Verses 1-28
Chapter 2
2:1-6 When, some time
afterwards, Jesus had come back to Capernaum, the news went round that
he was in a house. Such crowds collected that there was no longer any
room left, not even round the door. So he was speaking the word to them.
A party arrived bringing to him a paralysed man carried by four men.
When they could not get near him because of the crowd they unroofed part
of the roof of the house in which he was, and when they had dug out.
part of the roof, they let down the stretcher on which the paralysed man
was lying. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralysed man,
"Child, your sins are forgiven."
After Jesus had completed his tour of the synagogues he
returned to Capernaum. The news of his coming immediately spread abroad.
Life in Palestine was very public. In the morning the door of the house
was opened and anyone who wished might come out and in. The door was
never shut unless a man deliberately wished for privacy; an open door
meant an open invitation for all to come in. In the humbler houses, such
as this must have been, there was no entrance hall; the door opened
directly on to the street. So, in no time, a crowd had filled the house
to capacity and jammed the pavement round the door; and they were all
eagerly listening to what Jesus had to say.
Into this crowd came four men carrying on a stretcher a friend
of theirs who was paralysed. They could not get through the crowd at
all, but they were men of resource. The roof of a Palestinian house was
flat. It was regularly used as a place of rest and of quiet, and so
usually there was an outside stair which ascended to it. The
construction of the roof lent itself to what this ingenious four
proposed to do. The roof consisted of flat beams laid across from wall
to wall, perhaps three feet apart. The space in between the beams was
filled with brushwood packed tight with clay. The top was then marled
over. Very largely the roof was of earth and often a flourishing crop of
grass grew on the roof of a Palestinian house. It was the easiest thing
in the world to dig out the rifling between two of the beams; it did
not even damage the house very much, and it was easy to repair the
breach again. So the four men dug out the filling between two of the
beams and let their friend down direct at Jesus' feet. When Jesus saw
this faith that laughed at barriers he must have smiled an understanding
smile. He looked at the man, "Child," he said, "your sins are
forgiven."
After Jesus had completed his tour of the synagogues he returned
to Capernaum. The news of his coming immediately spread abroad. Life in
Palestine was very public. In the morning the door of the house was
opened and anyone who wished might come out and in. The door was never
shut unless a man deliberately wished for privacy; an open door meant an
open invitation for all to come in. In the humbler houses, such as this
must have been, there was no entrance hall; the door opened directly on
to the street. So, in no time, a crowd had filled the house to capacity
and jammed the pavement round the door; and they were all eagerly
listening to what Jesus had to say.
Into this crowd came four men carrying on a stretcher a friend
of theirs who was paralysed. They could not get through the crowd at
all, but they were men of resource. The roof of a Palestinian house was
flat. It was regularly used as a place of rest and of quiet, and so
usually there was an outside stair which ascended to it. The
construction of the roof lent itself to what this ingenious four
proposed to do. The roof consisted of flat beams laid across from wall
to wall, perhaps three feet apart. The space in between the beams was
filled with brushwood packed tight with clay. The top was then marled
over. Very largely the roof was of earth and often a flourishing crop of
grass grew on the roof of a Palestinian house. It was the easiest thing
in the world to dig out the rifling between two of the beams; it did
not even damage the house very much, and it was easy to repair the
breach again. So the four men dug out the filling between two of the
beams and let their friend down direct at Jesus' feet. When Jesus saw
this faith that laughed at barriers he must have smiled an understanding
smile. He looked at the man, "Child," he said, "your sins are
forgiven."
It may seem an odd way to begin a cure. But in Palestine, in the
time of Jesus, it was natural and inevitable. The Jews integrally
connected sin and suffering. They argued that if a man was suffering he
must have sinned. That is in fact the argument that Job's friends
produced. "Who," demanded Eliphaz the Temanite, "that was innocent ever
perished?" (Job 4:7.)
The Rabbis had a saying, "There is no sick man healed of his sickness
until all his sins have been forgiven him." To this day we get the same
ideas among primitive peoples. Paul Tournier writes, "Do not
missionaries report that disease is a defilement in the eyes of the
savage? Even converts to Christianity do not dare to go to Communion
when they are ill, because they consider themselves spurned by God." To
the Jews a sick man was a man with whom God was angry. It is true that a
great many illnesses are due to sin; it is still truer that time and
time again they are due not to the sin of the ill man, but to the sin of
others. We do not make the close connection that the Jews did, but any
Jew would have agreed that forgiveness of sins was a prior condition of
cure.
It may well be, however, that there is more than this in this
story. The Jews made this connection between illness and sin, and it may
well be that, in this case, the man's conscience agreed. And it may
well be that that consciousness of sin had actually produced the
paralysis. The power of mind, especially the sub-conscious mind, over
the body is an amazing thing.
The psychologists quote a case of a girl who played the piano in
a cinema in the days of the silent films. Normally she was quite well,
but immediately the lights went out and cigarette smoke filled the
auditorium she began to be paralysed. She fought against it for long,
but at last the paralysis became permanent and something had to be done.
Examination revealed no physical cause whatever. Under hypnosis it was
discovered that when she was very young, only a few weeks old, she had
been lying in one of those elaborate old-fashioned cots with an arch of
lace over it. Her mother had bent over her smoking a cigarette. The
draperies had caught fire. It was immediately extinguished and no
physical hurt was done to her but her sub-conscious mind was remembering
this terror. The dark plus the smell of the cigarette smoke in the
cinema acted on the unconscious mind and paralysed her body--and she did
not know why.
The man in this story may well have been paralysed because
consciously or unconsciously his conscience agreed that he was a sinner,
and the thought of being a sinner brought the illness which he believed
was the inevitable consequence of sin. The first thing that Jesus said
to him was, "Child, God is not angry with you. It's all right." It was
like speaking to a frightened child in the dark. The burden of the
terror of God and estrangement from God rolled from his heart, and that
very fact made the cure all but complete.
It is a lovely story because the first thing that Jesus does for
everyone of us is to say, "Child, God is not angry with you. Come home,
and don't be afraid."
2:7-12 Some of the
experts in the law were sitting there, and they were debating within
themselves, "How can this fellow speak like this? He is insulting God.
Who can forgive sins except one person--God?" Jesus immediately knew in
his spirit that this debate was going on in their minds, so he said to
them, "Why do you debate thus in your minds? Which is easier--to say to
the paralysed man, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, and
lift your bed, and walk around'? Just to let you see that the Son of Man
has authority on earth to forgive sins"--he said to the paralysed
man--"I say to you, 'Get up! Lift your bed! And go away home!'" And he
raised himself, and immediately he lifted his bed, and went out in front
of them all. The result was that they were all astonished, and they
kept on praising God. "Never," they kept repeating, "have we seen
anything like this."
Jesus, as we have seen, had already attracted the crowds.
Because of that he had attracted the notice of the official leaders of
the Jews. The Sanhedrin was their supreme court. One of its great
functions was. to be the guardian of orthodoxy. For instance, it was the
Sanhedrin's duty to deal with any man who was a false prophet. It seems
that it had sent out a kind of scouting party to check up on Jesus; and
they were there in Capernaum. No doubt they had annexed an honourable
place in the front of the crowd and were sitting there critically
watching everything that was going on.
When they heard Jesus say to the man that his sins were forgiven
it came as a shattering shock. It was an essential of the Jewish faith
that only God could forgive sins. For any man to claim to do so was to
insult God; that was blasphemy and the penalty for blasphemy was death
by stoning (Leviticus 24:16).
At the moment they were not ready to launch their attack in public, but
it was not difficult for Jesus to see how their minds were working. So
he determined to fling down a challenge and to meet them on their own
ground.
It was their own firm belief that sin and sickness were
indissolubly linked together. A sick man was a man who had sinned. So
Jesus asked them: "Whether it is easier to say to this man, 'Your sins
are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up and walk'?" Any charlatan could say,
"Your sins are forgiven." There was no possibility of ever demonstrating
whether his words were effective or not; such a statement was
completely uncheckable. But to say, "Get up and walk" was to say
something whose effectiveness would either be proved or disproved there
and then. So Jesus said in effect: "You say that I have no right to
forgive sins? You hold as a matter of belief that if this man is ill he
is a sinner and he cannot be cured till he is forgiven? Very well, then,
watch this!" So Jesus spoke the word and the man was cured.
The experts in the law were hoist with their own petard. On
their own stated beliefs the man could not be cured, unless he was
forgiven. He was cured, therefore he was forgiven. Therefore, Jesus'
claim to forgive sin must be true. Jesus must have left a completely
baffled set of legal experts; and, worse, he must have left them in a
baffled rage. Here was something that must be dealt with; if this went
on, all orthodox religion would be shattered and destroyed. In this
incident Jesus signed his own death warrant--and he knew it.
For all that it is an extremely difficult incident. What does it
mean that Jesus can forgive sin? There are three possible ways of
looking at this.
(i) We could take it that Jesus was conveying God's forgiveness
to the man. After David had sinned and Nathan had rebuked him into
terror and David had humbly confessed his sin, Nathan said: "The Lord
also has put away your sin; you shall not die." (2 Samuel 12:1-13.)
Nathan was not forgiving David's sin, but he was conveying God's
forgiveness to David and assuring him of it. So we could say that what
Jesus was doing was that he was assuring the man of God's forgiveness,
conveying to him something which God had already given him. That is
certainly true, but it does not read as if it was the whole truth.
(ii) We could take it that Jesus was acting as God's
representative. John says: "The Father judges no one, but has given all
judgment to the Son." (John 5:22.)
If judgment is committed to Jesus, then so must forgiveness be. Let us
take a human analogy. Analogies are always imperfect but we can think
only in human terms. A man may give another man a power of attorney;
that means to say that he has given that man the absolute disposal of
his goods and property. He agrees that the other man should act for him,
and that his actions should be regarded precisely as his own. We could
take it that that is what God did with Jesus, that he delegated to him
his powers and privileges, and that the word Jesus spoke was none other
than the word of God.
(iii) We could take it in still another way. The whole essence
of Jesus' life is that in him we see clearly displayed the attitude of
God to men. Now that attitude was the very reverse of what men had
thought God's attitude to be. It was not an attitude of stem, severe,
austere justice, not an attitude of continual demand. It was an attitude
of perfect love, of a heart yearning with love and eager to forgive.
Again let us use a human analogy. Lewis Hind in one of his essays tells
us of the day that he discovered his father. He had always respected and
admired his father; but he had always been more than a little afraid of
him. He was in church with his father one Sunday. It was a hot drowsy
day. He grew sleepier and sleepier. He could not keep his eyes open as
the waves of sleep engulfed him. His head nodded. He saw his father's
arm go up; and he was sure that his father was going to shake or strike
him. Then he saw his father smile gently and put his arm round his
shoulder. He cuddled the lad to himself so that he might rest the more
comfortably and held him close with the clasp of love. That day Lewis
Hind discovered that his father was not as he had thought him to be and
that his father loved him. That is what Jesus did for men and for God.
He literally brought men God's forgiveness upon earth. Without him they
would never have even remotely known about it. "I tell you," he said to
the man, "and I tell you here and now, upon earth, you are a forgiven
man." Jesus showed men perfectly the attitude of God to men. He could
say, "I forgive," because in him God was saying, "I forgive."
2:13,14 So Jesus went
out again to the lakeside, and the whole crowd came to him, and he went
on teaching them. As he walked along, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus,
sitting in the office where he collected the customs duties. He said to
him, "Follow me!" He rose and followed him.
Steadily and inexorably the synagogue door was shutting on
Jesus. Between him and the guardians of Jewish orthodoxy war had been
declared. Now he was teaching, not in the synagogue, but by the
lakeside. The open air was to be his church, the blue sky his canopy,
and a hillside or a fishing boat his pulpit. Here was the beginning of
that dreadful situation when the Son of God was banned from the place
which was regarded as the house of God.
He was walking by the lakeside and teaching. That was one of the
commonest ways for a Rabbi to teach. As the Jewish Rabbis walked the
roads from one place to another, or as they strolled in the open air,
their disciples grouped themselves around and walked with them and
listened as they talked. Jesus was doing what any Rabbi might have done.
Galilee was one of the great road centres of the ancient world.
It has been said that, "Judaea is on the way to nowhere; Galilee is on
the way to everywhere." Palestine was the land bridge between Europe and
Africa; all land traffic must go through her. The great Road of the Sea
led from Damascus, by way of Galilee, through Capernaum, down past
Carmel, along the Plain of Sharon, through Gaza and on to Egypt. It was
one of the great roads of the world. Another road led from Acre on the
coast away across the Jordan out to Arabia and the frontiers of the
empire, a road that was trodden by the regiments and the caravans.
Palestine at this time was divided up. Judaea was a Roman
province under a Roman procurator; Galilee was ruled by Herod Antipas, a
son of Herod the Great; to the east the territory which included
Gaulonitis, Trachonitis and Batanaea was ruled by Philip, another of
Herod's sons. On the way from Philip's territory to Herod's domains,
Capernaum was the first town to which the traveller came. It was by its
very nature a frontier town; because of that it was a customs' centre.
In those days there were import and export taxes and Capernaum must have
been the place where they were collected. That is where Matthew worked.
True, he was not, like Zacchaeus, in the service of the Romans; he was
working for Herod Antipas; but a hated tax-collector he was. (The King
James Version calls the tax-collectors, publicans; that is because the
Latin word was publicanus; the translation publican which is, of course,
nowadays quite misleading, actually goes back to Wycliffe.)
This story tells us certain things both about Matthew and about Jesus.
(i) Matthew was a well-hated man. Tax-gatherers can never be a
popular section of the community, but in the ancient world they were
hated. People never knew just how much they had to pay; the
tax-collectors extracted from them as much as they could possibly get
and lined their own pockets with the surplus that remained after the
demands of the law had been met. Even a Greek writer like Lucian ranks
tax-gatherers with "adulterers, panderers, flatterers and sycophants."
Jesus wanted the man no one else wanted. He offered his friendship to
the man whom all others would have scorned to call friend.
(ii) Matthew must have been a man at that moment with an ache in
his heart. He must have heard about Jesus; he must have listened often
on the outskirts of the crowds to his message; and something must have
stirred in his heart. Now he could not possibly have gone to the
orthodox good people of his day; to them he was unclean and they would
have refused to have anything to do with him.
Hugh Redwood tells of a woman in the dock district in London who
came to a women's meeting. She had been living with a Chinese and had a
half-caste baby whom she brought with her. She liked the meeting and
came back and back again. Then the vicar came to her. "I must ask you,"
he said, "not to come again." The woman looked her question. "The other
women," said the vicar, "say that they will stop coming if you continue
to come." She looked at him with a poignant wistfulness. "Sir," she
said, "I know I'm a sinner, but isn't there anywhere a sinner can go?"
Fortunately the Salvation Army found that woman and she was reclaimed
for Christ.
That is precisely what Matthew was up against until he found the
one who came into the world to seek and to save that which was lost.
(iii) This story tens us something about Jesus. It was as he
walked along the lakeside that he called Matthew. As a great scholar
said, "Even as he was walking along he was looking for opportunities."
Jesus was never off duty. If he could find one man for God as he walked
he found him. What a harvest we could gather in if we looked for men for
Christ as we walked!
(iv) Of all the disciples Matthew gave up most. He literally
left all to follow Jesus. Peter and Andrew, James and John could go back
to the boats. There were always fish to catch and always the old trade
to which to return; but Matthew burned his bridges completely. With one
action, in one moment of time, by one swift decision he had put himself
out of his job forever, for having left his tax-collector's job, he
would never get it back. It takes a big man to make a big decision, and
yet some time in every life there comes the moment to decide.
A certain famous man had the habit of going for long country
walks on Dartmoor. When he came to a brook that was rather too wide to
cross comfortably, the first thing he did was to throw his coat over to
the other side. He made sure that there was to be no turning back. He
took the decision to cross and made sure he was going to stick to it.
Matthew was the man who staked everything on Christ; and he was not wrong.
(v) From his decision Matthew got at least three things.
(a) He got clean hands. From now on he could look the world in
the face. He might be very much poorer and life must be very much
rougher, and the luxuries and the comforts were gone; but from now on
his hands were clean and, because his hands were clean, his mind was at
rest.
(b) He lost one job but he got afar bigger one. It has been said
that Matthew left everything but one thing--he did not leave his pen.
Scholars do not think that the first gospel, as it stands, is the work
of Matthew; but they do think that it embodies one of the most important
documents of all history, the first written account of the teaching of
Jesus, and that that document was written by Matthew. With his orderly
mind, his systematic way of working, his familiarity with the pen,
Matthew was, the first man to give the world a book on the teaching of
Jesus.
(c) The odd thing is that Matthew's reckless decision brought
him the one thing he can least have been looking for--it brought him
immortal and world-wide fame. All men know the name of Matthew as one
for ever connected with the transmission of the story of Jesus. Had
Matthew refused the call he would have had a local ill-fame as the
follower of a disreputable trade which all men hated; because he
answered the call he gained a world-wide fame as the man who gave to men
the record of the words of Jesus. God never goes back on the man who
stakes his all on him.
2:15-17 Jesus was
sitting at a meal in Levi's house, and many tax-collectors and sinners
were sitting with Jesus and his disciples, for there were many of them,
and they sought his company. When the experts in the law, who belonged
to the school of the Pharisees, saw that he was eating in the company of
sinners and tax-gatherers, they began to say to his disciples, "It is
with tax-collectors and sinners that he is eating and drinking." Jesus
heard them. "It is not those who are in good health who need a doctor,"
he said, "but those who are ill. I did not come to bring an invitation
to people who think that they have no faults but to those who know that
they are sinners."
Once again Jesus is flinging down the gauntlet of defiance.
When Matthew had yielded himself to Jesus, he invited him to his
house. Naturally, having discovered Jesus for himself, he wished his
friends to share his great discovery--and his friends were like himself.
It could not be any other way. Matthew had chosen a job which cut him
off from the society of all respectable and orthodox people, and he had
to find his friends among outcasts like himself. Jesus gladly accepted
that invitation; and these outcasts of society sought his company.
Nothing could better show the difference between Jesus and the
Scribes and Pharisees and orthodox good people of the day. They were not
the kind of people whose company a sinner would have sought. He would
have been looked at with bleak condemnation and arrogant superiority. He
would have been frozen out of such company even before he had entered
it.
A clear distinction was drawn between those who kept the law and
those whom they called the people of the land. The people of the land
were the common mob who did not observe all the rules and the
regulations of conventional Pharisaic piety. By the orthodox it was
forbidden to have anything to do with these people. The strict
law-keeper must have no fellowship with them at all. He must not talk
with them nor go on a journey with them; as far as possible, he must not
even do business with them; to marry a daughter to one of them was as
bad as giving her over to a wild beast; above all, he must not accept
hospitality from or give hospitality to such a person. By going to
Matthew's house and sitting at his table and companying with his friends
Jesus was defying the orthodox conventions of his day.
We need not for a moment suppose that all these people were
sinners in the moral sense of the term. The word sinner (hamartolos, Greek #268)
had a double significance. It did mean a man who broke the moral law;
but it also meant a man who did not observe the scribal law. The man who
committed adultery and the man who ate pork were both sinners; the man
who was guilty of theft and murder and the man who did not wash his
hands the required number of times and in the required way before he ate
were both sinners. These guests of Matthew no doubt included many who
had broken the moral law and played fast and loose with life; but no
doubt they also included many whose only sin was that they did not
observe the scribal rules and regulations.
When Jesus was taxed with this shocking conduct his answer was
quite simple. "A doctor," he said "goes where he is needed. People in
good health do not need him; sick people do; I am doing just the same; I
am going to those who are sick in soul and who need me most."
Mark 2:17
is a highly concentrated verse. It sounds at first hearing as if Jesus
had no use for good people. But the point of it is that the one person
for whom Jesus can do nothing is the person who thinks himself so good
that he does not need anything done for him; and the one person for whom
Jesus can do everything is the person who is a sinner and knows it and
who longs in his heart for a cure. To have no sense of need is to have
erected a barrier between us and Jesus; to have a sense of need is to
possess the passport to his presence.
The attitude of the orthodox Jews to the sinner was really compounded of two things.
(i) It was compounded of contempt. "The ignorant man," said the
Rabbis, "can never be pious." Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, was an
arrogant aristocrat. One called Scythinus undertook to put his
discourses into verse so that ordinary unlettered folk might read and
understand them. The reaction of Heraclitus was put into an epigram.
"Heraclitus am I. Why do ye drag me up and down, ye illiterate? It was
not for you I toiled, but for such as understand me. One man in my sight
is a match for thirty thousand, but the countless hosts do not make a
single one." For the mob he had nothing but contempt. The Scribes and
Pharisees despised the common man; Jesus loved him. The Scribes and
Pharisees stood on their little eminence of formal piety and looked down
on the sinner; Jesus came and sat beside him, and by sitting beside him
lifted him up.
(ii) It was compounded of fear. The orthodox were afraid of the
contagion of the sinner; they were afraid that they might be infected
with sin. They were like a doctor who would refuse to attend a case of
infectious illness lest he himself contracted it. Jesus was the one who
forgot himself in a great desire to save others. C. T. Studd, great
missionary of Christ, had four lines of doggerel that he loved to quote:
"Some want to live within the sound
Of Church or Chapel bell;
I want to run a rescue shop
Within a yard of hell."
The man with contempt and fear in his heart can never be a fisher of men.
2:18-20 The disciples
of John were in the habit of fasting, as were the Pharisees. So they
came to Jesus and said, "Why do John's disciples and the disciples of
the Pharisees fast, while your disciples do not?" "Surely," Jesus said
to them, "his closest friends cannot fast while the bridegroom is still
with them? So long as they have the bridegroom they do not fast. But the
days will come when some day the bridegroom will be taken away from
them--and then, in that day, they will fast."
With the stricter Jews fasting was a regular practice. In the
Jewish religion there was only one day in all the year that was a
compulsory fast, and that was the Day of Atonement. The day when the
nation confessed and was forgiven its sin was The Fast, par excellence.
But the stricter Jews fasted on two days every week, on Mondays and
Thursdays. It is to be noted that fasting was not as serious as it
sounds, for the fast lasted from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and after that normal
food could be eaten.
Jesus is not against fasting as such. There are very good
reasons why a man might fast. He might deny himself things he likes for
the sake of discipline, to be certain that he is the master of them and
not they of him, to make sure that he never grows to love them so well
that he can not give them up. He might deny himself comforts and
pleasant things so that, after self-denial, he might appreciate them all
the more. One of the best ways to learn to value our homes is to have
to stay away from home for a time; and one of the best ways to
appreciate God's gifts is to do without them for a period.
These are good reasons for fasting. The trouble about the
Pharisees was that in far too many cases their fasting was for
self-display. It was to call the attention of men to their goodness.
They actually whitened their faces and went about with dishevelled
garments on their fast days so that no one could miss the fact that they
were fasting and so that everyone would see and admire their devotion.
It was to call the attention of God to their piety. They felt that this
special act of extra piety would bring them to the notice of God. Their
fasting was a ritual and a self-displaying ritual at that. To be of any
value, fasting must not be the result of a ritual; it must be the
expression of a feeling in the heart.
Jesus used a vivid picture to tell the Pharisees why his
disciples did not fast. After a Jewish wedding the couple did not go
away for a honeymoon; they stayed at home. For a week or so open house
was kept and there was continual feasting and rejoicing. In a hard
wrought life the wedding week was the happiest week in a man's life. To
that week of happiness were invited the closest friends of the bride and
the bridegroom; and they were called by the name children of the
bridechamber. Jesus likened his little company to men who were children
of the bridechamber, chosen guests at a wedding feast. There was
actually a rabbinic ruling which said, "All in attendance on the
bridegroom are relieved of all religious observances which would lessen
their joy." The wedding guests were actually exempt from all fasting.
This incident tells us that the characteristic Christian
attitude to life is joy. The discovery of Christ and the company of
Christ is the key to happiness. There was a Japanese criminal called
Tockichi Ishii. He was utterly and bestially pitiless; he had brutally
and callously murdered men, women and children in his career of crime.
He was captured and imprisoned. Two Canadian ladies visited the prison.
He could not be induced even to speak; he only glowered at them with the
face of a wild beast. When they left, they left with him a copy of the
Bible in the faint hope that he might read it. He read it, and the story
of the crucifixion made him a changed man. "Later when the jailer came
to lead the doomed man to the scaffold, he found not the surly, hardened
brute he expected, but a smiling, radiant man, for Ishii the murderer
had been born again." The mark of his rebirth was a smiling radiance.
The life that is lived in Christ cannot be lived other than in joy.
But the story ends with a foreboding cloud across the sky. No
doubt when Jesus spoke of the day when the bridegroom would be taken
away his friends did not at the moment see the meaning of it. But here,
right at the beginning, Jesus saw the cross ahead. Death did not take
him unawares; even now he had counted the cost and chosen the way. Here
is courage; here is the picture of a man who would not be deflected from
the road at whose end there loomed a cross.
2:21-22 No one sews a
patch of new cloth on to an old garment. If he does the bit that was
meant to fill in the hole tears it apart--the new from the old--and the
tear is made worse. No one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does
the wine will burst the wineskins, and the wine will be lost as well as
the wineskins. New skins for new wine!
Jesus knew quite well that he was coming with a message which
was startlingly new; and he also knew that his way of life was
shatteringly different from that of the orthodox rabbinic teacher. He
also knew how difficult it is for the minds of men to accept and to
entertain new truth; and here he uses two illustrations to show how
necessary it is to have an adventurous mind.
No one ever had such a gift as Jesus for the discovery and the
use of homely illustrations. Over and over again he finds in the simple
things pathways and pointers to God. No one was ever such an expert in
getting from the "here and now" to the "there and then." For Jesus
"earth was crammed with heaven." He lived so close to God that
everything spoke to him of God. Someone tells how, on Saturday
afternoons, he used to go for country walks with one of the most famous
of Scottish preachers. They used to have long talks together. Telling of
it afterwards he said, "Wherever the conversation started, he had a way
of cutting straight across country to God." Wherever Jesus' eye lighted
it had a way of flashing straight on to God.
(i) He speaks of the danger of sewing a new patch on an old
garment. The word used means that the new cloth was still undressed; it
had never been shrunk; so when the garment got wet in the rain the new
patch shrunk, and being much stronger than the old, it tore the old
apart. There comes a time when the day of patching is over, and
re-creating must begin. In the time of Luther it was not possible to
patch up the abuses of the Roman Catholic church; the time for
reformation had come. In the time of John Wesley, for Wesley at least,
the time for patching the Church of England was done. He did not want to
leave it, but in the end he had to, for only a new fellowship would
suffice. It may well be that there are times when we try to patch, when
what is wanted is the complete abandonment of the old and the acceptance
of something new.
(ii) Wine was kept in wineskins. There was no such thing as a
bottle in our sense of the term. When these skins were new they had a
certain elasticity; as they grew old they became hard and unyielding.
New wine is still fermenting; it gives off gases; these gases cause
pressure; if the skin is new it will yield to the pressure, but if it is
old and hard and dry it will explode and wine and skin alike will be
lost. Jesus is pleading for a certain elasticity in our minds. It is
fatally easy to become set in our ways. J. A. Findlay quotes a saying of
one of his friends--"When you reach a conclusion you're dead." What he
meant was that when our minds become fixed and settled in their ways,
when they are quite unable to accept new truth and to contemplate new
ways, we may be physically alive but we are mentally dead.
As they grow older almost everyone develops a constitutional
dislike of that which is new and unfamiliar. We grow very unwilling to
make any adjustments in our habits and ways of life. Lesslie Newbigin,
who was involved in the discussions about the formation of the United
Church of South India, tells how one of the things that most often held
things up was that people kept asking, "Now, if we do that, just where
are we going?" In the end someone had to say bluntly, "The Christian has
no right to ask where he is going." Abraham went out not knowing
whither he went. (Hebrews 11:8.)
There is a great verse in that same chapter of Hebrews: "By faith
Jacob, when dying, blessed each of the sons; of Joseph bowing in worship
over the head of his staff." (Hebrews 11:21.)
With the very breath of death upon him the old traveller still had his
pilgrim staff in his hand. To the end of the day, with the evening now
upon him, he was still ready for the road. If we are really to rise to
the height of the Christian challenge, we must retain the adventurous
mind. I received a letter once which ended "Yours aged 83 and still
growing"--and with the inexhaustible riches of Christ before us, why
not?
2:23-28 One Sabbath
day Jesus was going through the corn fields. His disciples began to
pluck the ears of corn as they made their way along. The Pharisees began
to say to him, "Look! Why are they doing what is not allowed on the
Sabbath?" "Have you never read," he said, "what David did when he and
his friends were in need and hungry? Have you never read how he went
into the house of God, when Abiathar was High Priest, and ate the
shewbread--which none is allowed to eat except the priests--and gave it
to his friends as well?" "The Sabbath," he said to them, "was made for
the sake of man and not man for the sake of the Sabbath. Therefore the
Son of Man is lord also of the Sabbath."
Once again Jesus cut right across the scribal rules and
regulations. When he and his disciples were going through the corn
fields one Sabbath day, his disciples began to pluck the ears of corn
and to eat them. On any ordinary day the disciples were doing what was
freely permitted (Deuteronomy 23:25).
So long as the traveller did not put a sickle into the field he was
free to pluck the corn. But this was done on the Sabbath and the Sabbath
was hedged around with literally thousands of petty rules and
regulations. AH work was forbidden. Work had been classified under
thirty-nine different heads and four of these heads were reaping,
winnowing, threshing and preparing a meal. By their action the disciples
had technically broken all these four rules and were to be classified
as law-breakers. It seems fantastic to us; but to the Jewish rabbis it
was a matter of deadly sin and of life and death.
The Pharisees immediately launched their accusation and pointed
out that Jesus' disciples were breaking the law. They obviously expected
him to stop them on the spot. Jesus answered them in their own
language. He cited the story which is told in 1 Samuel 21:1-6. David was fleeing for his life; he came to the tabernacle in Nob; he demanded food and there was none except the shewbread. Exodus 25:23-30
tells of the shewbread. It consisted of twelve loaves placed on a
golden table three feet long, one and a half feet wide, and one and a
half feet high. The table stood in the tabernacle in front of the Holy
of Holies and the bread was a kind of offering to God. It was changed
once a week; when it was changed it became the property of the priests
and of the priests alone and no one else might eat it (Leviticus 24:9.)
Yet in his time of need David took and ate that bread. Jesus showed
that scripture itself supplies a precedent in which human need took
precedence of human and even divine law.
"The Sabbath," he said, "was made for the sake of man and not
man for the sake of the Sabbath." That was self-evident. Man was created
before ever the elaborate Sabbath law came into existence. Man was not
created to be the victim and the slave of Sabbath rules and regulations
which were in the beginning created to make life fuller and better for
man. Man is not to be enslaved by the Sabbath; the Sabbath exists to
make his life better.
This passage confronts us with certain essential truths which we forget at our peril.
(i) Religion does not consist in rules and regulations. To take
the matter in question--Sunday observance is important but there is a
great deal more to religion than Sunday observance. If a man might
become a Christian simply by abstaining from work and pleasure on the
Sunday, and by attending church on that day, and saying his prayers and
reading his Bible, being a Christian would be a very easy thing.
Whenever men forget the love and the forgiveness and the service and the
mercy that are at the heart of religion and replace them by the
performance of rules and regulations religion is in a decline.
Christianity has at all times consisted far more in doing things than in
refraining from doing things.
(ii) The first claim on any man is the claim of human need. Even
the catechisms and the confessions admit that works of necessity and
mercy are quite legal on the Sabbath. If ever the performance of a man's
religion stops him helping someone who is in need, his religion is not
religion at all. People matter far more than systems. Persons are far
more important than rituals. The best way to worship God is to help men.
(iii) The best way to use sacred things is to use them to help
men. That, in fact, is the only way to give them to God. One of the
loveliest of all stories is that of The Fourth Wise Man. His name was
Artaban. He set out to follow the star and he took with him a sapphire, a
ruby and a pearl beyond price as gifts for the King. He was riding hard
to meet his three friends, Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar, at the
agreed place. The time was short; they would leave if he was late.
Suddenly he saw a dim figure on the ground before him. It was a
traveller stricken with fever. If he stayed to help he would miss his
friends. He did stay; he helped and healed the man. But now he was
alone. He needed camels and bearers to help him across the desert
because he had missed his friends and their caravan. He had to sell his
sapphire to get them; and he was sad because the King would never have
his gem.
He journeyed on and in due time came to Bethlehem, but again he
was too late. Joseph and Mary and the baby had gone. Then there came the
soldiers to carry out Herod's command that the children should be
slain. Artaban was in a house where there was a little child. The tramp
of the soldiers came to the door; the weeping of stricken mothers could
be heard. Artaban stood in the doorway, tall and dark, with the ruby in
his hand and bribed the captain not to enter. The child was saved; the
mother was overjoyed; but the ruby was gone; and Artaban was sad because
the King would never have his ruby.
For years he wandered looking in vain for the King. More than
thirty years afterwards he came to Jerusalem. There was a crucifixion
that day. When Artaban heard of the Jesus being crucified, he sounded
wondrous like the King and Artaban hurried towards Calvary. Maybe his
pearl, the loveliest in all the world, could buy the life of the King.
Down the street came a girl fleeing from a band of soldiers. "My father
is in debt," she cried, "and they are taking me to sell as a slave to
pay the debt. Save me!" Artaban hesitated; then sadly he took out his
pearl, gave it to the soldiers and bought the girl's freedom.
On a sudden the skies were dark; there was an earthquake and a
flying tile hit Artaban on the head. He sank half-conscious to the
ground. The girl pillowed his head on her lap. Suddenly his lips began
to move. "Not so, my Lord. For when saw I thee hungered and fed thee? Or
thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw I thee a stranger, and took thee
in? Or naked and clothed thee? When saw I thee sick in prison, and came
unto thee? Thirty and three years have I looked for thee; but I have
never seen thy face, nor ministered to thee, my King." And then like a
whisper from very far away, there came a voice. "Verily I say unto you,
Inasmuch as thou hast done it unto one the least of these my brethren,
thou hast done it unto me." And Artaban smiled in death because he knew
that the King had received his gifts.
The best way to use sacred things is to use them for men. It has
been known for children to be barred from a church because that church
was considered too ancient and sacred for such as they. It can be that a
church is more concerned with the elaboration of its services than with
the help of its simple folk and the relief of its poor. But the sacred
things are only truly sacred when they are used for men. The shewbread
was never so sacred as when it was used to feed a starving man. The
Sabbath was never so sacred as when it was used to help those who needed
help. The final arbiter in the use of all things is love and not law.
-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)