Growing up in Colorado, there was a way that we measured distance, and it was with distance measurement units. If somebody was like, How far is it to that place? You would be like, that's 20 miles. And then they were expected to do the math in their brain about how long it would take them to travel 20 miles, given whatever kind of means of travel they would employ. But then I went to college in Chicago, on the north shore of Chicago, and I was hanging out with a bunch of people from Wisconsin and Michigan and Illinois as an 18-year-old kid just out of high school. And I noticed that whenever I asked somebody how far away something was, they would give me a time unit. That's 45 minutes. I never got to the bottom of it. But gradually I adopted that. And then eventually I moved back out to the West, and I realized that category doesn't work that well as technology changes, as laws change. Because when I was going back and forth to Chicago as a kid, it was 65 miles an hour going through Iowa. But now it's 80 miles an hour on the interstate in Wyoming, and I don't know, people do 90 if they have Wyoming plates and nobody seems to really care. It's a very different amount of time that it takes. And at some point it occurred to me that all of the old habits I'm in of, oh yeah, there to there is about that many minutes, it's all wrong now. It just isn't how traffic works. It's not how time works. I need to go back and I need to reevaluate all of that because my old mental categories don't fit the new realities that I'm dealing with anymore. Likewise, in Matthew chapter 9, we're getting the exact same kind of situation. We've got an old set of categories that I don't think people have thought about for a long time. It's become habit. They have a way that they're doing things religiously, culturally, and along comes Jesus with all of this talk about this kingdom and these kingdom values, and the values look different than world values, and he's describing a different means of admission into this new family of faith and into the old family of faith. The old one, it was ethnic, the new one, it's a condition of the heart. It's a matter of assuming a right posture before the one true king to enter into the one true kingdom. And the language between the two, I don't think it was meshing perfectly. I think people were talking past each other at this moment in history. I don't think all of the tensions that we see here in the relatively early going of Matthew can be characterized as bad people being awful and good people being good. I mean, there's definitely some of that in the not forgiveness business we've looked at the last couple of passages. But Jesus is changing the language and the categories for thinking about being in communion with God and being in communion with the family of faith. And you might be like, well, that's not cool. I don't like it when people come along in my culture or my world and just announce that these words mean this now and that means that now. And now you have to all think in these new categories because we decided it and we just announced it. Well, hey, I don't like that either, but Jesus is different. He's not some screaming special interest group from the sidelines. He's demonstrated authority over nature and distance and physics. I mean, he's miraculously breaking the laws of time and space in front of big groups of people. And that gives him more credibility to say these are truer, realer categories in which to think. But hey, understandably, it's gonna take a while to peel off all of that old religious language that people are used to. I mean, people have money invested in that stuff. And so when he comes along and says that things are different, it's gonna be confusing for people. And one of the groups that he is confusing is not just the Pharisees who were grouchy that he healed that paralytic a couple passages back, not just the Pharisees who were grouchy that Jesus is hanging out with a tax collector and other repugnant cultural others. But now Jesus is gonna come under some friendly fire. And this had to have been a disheartening moment for him, because it's John the Baptist's disciples who are gonna get after him. Here's the verse, uh, Matthew 9, 14. Then John's disciples came and asked him, How is it that we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast? Maybe in their minds, this was the most innocent of questions being asked from the most noble of places and the most sincere intent to get things right. But I'm guessing it was a little bit exhausting for Jesus, especially because of who it's coming from, and you would think that he would get it. John the Baptist is Jesus' cousin. He has been on board with the whole Jesus thing from the beginning. He vouched very publicly for Jesus. I mean, John the Baptist is the member of the family who went out and succeeded at the whole religious upstart thing before Jesus ever did. John the Baptist is a rock star. Everybody knows his name. And now Jesus has exploded onto the scene with all of the stuff that he's doing and saying. And he had this ally in John. Now they don't hang out together. I don't think they're operating geographically out of the same neck of the woods. I think John is probably more down around the Dead Sea area, closer to Jerusalem, doing the wilderness thing. It looks like there's, cult is too strong a word, but there's definitely a following, maybe not a messianic following, but people are drinking in his teaching. And so John got word about something that was going on all the way up north in Galilee, and he sends people up there, probably on foot, all the way up north to ask questions about the fasting. Or maybe these were just people who were hanging out with Jesus because John had them there. I don't know. But whatever the case, it looks like the party at Matthew's house is still going on, and now we're going to get some friendly fire, which is the worst kind of fire, by the way. And you know what this is like church, school, work, or whatever, coming from family. You got people getting after you at certain points in life, and it's kind of exhausting. But you know, you got these people who they're with you and they're in your camp, and then when they kind of get after you a little bit, or they just don't get what you're doing, it makes you feel tired. And so I feel for Jesus here, but he keeps it together and he answers. How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he's with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, then they'll fast. So there's this theme that you're gonna see that is really all over the gospels. It comes up in Luke as well, of Jesus believing that the moment of him being here on earth is a really special thing, and that there is something uniquely blessed about getting to hang out with him. And it's clear that Jesus sees very few people who understand the moment, who really get it. We're gonna get an account of a lady from the fringes of society way up north in ten chapters or so, who seems to have got it. The demons, last chapter, seem to have got it. Peter eventually comes around and seems to get it, but the really understanding who he is in the moment that he's there seems to be very few and far between. So to be a little more sympathetic to John's disciples here, you know, it's understandable they're coming from a reform movement, what is effectively an attempt to make Judaism work better. And I guess you could argue that Jesus in the grand scheme of things could be categorized as a Jewish reformer, but I don't know. He didn't say in Matthew 5.17, I don't think that I've come to abolish the law and the prophets. I haven't come to abolish them, but to reform them. He said, fulfill. Jesus isn't a reformer, he is the completion of the religion. He is the bump bump to the religions, bump, bada dot, dot. And that really is a different category. So again, here we run into the two different categories things, not just between people who will eventually become rivals, but between theoretical allies. And going all the way back to the stuff we were talking about at the beginning of our conversation here about thinking in terms of times and distances and realizing that your old categories maybe aren't relevant and don't work anymore, Jesus is going to take us even further down that road with the next analogy that he throws out, saying this no one sows a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do men pour new wine in 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. Obviously, it's going to take a minute to break all of that stuff down. We're going to do that tomorrow. But Jesus has made two statements in response to the friendly fire question: why don't you do the religious stuff the way we've done the religious stuff in the past? And both of them are pointing out that we're functioning in two different sets of categories, and there's an exhortation here to abandon the flawed set of categories and instead to begin to function in the new, or maybe it would be better to say fulfilled categories that Christ is articulating about himself and about the kingdom. This is kind of one of those cliffhanger ones because we we are cutting this in half, but we'll break down the wine, wineskins, patches, and garments thing tomorrow. Can be a confusing turn of a phrase, but we'll try to unravel it and make sense of it more as we go along. Huge thank you on the way out the door to all of you who responded to my request to go and do some reviewing on iTunes or whatever podcast app you used last week. That made a big difference. And what do you know? Hey, some more people jumped in and now they're hanging out with us. So we're doing the thing that we're supposed to do, which is broaden the circle. Thank you for helping me do that. You guys are awesome, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate not just the gesture of throwing, you know, a review up there, but also I actually read all of those and it means a lot. Thank you for the things that you said. You know who you are. We'll get after more of this Matthew 9 stuff tomorrow, talking about old categories and new categories and what to do in reconciling the two. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.