am not going to this festival for my.

My time has not yet come.

After seeing this, he remained in Galilee.

So a little bit of background when it comes to stories

about Jesus family.

We know, unfortunately, little, we of course know

Mary and Joseph, though not much about them.

And it would be nice to be able

to fill in those details, but they are lost to us.

The scripture references,

brothers and sisters of Jesus.

Some have taken this as a kind of

generic reference to close relatives,

like cousins or other family members.

Some have taken that literally based mostly on,

a reading in Luke, I think, that says that they,

they Matthew, that, Joseph and Mary didn't have intercourse

until after Jesus was born and then went on to have other children. So

here,

in terms of Jesus relationship with his family,

John leaves some questions we've already seen in the second chapter,

Jesus and Mary have this odd conversation about the wine being gone.

Jesus

sort of tells Mary that's not my problem.

But then he does the thing that Mary asked him to do.

Here we have Jesus interacting with brothers.

Before we get there, Michael, I think it's interesting

the way that John has just sort of dropped it in here,

that Jesus wants to stay in Galilee and not go

to Judea, because the Jews were looking for an opportunity to kill him.

So, I mean, we're raising the stakes in the story.

We've certainly seen tension.

But now Jesus is aware that they are after him. And,

this is a

it's a strange thing for John to say in some ways, because Jesus

is patently unafraid in this gospel,

but here he this he it's not his time yet.

And he, he he knows that this is not the time

for confrontation with those who are seeking his life.

And so,

this shouldn't be read.

I think in light of John, I don't think this should be read as if he's afraid.

I think it should be read in terms of

that's down the road, and it's not time for that yet.

Yeah.

The honest truth is, I don't know that the prime

character in this, at least as the setup, is Jesus.

I think the introduction of the family is really important.

And your comment here about how little we know about the family, the little

that we do know comes in very hard words in the Gospel of Luke.

You know, Jesus says, you know, this isn't my mother.

When his mother comes, he says, but the one who believes in me,

you're the one who does, the works that I command.

That there's some very harsh language about family that that we have

in the very little that we do have.

Now, what I find fascinating here, Clint, is that it is

given within the context of the update.

So we've had all of this revelation talk, the feeding in the wilderness,

Jesus feeds the 5000.

You've got the walking on water you've had,

you've got the healing of these outsiders.

Now, John is not leaving things to guess.

John is not beating around the bush.

John is being explicit so that we know now the hatred of Jesus

has risen to the level that they're looking for an opportunity to kill him.

Okay, that's not surprising.

You've been with us for this study thus far,

but we've had some significant increase in that rather.

And to be honest, Jesus has had some very harsh words to say

against religious leaders and also, honestly, the crowds themselves

in many of these cases, the fact that they don't believe

we then continue on in this text and make no mistake about it,

there is

some real fuzziness in what's happening here.

When Jesus says, brothers in verse three,

tell him to go to Judea

so that he could be

showing his works, revealing the truth of who he is.

While in the same section John is telling us

Jesus is being sought in Judea to be killed.

So there's a kind of animosity being represented there.

And then let's keep going further.

This idea that if you do these things, prove it.

Well, Clint, John has already showed us many opportunities

where people have told Jesus will prove it, show it to us.

Show us your works. Show us that you're the one.

And in John that is always met with a full, fat, underlined period.

Not going to happen in in the gospel, John, Jesus knows

when people are egging him on, they know when they're asking

for something that won't make a difference.

And that's once again going to happen here, that Jesus is not going to be taken

for a fool

if you don't see the revelation in front of you, no sign, no

miracle is going to do it.

And why his brothers would be saying that the first place.

There's some fuzziness around the edges of this text.

Yeah, I think it leaves us guessing at some of the details.

One possible explanation is that the brothers

are aware of this growing conflict with religious leaders,

and they don't want that mob or that crowd showing up,

in Galilee and particularly at their house.

So there there's a sense in which maybe they're saying one,

why don't you go or maybe you should go over there.

You should make yourself known there.

If you're if you're trying to convince everybody, you should go do it over there.

Maybe that's a way for them to try and avoid the conflict coming

to their community or to their home,

which, you know, is possible.

You could read this if if not for the parenthetical in verse

five, you could mean read this to mean they're encouraging Jesus.

Get out their but but but then but then John goes on to tell us,

for not even his brothers believed in him, and

part of that is that

we think there's probably a transition coming up, particularly with Jesus brother

James, who does play a role later in the New Testament.

And maybe this is John's way of saying

they're not,

they're not very far down that path yet, though they're going to get their

I think, to be honest, Michael, I, I'm not sure

we could say with confidence exactly what all this is about.

I'm sure Bible scholars have lots of theories.

I think is is a difficult passage to unpack,

with the exception that part of what John, I do think is clearly telling us

is that even some of those closest to Jesus

don't see him for who he is,

that even his family.

You know, Jesus is just saying

he just finishing for for most of a chapter,

unless God shows you, you can't see it unless it's revealed to you.

You can't know unless you trust me.

You won't be able to see who I am and know that I've come down from heaven

and eat that bread which is my living body, and.

And now John gives us this very interesting detail that even

some of the people closest to him have not yet seen that.

And I do think that fits John's purposes.

I do think that it is kind of,

part of the pattern of this gospel.

It's it it's interesting.

There doesn't seem to be animosity between Jesus and his family

in this particular passage, but

certainly there's not celebration of Jesus as the Messiah.

They don't believe. He tells us that explicitly.

A context piece I think helps us in this story is the fact that,

scholars do point out here that if you were, a Jewish male

and you live within 15 miles of Jerusalem, the law is that

you should go to Jerusalem to celebrate this one of the three great feats.

And so if you have that in the back of your mind that there's this expectation

that that this is one of those marks on the calendar that you really should be

showing up for, especially a person who's an itinerant preacher, right?

Someone who's

going around doing these miraculous works proclaiming the kingdom of God.

It would make a lot of sense to go to the festival, to go

and to to do what exactly what he's being told to do here.

But here's the thing Jesus never does

what he's supposed to do, because that's what the law is.

That's not how it works, that the revealed Son of God

does not do what the interpreted law says he should do.

He sets the law.

He re-envision is the law.

He shows us through glasses of his divinity

what the law was always intended for.

So Jesus in John, Jesus is not subservient to the law.

But we always look to Jesus to interpret the law.

And I think John is teaching that here in a really interesting way.

That being said, let's be honest.

If you were studying the Gospel of John devotional,

if you were opening John to to learn something about Jesus's relationship

with you and his call on your life today,

listen, this isn't the section where you're turning.

This isn't the place where you're camping.

The benefit of going in the study that's a little slower,

like the model that we have is you begin to see some of the texture

written into this that not even Jesus's family understands.

As you've already said.

So this claim that Jesus makes about how difficult it is to believe

that goes all the way to his own living room that goes right

directly inside his immediate family.

And now, also when Jesus is unwilling to bend to the rules

just because they're the rules, that also extends

to some of the highest moments in which his popularity and fame could be spread.

Jesus is unwilling to go do that just for his own self-serving

needs to just because it's a good thing for his movement

or his popularity is not a reason why Jesus does it.

Why Jesus is the Son of God.

Jesus is going to do as the revealed Son of God is going to do.

And that is what John wants us to see.

Here is the Son of God at work, and everything else is serving that.

From a larger of

maybe a further out perspective, though I do think there are a couple of things

here, Michael, that help us understand John as a whole.

I think you're right.

I mean, I'm certainly not going to recommend this

as a devotional reading, but we do see a couple of things

that are important to John, particularly near the end of this passage.

This, this,

this phrase.

My time has not yet come.

We've talked about it.

We're going to have occasions to talk about it.

A often again in the future.

This concept for John is vitally important that

that my time and that has largely to do with the cross that is looming

out on the horizon at this point for Jesus and Jesus has a purpose.

This is John's shorthand way of saying that

Jesus is speaking of his moment, his his destiny,

if you would, the thing that he is going to do,

the thing that he's here to do, it is not my time yet.

And when it the time is right, then Jesus will do those things that he needs to do.

But but it is coming. It is not here.

And then

that I think we've seen.

I feel like this next one is maybe one of our early introductions to it.

Jesus is going to use consistently throughout different parts

of the rest of the gospel, this language about the world heeding him.

And he even goes so far as to say the world will hate also the disciples.

In other words, the world works against faith.

That's an important concept in the Gospel of John.

John sees the world, and what he means by that is human sinfulness

directly opposed to the work of Christ.

These two are in constant conflict.

They're in battle, and the world hates Jesus.

Now, that doesn't mean all the people in the world hate Jesus.

It means that the sinful reality of human nature

hates and works against the coming and the work of Christ.

And and this is language we're going to see more of.

I don't know if

this is the first time we've seen it, but it's certainly

one of the early times we've seen it and it's and it's going to be with us.

So please take note of it.

This is a theological gospel in so many ways, and you should indeed

read this theologically, this idea

that, the world cannot hate you, but it hates me

because I testify against it, that its works are evil.

It this especially when you're talking about the festival

and this moment of gratitude for God's work.

I think it's very, very easy to see how John is already beginning to show us

that the world lives inside even the practices

of Israel, in a way that no one in his day would have been comfortable with.

Jesus is a prophet in that way.

His criticism is not just of the world in terms of the Roman occupiers,

which everybody in Israel would have agreed that those worldly people are evil.

But I think in John, the theology of how Jesus gets in conflict with the crowds

and the religious leaders and talks about the rhetoric of how he is hated

by the world in the same text, and which is talking about

how the religious leaders are seeking to kill him.

I mean, all of this blends together, Clint, to make your point

that this is very much a theological reflection

as opposed to singling out a particular group of people or a class of people,

Jesus is proclaiming something

that that sets the world off of its balance.

He's saying something

which challenges the very seats of power and expectation and normalcy.

He's proclaiming a truth that for those that see it, reorients the world

and for those who don't see it, or maybe they see it enough to understand

its implication,

they actually become violent against it, even seeking

to kill the one proclaiming it.

And that is a theological way.

It's a lens by which to see the world.

And then it provides a way of helping to understand how Jesus fits

inside the whole. Agreed.

And I think we want to be careful with this, Michael.

Not maybe go all in, but specifically that is pointed as well

at religion, at these religious leaders, if not the religion itself.

Certainly the abuse of religion within Judaism of Jesus day.

And so

partly maybe what's at play here is Jesus

saying, look, if you want to go to the religious festival, fine.

I'm about bigger things than that.

I'm about the kingdom.

I'm about delivering people from themselves and their sin.

I'm about standing against those who use God's name

for their own purposes and their own profit, and who

hang heavy burdens on others.

We just seen that kind of language, right?

And so there is a sense in which I think Jesus is saying,

yeah, do the religious thing if you want.

I'm here for something more than that.

And again, you want to be you want to be careful with that.

But I wonder if that's in play in the background.

And there's some different textures

coming, because for all of this talk about the fact that Jesus isn't going to go,

you need to join this tomorrow because there is going to be a twist in the story.

And that's all I'll say about that.

Make sure to like this video if it's been helpful for you.

Subscribe so you can see that episode tomorrow.

But in the Gospel of John, things are never only as they seem.

There's always more to it.

That is the case here today, and you know, you would definitely

want to hear the next conversation because that whole not

going is going to get pivoted in a surprising way.

Yeah. Hope you can join us. We will see you then.