You are going to continue or look at the book of Matthew this morning focusing on chapter 9 verses 14-17 and the response of the disciples of John the Baptist that Matthew records for us in reaction to Christ’s miracles and his ministry. In the beginning of chapter 9, the gospel writer gives us an account of Jesus’ healing miracle with the paralytic capping off the second set of three miracles Matthew records. A miracle that is focused not on the physical healing but the far more marvelous spiritual healing that occurs. This is the apex miracle, the greatest miracle in a series of growing demonstrations of Jesus’ authority. It is the miracle of forgiveness, demonstrating Jesus’s authority over sin that is parallel with God the Father.
We are then given an account of the response to that authority. Three responses, the positive response of Matthew as he immediately stands, leaves everything, and follows Jesus. The best response possible. A wholehearted, all or nothing commitment to Christ that is accompanied by a desire to tell all his friends about what he has been offered. And so, at Matthew’s banquet, which is attended by the scum of Capernaum’s society, we are given the second response to Jesus’s authority over sin, that of the Pharisees. A response that condemns Jesus for his willingness to reach out to the lost, to the spiritually void. A rejection of Jesus as a whole, his message, his ministry.
This morning we are going to look at the third response to Jesus, one that is more neutral, it is a response defined by confusion more than rejection. It is not one questioning his authority or his purpose as we saw with Pharisees, but a questioning of his system. How does Jesus fit with the world as we know it? These were the disciples of John the Baptist. He was the forerunner of our Lord that we saw back in chapter 3. He had come to prepare the people for the coming of the Christ and he was preaching in the wilderness of Judea saying “repent.” In the people who heard his message were baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins. John the Baptist was preaching the same message as Jesus. He was pointing to the heart not the ritual religion. When Jesus arrives on the scene his message was no different “repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” And in his Sermon on the Mount we see the clear focus of his ministry being on the internal and not the external.
Though his message was the same as John the Baptist, and John had pointed to Jesus as the one greater than himself, urging his disciples to begin following Jesus, some of the disciples of John were unconvinced. Jesus was just two different, two unlike traditional pharisaic Judaism. Something did not connect, and they wanted to know why. And so, we find the question posed in verse 14 and Jesus’ response helping them to understand the extent of his message. Let us read the verses 14-17.
“Then the disciples of John came to Him, asking, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?” and Jesus said to them, ‘The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”
We do not know if this interaction happened immediately after the Pharisees questions in verse 11 or if this was a different event, but as there is a logical sequence to both the questions and the responses by Jesus so Matthew, inspired by the Holy Spirit, puts them together for us. The Pharisees wanted to get rid of Jesus, and the Disciples of John wanted to understand him.
“Why do we in the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” “Help us understand this Jesus, you are preaching repentance, the need for a changed heart. You come offering forgiveness to the lost, to sinners, offering forgiveness to the worst of society. We do not have a problem with that. But John taught us that we should bear fruit in keeping with repentance and so we fast regularly to show our commitment, but you and your disciples do not, what is up with that?”
Unlike the Pharisees, who’s question back in vs. 11 was not one looking for an answer but simply to accuse, I believe that the Disciples of John brought a legitimate question, and Jesus deals with it in two parts. He splits the question up into two, a question about fasting and a question about fitting. The disciples of John were asking Jesus a question about external righteousness, about the practice of fasting, and so Jesus deals with that first. But there is an underlying question, an underlying confusion. It was a question about how Jesus and his message fit with their system. About applying what Jesus said to their lives.
We are going to start where Jesus did, that always seems a good idea to me, we are going to start with the issue of fasting. Dealing with the surface of the question, dealing with the question at its face before getting to the real underlying issue. “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?”
Within the pharisaic tradition of the time there were three major expressions of righteousness, of religion; fasting, alms giving, and prayers. We saw Jesus deal with these in chapter 6, in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by man… When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and street corners so that they may be seen by men… Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they neglect their appearance that they will be noticed by man when they are fasting.”
The Pharisees had developed their little routines and rituals about saying prayers, about giving alms, money to the poor, and about fasting. All these little things were done and paraded in front of the others so that they could put on a display of righteousness. These external rituals became the substance of their religion. The disciples of John had grown up under this system, this is what they understood to be a righteous life lived before God. And they were comfortable in their routine.
There are many people like that today. I think you especially get it in places like the Roman and the Orthodox churches. There is routine, ritual, pomp and circumstance. Kneeling, standing up, reciting the same words and phrases over and over again. We can often fall into the same sort of things, becoming comfortable in the routine. Protestants are just as likely to fall into similar routines. We may not have a rote prayer we recite before dinner, but those prayers can still end up sounding pretty similar every night. We go to church, sing a song, we say the same words over the offering, go through the routine, it is comfortable and it is expected and it shows that were being religious. It is easy to go through all of that, to feel righteous and to have no real conviction of sin, no deep repentance of the heart.
So the disciples of John were asking, “why is your system different? Why do not you fast like we do?” Jesus answers with the perfect response, short and to the point but one with profound implications. “The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?” Wait, what? What does that have to do with fasting? The attendants of a bridegroom were essentially what we call the groomsmen. In Jesus’ time weddings would last for seven days and the man getting married would pick his best friends who would be responsible for keeping the festivities going. They would get things moving in the morning, keep the activities and celebrations going throughout the day all seven days. What Jesus is saying is that he is the bridegroom and his disciples are like his groomsmen, those closest to him. Why would they be in mourning at a wedding? It is a time to celebrate not to weep.
Okay? What does that have to do with fasting? If you remember back to our time studying the Sermon on the Mount, we talked about the purpose of fasting. Fasting is meant as a show of remorse, of sadness, of emotional pain. There was only one fast in the Old Testament law that was required and that was on the Day of Atonement. The one day out of the year when all Israel gathered to offer up a sacrifice for sins of the people. A day focused on mourning over sin and repentance. There were other fasts called throughout the Old Testament for particular reasons. When the people were brought back from a lifestyle of sin by a prophet or a king and they wished to show national mourning and repentance, when they were under attack and crying out to God for help, when they were suffering under disease or famine. The purpose of a fast is to demonstrate remorse for sin or to call upon God in a special time of need.
But through the course of time, through the rabbinic tradition, fasting became a regular event in the life of a religious Jew. In fact, they would fast twice a week if they were very righteous like the Pharisees. Like many traditions or regular “acts of righteousness,” it is not wrong in and of itself. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus did not say not to fast, he did not say to not give money to the poor, he did not say not to pray. He expected these activities to continue. “When you give to the poor… When you pray… Whenever you fast.” The problem with these traditions was that they were being upheld for their own sake rather than for what they were intended to be.
It was exactly what Jesus was condemning in verse 13 as we saw last week. “But go and learn what this means; ‘I desire compassion, and not sacrifice.” Ritual righteous actions are meaningless if there is nothing behind them. God does not want your sacrifice if your heart is far from him. Was fasting twice a week wrong? Not inherently, but why were they fasting on the same days every week? Where they particularly broken over their sin every Monday and Friday? That seems a bit unlikely. Why are they fasting twice a week? Even the disciples of John the Baptist who understood their need for repentance, who understood the need for internal change? Because that was how they always done it, that is what they expected out of righteousness.
Why do you go to church every Sunday? Why do you do devotions in the morning? Why do you sing songs on Sunday morning? Is it because you like the music? The tunes are familiar? Why do you write a check to the church every week or every month? Because you have to make sure to get your 10% in? Why do you pray before a meal? God does not care about the religious exercise apart from an honest attitude in the heart. As we saw in Isaiah chapter 1 last week, it is burdensome, wearying to him to have to listen to it every Sunday when your heart is far from him.
In Jesus’ response, he condemns this ritualistic fasting while at the same time pointing to something very important about himself. He is the bridegroom, the reason for celebrating and you do not fast at a wedding, you feast. This analogy is important, it is one that is used throughout both the Old and New Testament, Jesus as the bridegroom. We see the relationship between God and the people of Israel described as a marriage over and over again, with eternity being described as a perfect wedding feast, a lasting celebration feast. Throughout the New Testament this same analogy is used. Christ and his bride, the church. This is especially used in Revelation to describe the joy of heaven. 19:7 says, “let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready…(and vs. 9) Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”
These statements about marriage are announcements of coming celebration, of the great promise of joy coming in glory and in eternity. We also should note Jesus’ latter half of that first statement, “the attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.” While Jesus is here, while Jesus is on the earth with his disciples they should be celebrating, and joyous at the promise of forgiveness that he brings. But there will be a day when he is taken away from them, violently snatched away from them, before the wedding will be completed and that will be a time of fasting, that will be a time of mourning. This is the first reference in the Gospel of Matthew that the King will not reign in his first coming. The idea that the bridegroom will be taken away from them provides a foreshadowing of Christ’s suffering and death as well as the loss and despair that his followers would experience.
The disciples of John may have understood that something better than the tradition of the Pharisees was being preached by John and by Jesus, but they were still stuck in those traditions. They understood that they needed something more, but they were not fully appreciating what Jesus was doing. They wanted to understand how to fit Jesus into their current setting. And so Jesus continues in his response by answering the question they did not even know they were asking. He is telling them that the system they have does not work at all and they have to get rid of it if they are going to follow him, if they are going to enjoy the benefits of the presence of the bridegroom.
Jesus uses two analogies in quick succession to make his point, two mini-parables. Mending garments and new wine. “No one puts a patch of un-shrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results.” Those of us in the younger generation probably have no experience with this because if our shirt or pants rip, we just throw them away and go buy another one. But in the old days, when clothes were not so abundant if you had a shirt or pants get a hole in it, or a robe in the time of Jesus, you would have to put a patch over the hole and sew it into place. You had to be careful though because wool clothes, which made up the majority of what the people in Israel wore, wool cloth shrinks after it has been washed the first couple of times. If you were to take a new patch of cloth and sew it into a well-worn robe and then wash that robe, the patch-cloth shrinks and tears away from the garment leaving a bigger hole than when you started. What Jesus is saying is that there is no way that what he is teaching can be fitted into that rabbinical tradition. There is no way that the message he is teaching, the focus on internal holiness, on true repentance, on a righteous heart attitude can ever fit into the ritualistic system that they held. It will not work, it will tear away all the more and ruin everything.
“Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.” In storing wine, they would take the skin of an animal, most commonly a goat because that is what they had the most abundance of and it worked as a good size being able to actually lift it when it is full of liquid; they would take the animal, remove the hid in one solid piece, treat the leather, tie off or sew off the ends of the legs and other orifices and then fill it with new wine. If you want to go home and find a picture of online, it looks kind of funny, search in Google “ancient wineskins.” You see what would happen is that as the wine ferments, it lets off the gas, carbon dioxide which could force its way out of the skin, but would stretch it out dramatically. If you put new wine that still needed to ferment into a used wineskin, the leather would be unable to stretch any further and would simply break apart and you lose everything.
That is what Jesus is saying. The system that you have is worn out and useless. You will have to get rid of your system, the pharisaical, rabbinical, traditional, self-righteous externalism cannot hold the truth. If you try to fit it around my message, it is going to tear apart and you are going to lose everything. It was useless to try and put the two together. Jesus is telling the disciples of John, because they want to know the truth, they are trying to get this whole thing figured out, he is telling them that they cannot just take his message and add it to their traditions, it will not work, you have to get rid of one or the other.
The tradition of the scribes and Pharisees said that if you do these things, you follow these rituals, fast twice a week then you are righteous. The message of Jesus is that you are a sinner who is completely incapable of righteousness and therefore you are in dire need of the forgiveness of Jesus. The disciples of John wanted to fit the message of Jesus into their tradition, into their life. It is noble, it is better than the Pharisees who outright rejected Jesus. The disciples of John saw their need for Jesus, saw their need for forgiveness, but they were not sure if they are ready to let go of their traditions. “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?”
This happens all the time today, I am convinced there are millions of people who fall under this “patchwork Christianity.” Patchwork Christianity is when you use religion to patch up the rough or torn up areas of your life. When life is difficult or when things are going the way you want, you make a repair here and put some cloth there. But the whole life is not dealt with. In my mind, this is one the most damaging things to the Gospel that exists on this earth. Patchwork Christianity is a kind of religion that people invent to fit what they like and what they want for their mostly comfortable life. They like how things are going for the most part, they want to stay in control and when things start to not look quite right, when a hole starts forming they take a patch of Christian sounding stuff and sew it in to cover their failings. And they see another part that needs get fixed up and they sew in another patch over there. “I am going to check in with God this week, maybe it will do me a little good, maybe I will get something out of it.”
The disciples of John were all caught up in their religious system and they missed the glory of the bridegroom that was standing there in front of them. And Jesus was saying to them, “this is a new day, I am bringing in a new covenant, and the change that I am bringing in is radical and you cannot simply continue the old with patches. You need a complete skin change or you are going to burst.” We are called to put on Christ, put on the whole Christ. God wants us body and soul, he does not want us to dabble in discipleship, he wants every part of us. Christianity is not a part-time thing.
Matthew made that choice when he got up from his tax booth. When Jesus said to him “follow me” he got up and followed the Lord with a life of unquestioning obedience, he dropped everything and followed him. Does that define your walk with him? God is not interested in patching up the holes in your life, he wants your whole life. He has sent you a Savior who is Christ the Lord, he has called you to embrace Jesus with your whole being. Nothing else will do.
Once a month we have the privilege, the joy of celebrating the finished work of Christ. It is a reminder of what he accomplished on the cross for us. The bread as a picture of the breaking of his body as which is the graphic illustration of the wrath of God that was poured out upon him in our place. His blood which has washed us clean and sealed us within the new covenant. In Luke’s gospel, in his account of the institution of the Lord’s Supper we read “(Jesus) said to them, ‘I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; for I say to you, I shall never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’ And when he had taken a cup and given thanks, he said, ‘take this and share it among yourselves; for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now until the kingdom of God comes.”
Jesus was telling his disciples that he was about to be taken away. The bridegroom, the focus of their joy that had kept them from fasting was about to be taken away and a time of sorrow was about to come. But it was not the final note, he did not say that he would never eat or drink again, but that he would not eat or drink until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. That is a reference to the marriage supper of the Lamb. The feast of celebration before the throne of God when all of history is consummated in glory.
The celebration of communion is a constant reminder of the extent God has gone to in order to fulfill his promises. It drives us onward as we look back to the life and ministry of Christ and the forgiveness that he purchased for us with his death and resurrection. It is a reminder that should propel us forward in absolute faith. Not in our own power and ability but because of the sovereignty of God and the completed work of Christ upon the cross. And it is also a reminder of the joy that is to come. The promise of the marriage supper of the Lamb.
“let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to him, for the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready… Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.”
Celebrating the Lord’s table is only for those who are in a right relationship with God. It is only for those who have come to recognize their spiritual poverty, who have come to a state of mourning over their sin and repented of the sin that dominated their life and accepted the forgiveness that Jesus our Lord has granted. It is a time for reflection, to test the motives of our heart. A time to both mourn over sin, and to celebrate our forgiveness and our blessed future that is to come.
We practice open communion which means if you are visiting our church today and you have experienced God’s provision of your ultimate spiritual needs then we welcome you to join in this celebration of the sacrifice of Jesus.
I will ask the ushers to come up and pass out the elements, and while they do that, take this time to reflect on the Forgiveness that you have been granted, and any sin that you are continuing to struggle with.