Mark: an interlude

I’m not sure if any of you who regularly attend Estevan Alliance Church noticed it this week or not but something was missing from the preaching. Perhaps those of you who work shift, or have been travelling or let’s be honest – just aren't as committed to being at church on Sunday morning as you would like to be, thought that it was covered last week and those of you who were there the previous week thought it would be covered the next. What was missing was a little passage of scripture on fasting form the second chapter of the Gospel of Mark.

Unfortunately as the sermon a couple of weeks ago took shape it became clear that this text didn’t fit into the message I was crafting and our schedule (to get to the end of chapter 8 by the end of June) doesn’t allow the flexibility to just bump everything back a Sunday so today I want to just give a brief teaching through this blog on the forgotten verses in the middle of Mark 2 and share with you how God has used these verses to speak to me as I’ve studied them.

Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, “How is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?”

Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them. But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast.

   “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If they do, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. And people do not pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

Mark 2:18-22 (TNIV)

What we have here is another story being laid out by Mark in series with the previous story (the calling of Levi, and the banquet with tax collectors and sinners) to illustrate the way Jesus is changing the paradigms from what was expected by the teachers and authorities of his day. In short this is part of a larger teaching section where the Gospel writer illustrates for us how the establishment religion of Jesus day was looking out for the a) Wrong people, was following the b) Wrong practice and was grounded in the c) Wrong paradigm – all things which Jesus provided in his ministry and teaching the antidote and correction to. Our passage in this study can be identified as the first Markan parable, but its meaning is not as clouded and difficult to understand as some others. Let’s begin by breaking this down quickly:

The Wrong People

The story of the calling of Levi and the banquet with sinners and tax collectors that we looked at on February 5^th (you can find the sermon audio here) illustrated that the Pharisees had the wrong idea about who was worthy of being called to discipleship. “When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” (2:16) The Pharisees had set up a false dichotomy where they were righteous and the others were not – but Jesus only drew distinctions between the self-aware sinners (i.e. the banquet guests) and those who were deluded into thinking they were righteous. The Pharisees had in mind the wrong people and Jesus was demonstrating by his actions that he had come for everyone.

The Wrong Practice

This brings us into our text proper – as an extension of the story of Jesus banqueting with sinners the Pharisees then come to him and ask about the behaviour of his disciples – specifically with regards to fasting: “Some people came and asked Jesus, “How is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?” (2:18b) This was probably in relation to the Pharisee’s practice of twice-weekly fasting (Luke 18:12) and not a reflection on behaviour during holy holidays that required fasting like the day of atonement or Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) but it seemed at first like a damning condemnation upon the spiritual discipline and related righteousness of the Jesus movement.

Jesus responds in a perplexing and unexpected way to the questions – he paints himself in the biblical motif of the bridegroom come for the chosen people of God – who at that time were Israel but would eventually through Pentecost be broadened to the Church. This bridegroom would have been surprising to his listeners in application but not unfamiliar. It is a well known motif to describe God’s relationship with Israel rooted in texts like Isaiah 54:5-8, 62:5 and Ezekiel 16:7ff. If Jesus was the bridegroom than his disciples would be akin to groomsmen who in that culture would stand guard outside the bedchamber while the bride and groom consummated the marriage to protect the couple and serve as witnesses (let’s hope only by making sure no one but the couple entered the chamber!) to the marriage’s consummation. This time when the bridegroom was with them was traditionally a time of feasting – not of fasting. The bridegroom was with them for a short time (at this point they had no idea just how short) and so it was not a time to be bogged down in disciplines of asceticism – but rather a time for celebration.

This would be especially applicable to the disciples of John, as several scholars I’ve read point to this event comporting with a point after John the Baptist’s execution – their fasting would be fuelled by mourning and sorrow – but Jesus was still here. The one to whom John’s whole ministry pointed to was with them so their fasting should turn to feasting while they had the chance because whether they understood it or not there was coming a time when the bridegroom would be taken away.

The Wrong Paradigm

The second half of this short text reveals the heart of the Pharisees and the problem under the problem that Jesus was trying to address. It wasn’t so much that they had missed the point of the inclusiveness of the Gospel, or that they had their fasting and feasting times backwards – it’s that all of these things and so much more that served to define them was rooted in remaining faithful to an old way of doing things. Jesus illustrates in his comments about garments and wineskins what he says quite clearly in 1 Corinthians 11:25 and in Revelation 21:5: that in Christ a new way of life is being birthed. New Covenant was the Christian reality, a new way for humanity to approach God and be reconciled to Him. The Pharisees were about trying to bring the messianic age to bear (and to invoke the arrival of the messiah) by increasing faithfulness to the old ways – by going back to basics and becoming increasingly rigid in their application (or sometimes misapplication) of the Old Covenant – whereas unbeknownst to them, the messiah they had so longed for had come and was trying desperately to make them see that there was a new way to do things if they would only open their eyes and ears to see and hear him.

The talk of garments and wineskins was to illustrate that Jesus was not simply in the business of renovation – he was not just interested in sprucing up Judaism – he was radically re-inventing the paradigm. If you sowed new fabric onto an old garment the new fabric would shrink and create a tear even bigger than the one you were trying to fix. Jesus was not about filling in the cracks of Judaism or simply correcting historical drift – that simply wouldn’t do. Neither would you pour new wine into an old wineskin – for as the new wine continued to ferment it would produce gas that would burst the previously stretched skin. This new paradigm that Jesus was revealing in his practice could not be contained by the old ways – Jesus was not going to simply settle for being another ‘expression’ of Judaism, he had something so much larger in mind.

And so in correcting the Pharisee’s understanding of people, practice and paradigm, Mark paints a picture of Jesus who moves on from here to tackle one of the most sacred institutions of the Jewish faith – Sabbath. And if you were around last Sunday (sermon audio available here) you heard about just how paradigm changing Jesus teaching on that matter was.

Sorry for missing this in the regular flow of services, but I hope this little explanation gave you some insight into the connections between the last two messages and illustrates a little bit what Jesus was trying to get the Pharisees (and us) to understand.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming...