Speaker: Jeff Jarvis
What would you do if you believed to the very core of your being that the world was going to turn out? And you believed it so much that you told everyone what it was going to look like. You posted it on facebook. You texted it to friends. Everywhere you went you told people, this is what my future is going to look like.
But when you get to that future point in time, it looked nothing like you believed it was going to be???
What would you do?
Give me a second, I’ll get back to that question…
Often the gospels in the Bible are seen as a way to get into heaven. Or maybe the gospels explain what we need to believe to order to get there.
Surprisingly, that’s a relatively new concept. The early Christians, the ones who wrote and read the gospels, don’t seem to having heaven in mind when they wrote and read the Gospels. Or at least not heaven as pop culture describes it.
Most of them would have believed that Jesus was the messiah, what we now call the Christ. That’s all fine and good. But to them, the messiah wasn’t as important as what coming of the messiah meant… the new age of God’s reign. And that was what they were looking for. That’s the future they were pinning all their hopes and dreams on.
And who wouldn’t? Because they believed that the new age of God’s reign meant that life would get way better. Way way better. Like win the lottery better. Take over the world better. And not only good stuff coming into their lives, but bad stuff going away, for good. Sickness? Gone. Mental illness? Gone. The evil stuff in the world that seemed to be trying to get them down? Gone.
And the most importantly, death? Gone!
And they didn’t mean spiritual death? The believed they would be free from physical death. They would never get old and die. They would live forever.
And yet, when the author we call John wrote his gospel almost 90 years after Jesus (this is an assumption), the world didn’t look that way at all. Death was still there. Sickness too. Metal illness. In fact things had gotten worse since the messiah had come, since the reign of God had started.
So now what? Is Jesus the messiah or what? Maybe the reason things are bad is because Jesus wasn’t the messiah. This isn’t the new age of God’s reign.
Or maybe, this new age of God’s reign looks very different than they had told everyone?
And it’s to this situation that I think that the author wrote the gospel we call John.
Today, the world around us still seems off somehow. Like bad people get rich and good people stay poor. Evil people get ahead while godly people struggle. People who shouldn’t get sick do. People who shouldn’t die do. So what are we to do with our world? The world of the new age of God’s reign? How do we explain it all?
How do you?
If you aren’t sure, come join us as Jesus’ BFF (according to tradition) makes his best case to explain how we got here… and what we should do about it.