Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
BONUS (16b): Going Deeper With Dr. David McDonald
243 Plays4 years ago
In this bonus episode, Jill Devine sits down with Laura Fleetwood and Dr. David McDonald to ask the questions she had while listening to Episode 16.
Normal Goes A Long Way Website: https://www.normalgoesalongway.com/
Normal Goes A Long Way Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/normalgoesalongway/
Normal Goes A Long Way Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Normal-Goes-A-Long-Way-110089491250735
Normal Goes A Long Way is brought to you by Messiah St. Charles: https://messiahstcharles.org/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction by Jill Devine
00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine Media production. Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members-only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way. I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The Normal Goes Along Way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation.
Introduction of Dr. David McDonald
00:00:42
Speaker
Hey friends, we are back for the Going Deeper conversation with Dr. David McDonald and Jill Devine regarding the conversation we had about why did Jesus have to die? That's a core part of what we believe as Christians that Jesus would die and rise again. And Jill was taking notes. Jill, what questions do you want to throw out? Well, I first want to say that, you know, there's always somebody that
00:01:11
Speaker
you can listen to and you want to hear more from. There's just something about their voice. There's just something about the delivery. And David, that is you to me, like I am listening to you and I don't even know you. And I'm like, I want to hang out and I want to learn more. I appreciate you coming on. And typically how this works is I kind of
00:01:38
Speaker
go in order of the questions that I wrote down based on the timeline of conversation with you and Laura. And you were talking about Jesus being aggressive, being funny, being tender. And one of the things that I have struggled with while reading the Bible is this whole demanding or commanding or stern kind of
00:02:06
Speaker
talk. I'm one of those like, say please, say thank you, use your manners.
Struggling with Biblical Language
00:02:12
Speaker
And so sometimes when I'm reading, I'm thinking, surely that is not what Jesus was saying or how he said it. And then I also have to remind myself, and this is because of the podcast too, that interpretation is everything. But
00:02:29
Speaker
It made me realize like, yes, there are times in the Bible like he had to be stern. And I don't know for someone that's new to reading it, do you have any advice on that? Like how to take away some of those moments or how to look at them? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think it's really helpful to consider that you're reading a screenplay or a script for a Shakespearean play or something like that.
00:02:59
Speaker
Because that helps you kind of envision that you're watching a scene play out. And so in context of that scene, the characters, the setting, the dramatic ironies, the tension, then a lot of Jesus' more uncomfortable sayings make a lot more sense. I mean, when you watch TV, people don't say please and thank you all the time. Nobody's Canadian on television. Nobody's super new. Nobody's, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.
00:03:29
Speaker
Nobody qualifies everything they say with, hey, this is just my perspective. And please don't be offended. Because it makes for really boring television. Similarly, in the ancient world, writing was just a very different craft than writing is now.
00:03:44
Speaker
I mean, there's no JK Rowling from back then. Instead, you've got very few people writing very few books comparatively. And so when they write them down, you have to pay attention to what their intent is. And in the case of the gospels, all the credible stories that we have about Jesus, they just want you to know this is how this guy interacted
Jesus' Playful Humility
00:04:02
Speaker
with these people. And these are the kinds of things that he said. And if you take Jesus' sayings out of their dramatic context, they can be really,
00:04:11
Speaker
harsh and silly sometimes. You know, like when the lady says she wants Jesus to heal her and he says, you know, I came to feed the lost sheep of Israel, not the dogs. And she says, but even dogs get crumbs from the table. You can't read that as a modern day person and come away with anything other than the impression that Jesus is a jerk.
00:04:33
Speaker
that he hates women, that he's misogynistic and possibly racist. I mean, what the heck? But you got to put it in context and you got to understand that the ways in which Jesus is engaging people tend to be much more playful and that we have no record that that woman became offended.
00:04:53
Speaker
And we know when we study kind of the words that Jesus was using and we do our homework or electrical work, you know that he's not giving the kind of insult that we would interpret today. There's like 2000 years between him and us. So they don't have the same idioms. They don't have the same insults. They don't have the same cultural references and sets.
00:05:11
Speaker
I mean so you gotta put yourself in their shoes in their time and when we do we realize that Jesus is making jokes about like the kind of jokes that children would make about family friends and family pets. Now again that doesn't make a ton of sense to us because we don't have a good cultural parallel but
00:05:29
Speaker
Our job is not to have it all make sense to us in our life. Our job is to go back and read it in their lives and understand how they understood it and then try and apply it to our lives. So here what you come with is Jesus is being playful and impish and this woman is better at it than him. And he's so charmed by her response that he ends up giving her exactly what she wants. And there you go. Like that was a really cool exchange. That shows a humility
00:05:59
Speaker
on the part of Jesus and he lost a game of one-upsmanship. How amazing is that? How amazing is it that Jesus lost something? That's so cool. And the fact that his followers told that story and that story was celebrated tells us about the culture of their friendship.
00:06:14
Speaker
It tells us about the values that they all shared together, that this isn't about making Jesus into something he's not. This is about showing Jesus as he was and loving him for who he was and what he did, and then embodying that love moving forward. And that kind of playful humility is something sadly missing in our churches today. So when we go in and we study Jesus, we learn from Jesus, we kind of get the
00:06:41
Speaker
the opportunity to understand what Jesus was like in his world, in his time, then we realized there's lots of growing that we can do now in our world, in our time, to have that same spirit.
Journey of Faith and Positivity
00:06:52
Speaker
Well, I feel like we need that. What you just said, either transcribed or always with every single Bible for any person who's new. Like if you're new, listen or read this verse so that you know, because it could turn someone off. And that's my concern.
00:07:09
Speaker
when I think of that. So now in this podcast, being able to hear from people like you and just anytime I start to question that, I go back to thinking, okay, context still, context. The other thing that when Laura was asking you about your personal
00:07:30
Speaker
relationship or how you felt Jesus was to you. I know you said that you're happier. You're more fulfilled based on learning about him. And that's how I'm starting to feel like there's this thing inside of me. Like right now, I just used this word the other day with my boss. I said, I'm fired up. I'm starting to understand
00:07:56
Speaker
what the parables mean like i'm starting to get these things i'm starting to feel more positive and of course i have my dark days and my down days but now i'm learning to turn to my faith turn to jesus turn to god and like it's cool yeah absolutely yeah there's a tremendous amount of resources
00:08:22
Speaker
available to us in the scripture. When we read the Bible, we live in the Bible a little bit, we ruminate on these stories of Jesus, we, you know, sometimes we memorize them. And I like to think of all that stuff is like, it's like spiritual nutrients, you know. And then when you find yourself in a season of adversity, or when you find yourself heartbroken or abandoned or betrayed, then all those spiritual nutrients, they come to the fore, you know, these ingredients inside of your soul start to really
00:08:53
Speaker
inoculate you against the full measure of hurt that life can provide. And that's really encouraging. You're just like, wait a minute, this thing used to, what it clobbered me, bad breakup with a boyfriend, losing my job, failing an exam, whatever. That thing used to devastate me, but now because of what I've received from the scripture, because of what I've experienced in prayer, I know I'm going to be okay. Yeah.
Jesus' Upbringing and Cultural Challenges
00:09:19
Speaker
Well, let's go into the question of why did Jesus have to die? I don't, you know, honestly, this may sound weird. I don't have a lot of questions about that particular question. I have questions about what you were talking about with him growing up. First of all, how long, I don't know if it was you or Laura, but how long did we say that he was doing ministry before he did die?
00:09:49
Speaker
Okay and then do we know how old he was when he died? We think we think he was about 33 maybe as old as 36. Okay so you were talking about how he grew up you said that he grew up in this small town that was poor I'm totally paraphrasing and I kind of
00:10:12
Speaker
like blanked out a little bit because I was going back to when he was born and there was the star and the wise men and all of this shebang. And then that's it. Like they left and he just started growing up. That's confusing to me. I'm confused. Yeah. Well, I mean, the story of the stories of Jesus' birth are really, really super cool.
00:10:39
Speaker
But you remember all the stuff of her on his birth happened in Bethlehem, which- Okay. That's Joseph's family's town. But pay attention to this. I mean, Mary is pregnant and she travels with Joseph to go to his town, Bethlehem. It's a several day journey. Who in their right mind wants to travel when they're pregnant on camelback?
00:11:05
Speaker
Like, why didn't Mary stay home in Nazareth? That's a really important question. Now, we know later, and from historical record, but the gospels tell us, you know, there's this reputation about Nazareth, you know, can anything good come out of Nazareth? We know that the Nazarenes were sort of a mean-spirited people. They were very devout, which also meant they were very rigid in their application of Torah. So imagine the most sort of uptight, joyless religious conservatives that you know today, and that's a fair parallel for Nazareth.
00:11:35
Speaker
Now, among those religious conservatives, they would look very literally at some of the injunctions in the Old Testament about shame. And they would look at the ways in which those laws have been applied over the last several thousand years within these austere Jewish community. Which means if you get a teenage girl pregnant outside of marriage, in all likelihood,
00:12:04
Speaker
they would have wanted to do an honors killing because that was such a profound shame to their family,
Jesus' Actions in the Temple
00:12:13
Speaker
to her parents, and to their community. So why did Mary not stay home when she was that close to giving birth? She's probably afraid for her life.
00:12:21
Speaker
Now, maybe that's overstating it. I don't think it is. I think we can make the historical case for that. But maybe that's overstating it. But at the very least, she doesn't want to be home with all these people who hate her and are going to call her, you know, all kinds of terrible names because she's been quote unquote fooling around. She wants to get out of her town. And so she goes with Joseph. That's where all the cool stuff happens, you know. And then and then eventually Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus, they go to Egypt for a couple of years because they're scared.
00:12:49
Speaker
So when Mary and Joseph and Jesus finally come back to Nazareth and he grows up, they've been gone for, well, probably long enough for the religious community to tone it down a little bit. And Joseph had a great reputation. So Joseph showing up would have provided a buffer for Mary and Jesus. But nevertheless, this illegitimate son of Joseph, he's not going to have a good time growing up. They don't know about that.
00:13:15
Speaker
the shepherds and the wise men and the star. They don't care about what all these supposed stories are about Jesus. They just think he's somebody that doesn't matter. You talked about the temple tantrum since I am new to the Bible. Where is this in the Bible? Oh, it's in at least two of the gospels. You could Google it. It's commonly called a
00:13:38
Speaker
Jesus overturns the tables in the temple. Temple is our colloquialism, you know, funny way of saying it. But what happens is he goes to the temple and he sees that the temple authorities are extorting money from the poor. So around Passover time, there was a huge demand for sacrifices. Sometimes, you know, goats, sometimes doves and, you know,
00:14:06
Speaker
whatever the normal prices were for those things, sometimes doubled and tripled around Passover time. So people were going to the temple to make an offering. Sometimes they'd bring their own goat or their own doves and the temple authorities would say, Hey, sorry, that goat you brought from home isn't good enough. You're going to have to use a temple goat. Well, how much is a temple goat? A temple goat is three times as expensive as it used to be. And they go, what?
00:14:32
Speaker
And furthermore, you've got to use temple currency. You can't use your little podunk small town currency. So you've got to
Speculation on God's Timing
00:14:38
Speaker
get your money changed into temple currency. Well, how much is that going to cost? Well, there's a fee depending on how much you need to get changed. So the people are getting screwed left, right, and center. They're getting screwed in the exchange rate. Then they're getting screwed in the purchase of the animals. And Jesus goes, enough, enough. This is grotesque.
00:14:57
Speaker
and he flips over the tables and he makes a whip out of a bunch of nearby courts and he starts beating the people who are extorting the poor. Now that's what I mean when I say Jesus is
00:15:07
Speaker
He's angry. He is aggressive. And honestly, if you're poor, that's exactly the Jesus you're open for. Well, yeah. He's like on your side. Yeah, because he knows what it's like to be poor. He knows what it's like to be exploited. He knows what it's like to have the people who have power and control, use that power and control to dominate and humiliate you. And he goes,
00:15:30
Speaker
As God's representative, no way, not on my watch. Let's get this perfectly clear right now. Grace is free and God is here and you're not doing that anymore.
00:15:40
Speaker
final questions, thoughts that I have. And this was when you were talking about towards the end, hey, Jesus could have been here for 50 more years, but people could have been complacent like his disciples. And so what I wrote down was, so did God intervene when he felt like it was needed? Things were too much. And is that why Jesus was born?
00:16:06
Speaker
And is that why Jesus died? At certain points, God was just like, okay, I'm done, and this is what I'm gonna do. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, because we don't have any clear answers on that in Scripture, so everything is really speculative. You know, like there's a sense in which you go, okay, if things went off the rails in Genesis 3 in the Garden of Eden, if that's when sin enters the world and human beings are corrupted, why didn't God just send Jesus then?
00:16:36
Speaker
Like, think of all the heartache that would have been resolved if God had come as Jesus to Cain and Abel. But I don't know.
00:16:51
Speaker
I don't know why he didn't. And it's not typically a question I ever ask myself. I think because I'm quite cynical. Like Jesus came in at the turning of the epoch and we still have all kinds of corruption and we still have all kinds of hardness of human hearts and we even have all that stuff within the followers of Jesus.
00:17:11
Speaker
But the heart is deceitful above all things. And every one of us has got darkness inside of us against which we wrestle. That's why Paul says, even the things I don't want to do, I do. And the things I want to do, I can't do because I've got this garbage inside of me. So I'm not sure it would have made any difference if Jesus came earlier or later, for that matter. OK. Yeah, there is that verse that says, in the fullness of time or when the time was right, Jesus came into the world.
Conclusion and Listener Invitation
00:17:41
Speaker
got had some kind of plan. Yeah, it certainly doesn't seem random or haphazard. It just it just
00:17:49
Speaker
I don't know what the, I didn't see the strategic game plan. You didn't? You weren't part of that? Well, thank you so much for your insight on this. Again, I just could listen to you all day and I really, I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. My pleasure. Thanks you guys. I really appreciate it.
00:18:12
Speaker
So what did you think? What did you think about this episode? Thumbs up, thumbs down. Let us know. We would love to hear from you. You can interact with us on Facebook and Instagram, at normal goes a long way. Also online, normal goes a long way.com.
00:18:30
Speaker
If you think that someone could really benefit from this podcast, share it with them. Let them know what we're talking about. And maybe you have something that you want us to talk about. The best way to interact is to go to the website, like I mentioned, normalgoestalongway.com or social media, Facebook and Instagram at normalgoestalongway.