Just so you know, we are going to use our imaginations today. We’re not going to just kind of play around and make things up, but we are going to use our imaginations to see if we find some new meaning in a passage we have probably read or heard many times before. We’re going to try and remember what was going on back in the first century when this story actually took place and see if that might give us any new thoughts about why John wrote this down.

John was writing about what happened when John the Baptist was finally arrested and put in prison, and Jesus moved to Galilee where he started collecting his disciples. It sounds so simple and clean as John told it; pretty calm and straightforward. Jesus heard that John was in prison. He took that as the sign that it was time for him to begi…