Mark 2:18-3:6
A man went into a restaurant in Paris and overheard a conversation between two men sitting next to him at the bar.
“Where are you from mon ami?”
“Lyons.”
“Really? So am I. What school did you go to?”
“Lycee de Victor Hugo.”
“Really? I went there myself. What year did you get your bac?”
“1985.”
“Really? That’s the same year I got my bac.”
And then the bartender leaned over and said, “Looks like the Fontaine twins are drunk again.”
This is how some people respond to new wine. But in our text today, Jesus had a different kind of wine in mind when he taught with a parable.
Today’s text contains the third, fourth and fifth confrontations with the Pharisees Mark recorded in his gospel. A couple weeks ago we looked at the first of these when Jesus healed the paralytic who was lowered through the roof of the house where Jesus was speaking. We skipped over the story of the calling of Levi who is identified in Matthew’s gospel as Matthew, the author of that gospel, and then we come to today’s three confrontations.
In this third confrontation, Jesus is asked why his disciples were not fasting as were the disciples of John the Baptist. There was one day of fasting required for Jews and that was on the Day of Atonement. But the Pharisees, as a sign of their religious fervor and piety fasted on Mondays and Thursdays. If John’s disciples had joined the Pharisees in this voluntary act of piety, why not the disciples of Jesus, many of whom had been John’s disciples?
Jesus responded by telling the Pharisees that something new had come and they were not paying attention to this new thing God was doing. And then Mark added two brief parables.
“No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. 22 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.”
Cloth shrinks and so if you sew a new piece of cloth to cover a hole in an old piece of cloth, when the new cloth shrinks, it will pull away from the old cloth, and tear a new hole larger than the original.
When wine is put into a wineskin, the new wine ferments, stretching the leather wineskin. An old wineskin becomes brittle and inflexible and if you put new wine into it, the fermentation process will burst the skin.
These parables are added to the story of Jesus being questioned about fasting because Jesus is new wine and cannot be put into a rigid, inflexible religious system without destroying the system.
The fourth confrontation with the Pharisees when Jesus’ disciples picked grain on the Sabbath as they walked through a field and the fifth when Jesus healed a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath are further examples of new wine being incompatible with old wineskins. Jesus confronted the Pharisees because their religious system was blocking the new life he was bringing.
When we read these stories of Jesus confronting the Pharisees, we see how right Jesus was and how wrong the Pharisees were. But to really understand these confrontations, we need to have a more complete knowledge of the religious system of the Pharisees.
If you went to a Pharisee and asked him how you could draw close to God, he would have told you to obey the law.
In Luke 18 when the rich ruler came to Jesus and asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” how did Jesus answer him? He told him to obey the law.
You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.
Every Jew who went to synagogue knew this and we know this as well. Read through the accounts of giving the law in Exodus and Deuteronomy.
In Exodus 19 Moses went up to God and God told Moses to tell this to the Israelites:
‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession.
Moses reported this to the Israelites and they responded with a statement of obedience:
“We will do everything the LORD has said.”
When Moses gave his farewell speech to Israel, just prior to their passing over the Jordan River,
Deuteronomy 11
See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— 27 the blessing if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today; 28 the curse if you disobey the commands of the LORD your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known.
In the preface to John’s gospel, he wrote:
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.
God gave his law to Moses to teach these people he chose about his holiness, purity and love. The law of Moses was given by God to Moses. The law was not a human invention. The Pharisees did not invent the law they fought to preserve. Their understanding was correct. To draw close to God and to receive his blessing, obedience to the law was absolutely necessary.
The problem was twofold. They created a legal system that violated the intention of the law God gave to Moses. They took the law that was meant to be a means to an end and turned it into an end in itself. The law was meant to teach and lead Israel to an awareness of God’s holiness, purity and love and instead the law turned into an unforgiving dead end.
Secondly, their devotion to observing the law prevented them from recognizing the new wine God brought in the form of Jesus.
Let me explain a bit about the legal system the Pharisees fought to uphold and that Jesus confronted.
By the time of Jesus, it had been long established that there were 613 laws taken from the Hebrew Bible that had to be obeyed. All these laws came directly from the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible.
1. To know that God exists (Ex. 20:2; Deut. 5:6)
2. Not to entertain the idea that there is any god but the Eternal (Ex. 20:3)
17. To circumcise the male offspring (Gen. 17:12; Lev. 12:3)
18. To put fringes on the corners of clothing (Num. 15:38)
40. Not to afflict an orphan or a widow (Ex. 22:21)
41. Not to reap the entire field (Lev. 19:9; Lev. 23:22)
143. To examine the marks in cattle (so as to distinguish the clean from the unclean) (Lev. 11:2)
358. Not to cross-breed cattle of different species (Lev. 19:19)
609. To have a place outside the camp for sanitary purposes (Deut.23:13)
610. To keep that place sanitary (Deut. 23:14-15)
From these 613 laws, thousands more were created. For example, from the 110th, Not to do work on the Sabbath (Ex. 20:10), came 39 categories of work: sowing, ploughing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, sifting, grinding, sifting in a sieve, kneading, baking; shearing the wool, washing it, beating it, dyeing it, spinning, putting it on the weaver’s beam, making a knot, undoing a knot, sewing two stitches, tearing in order to sew two stitches; catching deer, killing, skinning, salting it, preparing its skin, scraping off its hair, cutting it up, writing two letters, scraping in order to write two letters; building, pulling down, extinguishing fire, lighting fire, beating with the hammer, and carrying from one possession into the other.
And then Talmudic scholars and Rabbis debated on and on, creating law after law. To pick fruit, or even to lift it from the ground, would be like reaping. If a mushroom were cut, there would be two violations, reaping and sowing, since by the act of cutting a new one would grow in its place.
When the disciples walked through the field picking the heads of grain to eat, they were reaping by collecting the grain. They were threshing by rolling it in their fingers preparing it to eat. If they tossed the grains up in the air to get rid of the chaff, they were winnowing. And if they dropped two seeds or more as they did this, they were sowing.
Minute distinctions were made. A radish may be dipped into salt, but not left in it too long, since this would be to make a pickle.
The rabbis carefully distinguished between wearing and carrying. They had to decide if a woman’s hair clip, for instance, was worn or carried. If carried, then it would be a burden and forbidden on the Sabbath.
These distinctions continue to be made by Orthodox Jews. To open a refrigerator door on the Sabbath, one must first disconnect the interior light (before the Sabbath) so that one does not violate the injunction against “kindling.” Modern interpretations of starting a fire or putting it out carry over to turning on a light switch or turning it off.
I had a roommate in college named Ariel Streitfeld who was an orthodox Jew. There were three of us in the room and two of us slept in bunkbeds in one corner of the room. Ariel slept in a bed next to the light switch at the other end of the room. We were in bed and then Ariel got into bed without turning off the light. We said, “Ariel, turn off the light.” “I can’t.” “Why not?” “It’s the Sabbath and I can’t turn off the light.” “What would you do if we weren’t here?” “I’d have to turn off the light but you are here so I don’t have to.” So we had to get out of bed, walk across the room and turn off the light.
Letting warm air into the refrigerator also creates a problem, because that will cause the compressor to activate before it otherwise would have. This would cause the compressor to “spark,” also a Sabbath violation. Therefore, one has a timer installed to run the compressor motor at set intervals, rather than a thermostat, which the door’s opening would indirectly affect. Another proposed solution: open the door only when the compressor is already running.
The law is an all encompassing system that thinks through every possible action and creates a law to cover that action.
This is the religious system Jesus was up against. When Jesus healed on the Sabbath, he violated this law that scholars and religious leaders spent a lifetime studying. All of life consisted of being attentive to the law and making sure you were not violating any part of it.
When Jesus healed on the Sabbath, he made a direct attack on the religious system of the Jewish establishment. Jesus was new wine bursting an old wineskin. Because it is so clear to us that what Jesus did was loving and proper, it is difficult for us to comprehend how much the Jewish religious leaders were upset by what he did.
How would you react if this morning during our service, a man with a withered hand were sitting here in the front pew and a Jehovah’s Witness stood up and said to the man with the withered hand, “Because we have been given the true Gospel we proclaim that by our faith you are healed,” and then the man’s hand developed muscle and sinew and nerves and was in fact miraculously healed?
Would you rejoice with the man because his hand was healed or would you be upset because your religious understandings had been shaken up?
“Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult. God does not and will not work through them. Satan has the power to do miracles and that is what we have just seen,” you might say. But that is exactly what the teachers of the law said when Jesus did his miracles.
And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”
Why would you not rejoice with this man whose hand was withered and now was healed? Would it really matter who healed him as long as he was healed? He was deprived of working to earn a living for himself and his family and now he could do that. Can you see just a bit how the Pharisees felt when they watched Jesus violate the Sabbath laws they followed so they could receive God’s blessings?
The Pharisees and teachers of the law were not just power hungry, although some of them were. The Pharisees and the teachers of the law, at least in part, sought to obey the law out of a desire to follow and serve God. They had taken a wrong turn in the path to God but they were not deliberately choosing not to follow God.
I want you to be at least a bit sympathetic toward the Pharisees and teachers of the law. Yes they had gone off on the wrong track and were missing what Jesus had brought them, but understand that their intense devotion to the law, even the most minute part of the law, was at least in part, a genuine search for God.
The question is, how do we detect new wine when it comes? How do we know that what we are confronted with is new wine and not some scheme of the devil to divide and destroy and lead us away from God? How do we avoid the problem the Pharisees had?
Imagine that you were raised in a Christian family that read the Bible and went to church with parents who modeled for you how to love others in the name of Jesus. Imagine that you were raised in a wonderful Christian family that sought God with all their heart, soul and mind.
In the teaching of the church, the pastor and other teachers taught that certain gifts of the Holy Spirit ceased to be exercised after the apostles. God used the gifts of healing and tongues to get the church started but then after the church got going, preferred instead to have people use the Scriptures when they sought the will of God for any given situation. God used doctors to heal people.
Your church was a wonderful church and the pastor was a wonderful man who loved his congregation and whose sermons encouraged people to grow in their relationship with Christ. You trusted what he had to say.
But then you come into contact with some people who call themselves Christians but speak in tongues and pray for people to be healed and sometimes people are healed. What do you do? Is this new wine or is this some distortion of the gospel?
What do you do if you were raised in a Pentecostal church and taught that a Christian was incomplete unless he or she experienced the second baptism of the Holy Spirit and that the gift of tongues was a sign of that baptism? What do you do if you were raised in a church like this and then come to a church where you meet men and women who are sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit and pray for healing and sometimes people are healed but they do not speak in tongues and have not had the Pentecostal experience of the second baptism?
What do you do if you were raised in a Pentecostal church that never had a printed order of service because that would block the leading of the Holy Spirit as you went through the service but then come to a church with a printed order of worship and the presence of the Holy Spirit is sensed as you worship even when you sometimes read a printed prayer?
In Acts, the high priest and his associates arrested the apostles and had them put in jail. They were miraculously released and in obedience to the angel who spoke to them, went out again to preach Jesus in the temple courts.
The high priest assembled the Sanhedrin and had them brought in to be questioned. When the apostles responded to the questions by preaching the gospel, there was a furious reaction and calls were made that they should be put to death. But then Gamaliel, a respected rabbi among whose students was Saul, later called by his Greek name, Paul, spoke up.
But a Pharisee named Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, who was honored by all the people, stood up in the Sanhedrin and ordered that the men be put outside for a little while. 35 Then he addressed them: “Men of Israel, consider carefully what you intend to do to these men. 36 Some time ago Theudas appeared, claiming to be somebody, and about four hundred men rallied to him. He was killed, all his followers were dispersed, and it all came to nothing. 37 After him, Judas the Galilean appeared in the days of the census and led a band of people in revolt. He too was killed, and all his followers were scattered. 38 Therefore, in the present case I advise you: Leave these men alone! Let them go! For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail. 39 But if it is from God, you will not be able to stop these men; you will only find yourselves fighting against God.”
This was wise advice and it is advice we should take. When we are confronted with something in our Christian life that seems strange to us, we need to sit back and watch and wait and reflect and see if this new thing is from God or not.
This is not what the Pharisees did in today’s text. The Pharisees saw Jesus confront their religious system and openly defy it. They saw a man healed and what they should have done and what some of them, like Nicodemus did, was to sit, observe, wait, watch and reflect and consider if this was new wine or a poison.
What they did instead was to be furious and go out and plot with the Herodians how Jesus might be killed.
Our difficulty is that we see easily the resistance of others to new wine but have a difficult time seeing our own resistance. We see easily how others are acting like the Pharisees but have difficulty seeing how we too are like the Pharisees.
Being absolutely sure you are right is not protection from being wrong. There was not a doubt in the mind of the Pharisees that they were right. But they were wrong. In the same way, we come to new experiences with a certainty that we are right. We have learned and experienced what works for us and then we confront something that runs counter to what we have learned and experienced.
The Pharisee reacts instantly and says, “ This is clearly wrong. I know better.” The wiser response is to say, “I don’t understand this. I need to think about what I have seen and experienced. I need to study this issue. I need to pray and ask God to lead me into his understanding of what I have seen and experienced.”
I started the sermon with a joke, let me end it with a cartoon. There is an American cartoon strip called Peanuts. In this cartoon there is a dog named Snoopy and in this particular cartoon he is sitting on his doghouse writing a book. The book is a book on theology and the first chapter is titled, “Have you ever considered that you might be wrong.”
When I studied church history in seminary, the professor would point out how Augustine was right about these things but wrong in this area. We learned about Luther and Zwingli and Calvin and how they were right about many things but wrong in this area or that. I remember sitting there is class and reflecting that these were some of the most brilliant minds in history and if they were wrong in some part of what they believed, who was I to think I was the first person in church history to have it all right.
There is a core that we believe that is unshakeable. The Apostles’ Creed that we use as a faith statement for our church contains a core from which we do not want to deviate. God is the creator who sent his son Jesus to live among us and to die on the cross so that our sins might be forgiven. On the third day he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. He will come again as judge of the world.
We need to carry what we believe outside the core of our faith with some measure of humility.
My call to you this morning is to be patient with each other on other issues of the Christian life. These other issues are not unimportant but they are secondary concerns compared to what we hold at the core. Infant baptism or adult baptism by immersion or sprinkling. The gifts of the Holy Spirit. The meaning of communion. The way in which God speaks to us and leads us.
When you confront some experience in your Christian journey that runs directly contrary to what you have always understood, be patient. Watch. Listen. Observe. Reflect and allow God to speak to you to make clear if he is taking you a step further into his kingdom of if the thing you have observed is not from him.
Do not be as the Pharisees. Take Gamaliel’s advice and allow God to lead you into all truth. Trust him that he will do so, even when the truth lies outside of your Christian understanding.
**************************************
Go now in the name of the Father who created you,
in the name of the Son who died for you,
and in the name of the Spirit who will guide you into all truth.
May the peace of Christ be with all who belong to him.
Amen.
