Mark 2:18-3:6

08/24/11 Mark 2:18-3:6 GUMC Youth

We took a break from Mark last week to consider the Problem of Evil, but we are back into it tonight, with something of a long passage, but a passage that, for our purposes, can be seen as making a point and then bringing forward two stories that confirm and illustrate that point. Two weeks ago, we read about Jesus getting in trouble with the religious authorities for eating with tax collectors and sinners. He reminded us that it is sick people who need a doctor, not those who are well or, at least, those who think they are well. Tonight, our passage is about Jesus catching fire for not fasting, which means going without food for a religious reason. It is interesting that, even though we've had a week in between them, we have two passages in a row; one of them is about feasting and the other one is about fasting. It is as if, when Jesus' opponents realized that they couldn't get Jesus one way, they turned around and tried to get him the other way.

Look at what the people ask Jesus, "Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?" I imagine that most of you do not have a whole lot of experience fasting, and probably don't know all that many people who have taken fasting seriously in their lives, so this question probably doesn't sound as pointed to you as it would have to people at the time. You need to understand that fasting was one of the single most common and important ways to practice your faith. If something terrible happened to you, whether by accident or your own fault, you would fast, that is, you would stop eating so you could devote yourself more completely to prayer. If disaster came upon the nation, the prophets would call the people to fast and pray. Fasting has a long tradition of helping people to be close to God.

Why should fasting make such a difference? It is really amazing to think about the things we do, not because we have a good reason to do them, but because our bodies compel us to do them. How many of us eat, not because we are hungry, but because we just want to eat? How often will we go back for seconds when we don't really need them, but are driven to it by the fact that it tastes good? By fasting, which isn't just not eating, but not eating so that we can devote ourselves to God, we are saying to our bodies, "No, you will not tell me what to do. God is in charge, not you." If you can control your body's desires, you can make better choices, and you will be more able to hear God, because you have already taught your body to keep quiet about its demands.

The point is that, if you were a religious person in those days, you fasted. The Pharisees, for example, had a practice of fasting twice a week. So here we have the disciples of John the Baptist fasting and the disciples of the Pharisees fasting, but Jesus and his disciples are not fasting. They kind of stick out.

Jesus' response is interesting. He says, "The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day." So, Jesus is saying that they aren't avoiding fasting because they don't think it is important. After all, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness fasting before he was tempted by the devil. He is saying that they are in such a time of radical celebration that they couldn't fast if they wanted to. Because he is present, it is like being at a wedding. The Pharisees did not understand how pointless it was to fast when Jesus was there. If the point of fasting is to get close to God, why do you need to fast when God himself is in your midst? Jesus says that there will be a time when he is taken away and, when that happens, his disciples will fast, but it doesn't make sense at that particular time and place.

Jesus uses this conflict as a chance to say something incredibly powerful. He says, "No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins." What I think Jesus is getting at is that, in Christ, all the rules are changed. You can't jam him into an old way of thinking and expect him to fit. Instead, the old way of thinking will be torn apart. This isn't because Jesus is mean, but just because he is who he is, he cannot fit into our little boxes that we make for him. And, by the way, when I say that Jesus explodes out of old ways of thinking, I don't just mean that he breaks out of ancient ways of thinking, but that he even breaks out of our ways of thinking, even though they are "new" in a sense, and we are still young people.

This is really important and I think we need to take some time and take this seriously. It is absolutely imperative that you understand just what this means. In Jesus Christ, everything changes. Our whole way of thinking and our way of living is changed, even the definitions of our words are changed. This is something that I don't think most people, even most Christians, take seriously enough. Jesus steps into our world of space and time, where we use words to communicate, and shatters them. We can no longer mean the same thing that we used to mean when we said that things are "good" or "evil." We can no longer think of good and evil in static, impersonal terms, where something is good or bad based on how we feel about it. Instead, things are good or evil based on how well they do or do not conform to Christ, who is who he is. This means that even the Ten Commandments, as helpful as they are, are not a final authority, independent of Christ, but serve to point us to Christ where we see what they really mean. We have to understand all the commands to not do things as ways to describe what it means to be like Christ, instead of free-floating rules. It means that, when we read that we are to have no other gods before God, it means that we are to understand the God, before whom there can be no other gods, as the God who reveals himself to us in Christ.

Everything about the way we think, the way we live and the way we speak is transformed in Christ and every attempt to make Jesus fit into our old ways of thinking, living and speaking is doomed to fail, for Jesus cannot be contained in them. Old ways of understanding God and interpreting the Bible, and of looking at life, are ripped (like the old fabric with a new patch on it) and burst (like the old wineskins carrying new wine) by Christ.

This is made even more clear by a statement we get in Luke, though not in Mark. In Luke, Jesus adds, "And no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, 'The old is good.'" The fact of the matter is that we get used to things. Our whole framework of thought, what some people call our "worldview," is moulded and shaped by countless influences over our lives. By the time we even come to consciousness as toddlers, we have been shaped by our families and our environment. In our elementary school days, we are shaped by our friendships and our classes. We are in our framework of thought and life like a fish is in water. We are so deeply immersed in it, we can't even see it anymore.

That is the reason why it is so important for you to give your lives to Jesus when you are young. You have less baggage to deal with than you will when you are older. Some people will talk about becoming Christians later in life, so they can have their fun now and then be faithful later. First of all, not being a Christian isn't any more fun than being a Christian, and being a Christian is not anti-fun. But on top of that, you need to take seriously the fact that there are decisions you can make as a young person that you simply can't make, or at least become much more difficult, when you are older. It's like learning an instrument. If you go and talk to a bunch of world-class musicians, I imagine there are hardly any who took up music as adults. Whether they were making music as five year olds or not, most of them will have picked up music before they were in college. There is a certain age, which is different for everyone, after which it is impossible to master things like music to that kind of level. The longer you put off giving yourself to Christ, the harder it will be.

Let me put it this way. I have a dear friend who has, during his whole life, been deeply formed by a particular view of the universe, that it is rigidly deterministic. He is scientifically minded, so he has been taught by certain branches of natural science that this is so. However, he is also a committed Christian, but has been formed by a particular branch of the church that emphasizes God's sovereignty to the point that everything happens because God causes it to happen. This man loves Jesus, but the whole way he looks at his faith and life is formed by this deterministic framework which, in my judgment, is not helpful and even distracts us from seeing what really is the case. This way of thinking is so bound up with his understanding of Christian faith that, when I challenge him on that framework of thought, he has no other way to interpret it than to say that I am attacking the gospel, when my goal is to help liberate his faith from a destructive view that is hostile to the gospel. The sooner we get it through our heads that Jesus doesn't just change what we think, but how we think, the easier it will be to let ourselves be formed by him.

Let's see how the rest of the passage illustrates what I'm talking about. Jesus and his disciples begin to travel through a field and pick off pieces of the grain and eat them, a practice which, by the way, is totally legal according to ancient Israelite law. The Pharisees point out that it is the Sabbath and that gathering food is not legal on the Sabbath, however legal it might be on other days. Now, if you think this is somewhat nit-picking, you need to understand that there is a story in the Old Testament about a man who is executed by stoning for gathering wood on the Sabbath. The command to keep the Sabbath holy doesn't get taken very seriously these days, but it was a really big deal at the time.

What is interesting is that, even though there was some debate at the time at exactly what people were supposed to do or not do on the Sabbath, Jesus does not make use of this difference of opinion to justify himself. Instead, he tells a story of a time when king David broke the law by eating of the priest's bread. What David did was not, strictly speaking, legal, but it is not condemned in the Bible, not because there was some secret reason why it wasn't actually breaking the law, but because David was who he was. What David did was legal because it was David who did it. What Jesus is doing is legal because it is Jesus who is doing it; he is the Lord of the Sabbath, in his own words. He is one who is able to overturn hundreds of years of tradition and radically reinterpret the law because of who he is. The old wineskin of the Pharisees' interpretation is absolutely exploded by the reality of Christ. Even though Jesus makes the argument that the Sabbath was made for the benefit of humanity and not the other way around, the real reason he can do what he is doing is because He is the one who is doing it.

The last part of our passage is a story of Jesus entering into a synagogue and healing a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees were watching, hoping he would heal the man, but not because they wanted to see the brokenness and hurt of the world lessened, but because they wanted to accuse Jesus of breaking the law. Because of this antagonism, we read that Jesus is angry when he asks, "Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?" This question might seem obvious to us, since we live in a more pragmatic age, where it doesn't matter whether something is said to be right or wrong, but whether it helps or hurts, but it was a radical overturning of tradition that would have been shocking to the people at the time.

The point is that Jesus reinterprets the law because of who he is. He does not make an independent argument, as if we could simply go by how something feels and decide whether it is right or wrong; instead, he makes a change based on who he is. Apart from Jesus, the law could easily become nothing more than a crippling, cold and impersonal rule that steals life instead of giving life as Jesus intends for it to do. When we see Jesus reinterpreting the law, we must not conclude that we can reinterpret it based on how we feel at the moment, but that the law must be interpreted in light of who Jesus is. There is no substitute for the reality of Christ. He completely changes the rules of the game, not because he just wants to mess things up but because the way the world looks at things is so completely problematic that he cannot enter into our world without overturning everything.

I want to draw attention, by way of conclusion, to the last verse in our passage. "The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him." You need to know that the Pharisees were the major religious authority over the people and the Herodians were the supporters of King Herod, the secular authority over the people. Both groups of people were deeply offended at what Jesus was doing, at who Jesus was. They both wanted to get rid of him. They wanted to do this because they were no fools. They knew exactly what Jesus was doing. He was overturning the way the people lived their lives. If the people actually changed to be like Jesus was calling them to be, they would lose their power.

The power of the world is broken in Christ. If you give your life to Christ, do not be surprised if, all of a sudden, the whole way you used to look at the world starts to shift. When Jesus becomes the center of your life, all the old ways of living start to be torn like old clothing and burst like old wineskins with new wine in them. As your priorities change because of Christ, you might find people not being very happy with you. No longer do your peers who used to have power over you at school have that power, for your ultimate authority is Christ, and they might even get mad at you for it. But Christ is already the center of the universe, and he has already come and died for you, and he has also already come and lived for you, that you might have life. Know and trust that, if you are deeply in Christ, and everything you do is in line with who Christ is, no one else can have ultimate control over you. Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Sabbath, and he can save you from the false powers of this world. Take courage, for God felt you were worth dying for. Let us pray.

AMEN