5- Changing the Narrative: Mark 2 - Mike Olynyk, Meadows Church

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Transcript

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You're listening to audio from Meadows Church in Langley, BC. For more information about Meadows Church, go to Meadowschurch.ca. We are in Mark 2. We're in the New Living Translation. We're on a journey of encountering Jesus through Mark's gospel. And we want to dive into the culture of the day so we can really experience the text. Often people look at the Bible, I think, through the lens of their own culture. And but that's not how it was written. We are on a journey to be one of the crowd. Experience Scripture as one of the disciples. We were just here. This is Capernaum on the screen behind me. And now we're moving on from here. Jesus is going on his Galilean world tour. And so let's pray. And then we're gonna dive in together. God, I thank you so much for your word. Thank you that we can glean, we can grow, and we can learn because your Holy Spirit is here. So God, would you be with us? Come and touch our hearts, we pray. In Jesus' name. Amen. Verse 18. Once when John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, some of the people came to Jesus and asked, Why, why don't your disciples fast like John's disciples and the Pharisees do? Well, let's just stop it there for a second. Because we are seeing the Pharisees fasting. We're seeing John's disciples fasting. All these people are asking, Well, where's your piety, Jesus? Where's your piety, disciples? Well, fasting was a practice of denying yourself food for a set time, often a 24-hour period. In the Bible, there is only really one mandated fasting time, annual date per year, and it was on the Day of Atonement. In the Old Testament, it was a day that you would make things right with God through both animal sacrifices and by fasting. In this, fasting was a tangible act of sacrificing something and pointing ourselves to reconciliation with God. You ask for forgiveness, you analyze your hearts, and we see if changes need to be made. That's what fasting was about on the Day of Atonement. That was the only you need to do this fast in the Bible. And it was for Jewish people pre-Jesus dying on the cross and rising from the dead. There was other times people fast, and I think it's a great practice to fast and really turn our attention to God, to show your love for God through sacrifice or appeal to God, to sacrifice food, to seek an answer, or to ask him to intervene in a situation. That is most likely what John's disciples were doing at that moment. You see, Herod had arrested their leader John and put him in prison, and it was quite likely that they would have fasted multiple times a week to plead with God for John's release. And they might have done it alongside the same time that the Pharisees did it. Now, why did the Pharisees fast? That's a totally different story. It was probably another one of their over-the-top things that they were doing. They loved making a public display of their religiosity, their piety. And they would heap on more and more rules and religiosity to pop up how awesome they were, and then they would call the people to do likewise. So the Pharisees had a practice of fasting twice a week, which in and of itself isn't wrong at all. It's great. Except that they would implore their followers to do it too. And in Matthew 6, Jesus tongue-lashes them for the way they're fasting. The religious leaders were all about making it a public performance. Matthew 6, 16. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces, that their fasting may be seen by others. So we have this culture of fasting quite a bit, and Jesus' disciples aren't doing it. And with this in mind, let's keep reading verse 19. Jesus replied to them on this. Do wedding guests fast while celebrating with the groom? Of course not. They can't fast while the groom is with them, but someday the groom will be taken away from them. And then they will fast. You see, the disciples would truly mourn in this prophetic statement by Jesus. They would fast for three days after watching their Savior, their leader, die on a cross. They would also probably fast a lot during the 40-day period between his ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And so there was lots of fasting to be had there, but in this moment, Jesus is saying, Why would they fast while I'm here? They're with the Messiah, the Savior. Now Jesus turns the conversation to what he is doing, this salvation and new covenant that he's bringing, and he uses two metaphors to do it. The first is of clothing and sewing in verse 21. Let's read. Besides, who would patch old clothing with new cloth? For the new patch would shrink and rip away from the old cloth, leaving an even bigger tear than before. Here's the second metaphor, verse 22. And no one puts new wine into an old wineskin, for the wine would be burst the wineskin, and the wine and skins would both be lost. New wine calls for new wineskins. Do we have any sowers in the crowd? Yeah? You can attest to that then? That new cloth is gonna shrink when it gets washed and dried, and it would pull the seams on the patch. I think this is pretty easy to understand. But we don't tend to walk around though with wineskins, do we? We go to the local BCL now that they're off strike and we'll grab a bottle of wine from there. So let's look at it. This picture is a picture of an old goat skin, a wineskin. You can see it even in the picture on the left that it looks brittle. Now, does anyone make their own wine here? Anyone? No. I uh I brew my I brew my own beer and the process is is quite similar, except you have to add yeast to the the uh grain mash. But with wine, the the skin of the grapes provide the yeaps and it's just a natural fermentation process. What they would do to ferment the wine is they would take the grape juice and and they would put it into wineskins that were soft and pliable, and as the skin was filled, the wine, because it's got a new wineskin, the wine would stretch the wineskin. The wine would then stay in the wineskin for three to five days where it would ferment. The natural yeast would turn the sugar into alcohol, and the byproduct or the off-gas would be carbon dioxide, which would expand the bag even more. And so a brittle wineskin would crack and break under pressure. And what we need to understand here is it's not to say that the wine would drip out and all would be ruined because it would all hit the ground, uh, but now it wouldn't have a seal during fermentation. I'll tell you the story on one of my brew sessions, I brewed a beer and put it in a fermentation vessel that ended up having a little leak. It didn't have a proper seal on it. And after a week of fermentation, the batch was completely destroyed. The beer was ruined. What happened is the oxygen was able to enter the chamber and it caused oxidization in a bad way that led to it smelling and tasting like vinegar. The wineskin and the wine would be ruined because oxygen would enter the wine and now it's useless. It tastes like vinegar, it smells like vinegar. And so, getting back to the story, Zechariah tells us that one of the main reasons to fast was to mourn captivity and to cry out to God for a Messiah. We learn this in uh Zechariah. After Babylonian captivity, the Jews added four fasting times a year for this purpose. They mourned the loss and the captivity and being exiled to a foreign land. Well, it's not lost on me that the Pharisees in this moment are likely fasting to cry out for the Messiah, and there right in front of them is staring at them, Jesus, doing miracles and teaching with real authority. This is the Messiah. You see, the old wineskins and the old clothing is this old system. The animal sacrifices and the crying out for Messiah and still living in devastating captivity, first from the Babylonians and now at the hands of the Romans. And the best the Pharisees can think to do is to heap on rules and things you need to do to earn God's favor. Then maybe God will hear us. Then he will come and send his Messiah and we will be rescued. You see, Jesus fulfills all this. And because he died on the cross, and because he would rise from the dead, he enters in a new covenant where we don't have to do animal sacrifices anymore. And we don't have to follow these this burden of rules that was on the Jewish people. We have this new life in Jesus where we can take our the embarrassments of our past and we can put it on his shoulders and he takes it and he gives us freedom. You see, I love this. Jesus was changing the narrative. And the Pharisees in this old system that was broken with hypocrisy and helplessness and greed, they couldn't handle the new wine. Well, let's keep going. Because Jesus moves from fasting to Sabbath in a similar conversation. Verse 23. One Sabbath day, as Jesus was walking through grain fields, his disciples began breaking off heads of grain to eat. Okay, okay, wait, time up. What's going on here? Did we just read that Jesus was trespassing on a farmer's field and that his disciples were stealing the farmer's grain? Is that what I just read? Like my theology and the way I think and the way I read my Bible is that Jesus is perfect. He never sinned. He was the perfect sacrifice, the unblemished sacrifice. Yet it would seem here in this passage that they were walking on private property they didn't own, and that Jesus was at the very least condoning his disciples' theft of grain. Well, surely the Pharisees who are looking for a way to trap Jesus, surely that they would catch on to this, right? And he's they're gonna call him out. Let's keep reading. The Pharisee said to Jesus, look, uh, why are you breaking the law? Okay, here we go. By harvesting grain on the Sabbath. That's curious, isn't it? They don't even mention those two things. Well, why is that? Well, that that's because Jesus and his disciples are not actually doing anything wrong in first century Israelite society. You see, uh, there wasn't no trespassing signs. There was no one shouting, get off my property back then. Things didn't work like our North American sister. Uh, when people were walking to a destination, they would take the quickest way possible between point A and point B, and that might not be the nearest Roman road. And so it was commonplace not to walk around a field and waste time, but to walk through the field. And if you've been to parks, you might see little game trails. I recently were at Campbell Valley Park feeding the birds, and I got off on a trail with Bailey thinking it was a trail, it ended up being just a game trail, a place where coyotes or or uh whoever uh roams the area, they walk there frequently, and it's basically made a bit of a path. Well, that's what happened to farmers' fields. There was little trails throughout, as you can see in this picture, and so they weren't trespassing. This was cultural, but weren't they stealing? No one was offended on that one either. And let's read Deuteronomy 23, verse 25, because it brings it all together. It says, if you enter a neighbor's grain field, you may pick kernels with your hand, but you must not put a sickle to the scanning grain. You cannot harvest your neighbor's grain, but you can grab a handful of grain and eat it. And so knowing this, the the Pharisees knows that they're not doing anything wrong except that they're doing something questionable on the Sabbath. They are picking grain on the Sabbath. They're saying, is that work? We need to understand one more thing about this. The Pharisees are not in their home turf, the synagogue, and this is not a rousing debate, and they're not trying to trap Jesus yet. They are actually students, pupils of Jesus, walking with him and asking questions. It was actually commonplace for a rabbi to be challenged and asked questions, especially by their star pupils. This was just commonplace. So the these Pharisees aren't being confrontational here. And that would happen in the next chapter, and we'll get to that next week. Jesus responds to them in this rabbi pupil communication by referencing the law and the prophets out of 1 Samuel 21. And here it is. It says, This is how Jesus responded, verse 25. Jesus said to them, Haven't you ever read in the scriptures what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He went into the house of God during the days when Ibathar was high priest and broke the law by eating the sacred loaves of bread that only the priests are allowed to eat. He also gave some to his companions. This is Jesus' response to, hey, why are you picking grain on the Sabbath? Well, Jesus is changing the narrative again. Here Jesus is providing a challenging reference back to them. There's been a ton of scholarly arguments and discussions about this passage, and it was a deep rabbit hole for me in study, but I'm gonna save you all the specifics. It was a little bit of a head scratcher for me though. Because why would Jesus equate his actions and that of his disciples to those of King David when he broke the law in the temple, at the temple? I came to the conclusion, and other scholars would agree, that Jesus was actually using irony to prove his point. Today we might have air quotes over broke the law. You see, David was the anointed king of Israel, and he was fleeing for his life from Saul at the time, and his men were starving. But the only food the priest had was this bread used as an offering to God. You see, bread was made and it was put on the altar as a sacrifice with some frankincense, and then when new met bread was made, the priests would then get that share of bread as their portion. This was the bread that was given to David. And David, I mean, we know that David was far from perfect, right? He did some horrible things, including committing adultery and murder. Yet here in this passage, David didn't actually break the law. But the irony was used to show that just as David didn't do anything wrong here, neither was his disciples. They weren't harvesting and working on the Sabbath. They were simply picking some, a couple blackberries on the bush on a hike in Fort Langley, right? You see, Jesus is again trying to shake things up. To see God's immense love for them, and this whole changing of the narrative would really be summed up in the next verse. So let's continue in verse 27. Then Jesus said to them, The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of the people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even over the Sabbath. See, the narrative of the day was cling to the rules for rules' sake. Obey the rules or else. And what does that mean? What is the or else? Well, it usually came down to public shaming. You could get to the point where you weren't allowed to come to the temple or come to the synagogue. People might just go, oh, look at that sinner. There could be that type of public shaming. Or God would smite you. That's the or else. Obey or else. And if it wasn't enough, the Pharisees were also making sure that nobody could follow the rules because they were heaping on all these rules. Yeah, Jesus. Jesus was about freedom and turning the conversation, changing the narrative from observing rules or else to observing rules and following Him because it's actually for our own good. And this is the example. It's crazy. It's nuts that God needed to tell us to take a day off, to simmer down, to rest, to spend time with him, to take a Sabbath rest. I think some people have a really hard time with God. He's an all-powerful rule monger. Trying to harsh or mellow with all his rules. Follow or else. And geez, with the amount of silly people with their turn and burn signs or their God hates this type of sinner, or God hates that type of sinner. I was gonna show you protest sign, but it's just really bad form. People see that on the news? No wonder people hear this and want no part of God. There was no love in those protests. What are they trying to do? Jesus was about love and relationship. But friends, I'm not gonna stand here and be like Fillmore from Cars saying, all you need is love, man. Yes, being a Christ follower, following Jesus is about love and relationships, but there are some things that God has put in place for our own good. Rules that are in place that stops us from hurting ourselves or hurting others or hurting our relationships. With God. Jesus actually sums up all the things in the Bible in two categories. He sums it up as loving God and loving others. These rules for godly living, maybe this is actually a great conversation around the table. Are there things in the Bible, rules for godly living, that you think actually aren't for the good of our relationship with each other or with him? It is their stuff that's like, no, he's just harshing our mental. I think that's a good conversation because if you look at it, don't lie, steal, covet, all of those things, kill. Those are all things that if we abstain from doing, we will have better relationships with each other. Adultery or sex outside of marriage, that there are just numerous problems with that, and Jesus says, don't do that. Don't worship idols, honor your father and mother, love God and love others. All the things in Scripture are for our own good. So we've just finished reading two passages of Scripture where Jesus takes a common theology of the day around fasting and Sabbath rest, and he nuances it. Things that aren't made to strip the joy out of our life, but things that are actually help point us to a better life. And as I'm thinking on our discussion today, verse 27 really resonates. The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath. All of this, friends, is for our own good. God created you and He created me. He knows how we tick, He knows what we need, He created everything around us. This book is made for us because we need it to have a good life, to have good relationships. So as we close, I thought we would have a chance for a little self-reflection. You can just get in a comfortable position and buy you to close your eyes. To poison your soul or to poison your relationships with others? Is there something that you need to ask for forgiveness for and to stop doing? David writes in Psalm 139 about how intimately he made me and you. And I love that psalm. I invite you to read it in your quiet time. But then he goes on in verse 23 to say this prayer. And I think it's a prayer for us today. Psalms 139, verse 23 and 24. Listen to it. It says, Search me, God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. So as we close and I invite the worship team back up, I want to ask you, friends, what is the condition of your heart? Like if God were to search your heart right now, just as David asked God to do in Psalms 139, what? What do you see? Well, first, before you get really self-deprecating, first he would see the love he has for you. You are his son, you are his daughter, and he loves you. So know that. But then are are there some things that you need to let go? Ask for forgiveness. Stop doing them because you're hurting yourself, your relationship with God and others. Or maybe it's the reverse. Are you carrying bitterness for someone and you need to ask God to help you let that go and to forgive them? In these moments of reflection right now, let's ask Jesus to search our hearts. Because he loves us so much. We're so glad you chose to join us today. To find out more about Meadows Church and how you can get involved, connect with a pastor or how you can partner with us in ministry. Go to meadowschurch.ca.