Hey everybody, I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we're in Matthew chapter 9, verses 14 through something else, 17. And this is the part where Jesus is in Capernaum. He's probably still at or just coming off. A party is maybe winding down that got thrown for him by this repugnant cultural other tax collector named Matthew or Levi, depending on which book of the Bible you're in. Both of those were probably his name. And this repugnant cultural other tax collector invites a bunch of other people who aren't very well liked from society. And also the most conservative religious leader scholar types also show up at the party. So this is going to get weird. And it does get weird. And the Pharisees, the religious leader types, are like, I don't know why you're eating with these repugnant cultural others. And Jesus is like, hey, it's not the healthy you need a doctor, it's the sick. Go and learn what this means. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. For I haven't come to call the righteous, but sinners. So Jesus clarifies his priorities both in action by hanging out with people that other people don't like very much, and with words, going right to Hosea 6.6, a verse that everybody in the audience would have been very familiar with, to say, yeah, mercy, not sacrifice. I mean, the all along, you guys who were looking at the Bible, you should have been able to see it coming that God's redemptive plan was going to be for the people who actually needed redeeming, not for the people who thought they had everything together and nothing that needed to be redeemed. So that party's going on. There's still the social awkwardness lingering in the air. It's like, oh, that got weird for a minute, but uh, let's try and ramp this thing back up, get some music going, and try to make it more comfortable for everybody. And then one of John the Baptist's disciples show up, or maybe some of John the Baptist's disciples rather show up. And they're like, hey, I got a question too. How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast? That's verse 14 of Matthew chapter 9. And we talked yesterday about the bummer that is friendly fire and feeling like, well, I expect it from these people, but yeah, yuck. Now I'm getting it from my own team. But Jesus plays this thing really cool. And yesterday we talked about the first half of his answer, which is we're just in a really unique moment in time here, guys. These people are seeing the situation for what it is, and they are celebrating, and it's just not a time for fasting and mourning and misery. It's a time for celebration because there's this reunification of God and humanity in this new way, because, well, as we're going to find out as we go along, because God in the flesh is present and with you, redemption is at hand, all the stuff that got prophesied and promised in Isaiah about everything getting straightened out like that's happening right now. This is a very unique moment in all of history. So going around and being dour and miserable, it doesn't make sense. The celebratory atmosphere here makes more sense. And we see this theme, as I mentioned again yesterday, come up all over the place in the Gospels, that this is a unique moment in history. And maybe two of the most memorable parallel passages to this that are reminiscent of this same theme of, hey, celebrate. Jesus is here right now, redemption is happening right now. Both happen in Luke, right in the middle. In Luke chapter 7, you've got the incident where the lady of ill repute apparently comes in and she pours out this expensive perfume on Jesus' feet, and she's crying, like scrubbing his feet with her hair, and then some people get grouchy and mad, and they're like, What the heck is going on with this? It's a waste of money, and this is just indecent. And then Jesus goes on to be like, Well, you know, how much has she been forgiven? How much have you been forgiven, buddy? Well, she's been forgiven a lot, so she's celebrating a lot. And the idea is she understands the implications because of her flaws and her awareness of her situation, whereas you fancy people, you don't get it. And then in Luke chapter 11, you've got that brief little anecdote that just tons of devotional material and stuff has been written about where Mary and Martha are working together, and Martha's like, hey, Mary's not doing enough stuff, make her do more stuff, Jesus. And Jesus is like, I don't know, she's sitting here hanging out with me. Seems like she kind of gets it. And so, not just here in Matthew 9, but all over the Gospels, we run into Jesus conceiving of this moment as being very unique and very important and celebrating people who are fired up about it and respond in big dramatic ways to the importance of the moment because they are getting things that is just flying by everybody else. So that's the first half of his answer. The second half of the answer gets into a couple of examples. And he says, No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. If you sew things, I'm sure you're like, oh yeah, I totally get it. I understand what Jesus is saying here, but if the last time you meaningfully sewed anything was in eighth grade home ec at Highland Middle School in Alt, Colorado, then you probably have no idea what's going on here. And that's kind of my situation. I guess I can conceive of the idea that some kind of new cloth would be aged differently than the old cloth. I guess that smacks of truth, but I do understand the second example that Jesus gives. He says, Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins and both are preserved. And the reason I understand the booze example better than the sewing example is not because I down a lot of the booze. I don't really understand the booze that well. That's not something that I was raised around. I try to play along a little bit better now, and I don't know, I don't want to make people mad who really, really like the booze, and they're like, what's the matter with you? Why don't you drink more alcohol? I don't know, I'm sorry, I'm trying to drink more alcohol. And I also don't want to make people mad who are like, booze is bad, the Bible doesn't say it, but it meant to say it. And so don't be drinking the booze. I just I like all of you. I think we can get along, I think we can be cool. But one time somebody came through my town in Wyoming, and you know, from time to time people throw me a little note and they're like, hey, I'm going by where I think you live. Could we say hi? And usually just timing-wise, it doesn't work out because people are busy and there's stuff going on and all of that. But every now and then it does. I've hung out with a few people coming and going, and this guy came out. I had an hour, it lined up fine, and we went fly fishing and we caught a few brook trout, and it was a really nice time. And then we got done, and he was like, hey, here's the thing. And he gave me this little, I don't know, just container, a little glass container with a wax seal. It was just elegant, it looked like something out of the Middle Ages, beautiful, of whiskey. He's like, this is really special whiskey, it's from where I live. And he gave me this backstory and it was interesting. And I was like, you know, I don't know anything about whiskey at all. That is not something that I really have consumed, but I am going to try a little bit of this whiskey later because that was a really thoughtful gift and it's important to this guy, and so I'm gonna do it. And so I thanked him, he got on the road, I put the whiskey in the back seat of my truck, and I went into work for a couple hours. And when I came back out, the truck was filled with this really pungent odor that I didn't understand. It smelled like cleaning product and kind of stung my nose and my eyes. I was like, what would that even be? And then I looked in the back seat and that wax had melted. I don't know if there was some kind of expansion or what, but all that booze got in the seats of my vehicle, and that truck never smelled right again. And fortunately, I never got pulled over in that vehicle because surely any sane officer of the law would have assumed that I was getting liquored up in there while I was driving. But even somebody who isn't really that well versed in liquor things like me understands that the relationship between the alcohol and the container has to be right because of the chemical and physical properties of alcohol, it can wreck the container really quickly and make a mess of things. And that's an example that Jesus is drawing on here that everybody would have understood. There's really nobody in this audience who would have rejected alcohol altogether like certain groups of Christians do today. So everybody would have got this and they would have been like, oh yeah, this is the basic principle of how things are. These wineskins, which are literally the dead bodies of animals, get used for a while. At first, they're gonna grow and expand with the wine and they're gonna do what they're supposed to do. But if they get old and crusted up, there's no more flex, there's no more give in that skin. And then as wine ages and does what wine does, it's gonna rupture the things and it's gonna spill out everywhere and it's gonna be wasted and worthless. The container has to have the right relationship to the stuff inside. So, what Jesus is saying here is very overt. The old categories of the law as it was being practiced and taught, lived out at this point in history, could not contain the new currency, the new values of the kingdom that Jesus was articulating. The container didn't match the substance, and that was causing people's brains not to comprehend what was going on. So this statement, the patch and the garment, and then doubling down with a second analogy, the wine and the wineskins, is really Jesus offering a brief mini parable or illustration that reflects back on the three bits of pushback we've seen so far in Matthew chapter 9. In reverse order, that is John's disciple saying, How come you don't do this external religious thing more or do it the way we do it? It also includes the Pharisees saying, Why do you hang out with bad people, the repugnant cultural other, and it also includes the Pharisees saying, Why are you giving away this forgiveness, that's blasphemy, and being opposed to Jesus doing these redemptive things? These things Jesus was doing, going the other way now, forgiving, hanging out with undesirables, and not doing the external religious things to quite the same rigorous degree that other people had seen their religion evolve into thinking were necessary, that stuff didn't compute in the law brain of people who didn't understand kingdom values, but it was starting to compute maybe in the kingdom brain of the people who were starting to understand kingdom values. And rather than getting after John's disciples in the same vigorous way that he went after the religious leaders, he instead graciously chooses to say, Yeah, there's some evolution of the categories that needs to happen here. And we've got a lot more Jesus and a lot more Matthew to come, so there's time for that stuff to unfold and make more sense. In general, this can just happen in religion, not just when uh you know a new prophet or a messiah shows up, but I mean just in general, it's really easy to get to a place where the rhythms and the normalities of the religious experience becomes the thing where you find consistency and meaning and security. And then when you try to shake yourself out of that, and actually in you know our example with the Bible and Christianity, look at what the founding character of the religion says, it can be almost very difficult to fit the teachings of Jesus in this case into the religious categories that we even make now. So I'm pretty sympathetic actually to John's disciples here for struggling to adapt in an instant to what's going on with Jesus, and he seems to be being pretty patient with it too, which means we can be patient with each other and just keep chipping away at this thing moving forward in Matthew 9 and trying to wrap our brains more around what the deal is with these new kingdom categories that Jesus is operating in. I'm Matt, this is the Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.