Mark 6 - New Wineskins

Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, "How is it that John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?"

[19] Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them. [20] But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast.

[21] "No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. [22] And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins."

[23] One Sabbath Jesus was going through the grainfields, and as his disciples walked along, they began to pick some heads of grain. [24] The Pharisees said to him, "Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?"

[25] He answered, "Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? [26] In the days of Abiathar the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is lawful only for priests to eat. And he also gave some to his companions."

[27] Then he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. [28] So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath."

[3:1] Another time he went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. [2] Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. [3] Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Stand up in front of everyone."

[4] Then Jesus asked them, "Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?" But they remained silent. [5] He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. [6] Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.

Well, like it or not, it is the political season of a presidential election, still a year and a half away. Predictably, as in every election, we are hearing calls for change, especially from the Democrats, but also from the Republicans. “Vote for me—I’m different! I’m not like the current administration; I’ll make changes; etc.” For those of us who have been through more than one presidential election, we wonder just how different the new leader will be. How many times have men campaigned as “outsiders”, not from the “Beltway” culture, and then been squeezed, pressured, co-opted, distorted by the pressure and culture of government? Forgive our skepticism if we ask, “Really? Just how different will you be?”

But when Jesus started His public ministry, something entirely different was truly there. No one had ever seen anyone like Him, literally. Not only did He bring a new agenda from God, but He also brought new power to enable people to live that agenda. Jesus was not just another great national leader in the mold of Moses and Joshua and David; He was something completely new—God in the flesh. And because of that, His ministry was going to cause a major overhaul of the way the Jews related to God and each other.

Here’s how Jesus described the changes that were coming: Mark 2:21, "No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. [22] And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins."

These images don’t immediately communicate with us, because they are drawn from an earlier day. In this day of pre-shrunk, permanent press, nano-tech fabrics, the image of sewing a patch on a torn garment may not make a lot of sense to us. The other problem with this image for us is that when we get a tear in a piece of clothing, we just throw it out, rather than sewing a patch on it. But in Jesus’ day, the average person was too poor to do that, so they would patch their clothes. Since the old clothes had been washed many times and had already shrunk, they learned that they had to use an old, already shrunk, piece of cloth as the patch, or when it was washed, the patch would shrink and pull away from the garment, making the hole bigger.

Then there are the wineskins, which we don’t use. These were typically made from goat hides, and as they got old, they got somewhat more stiff and brittle. New wine was still fermenting somewhat, and the pressure of that fermentation process would burst an old skin, so it had to be put into a new wineskin which was more flexible.[1]

Jesus says that He and His ministry are like a new patch of cloth or new wine, and the point is that the old structures of Judaism were going to have to change. What He was bringing was so new that the old ways just couldn’t adjust to it, or absorb it, and they would tear, or burst, if they tried.

One example of that was fasting. The Pharisees fasted, of course, because it fit in nicely with their attempt to do everything just right so they would be acceptable to God. They typically fasted every Monday and Thursday. John the Baptist’s disciples fasted, too, apparently copying their leader who was an extremely ascetic person (this is the guy who thought fast food was a locust, and wild honey was the dipping sauce). But Jesus and His disciples did not fast, and it raised a question in the minds of some people.

Jesus’ reply was, Mark 2:19, "How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them.” A wedding was such a joyous occasion, and wedding feasts in that culture could last up to a week, that nobody was fasting—they were feasting. Jesus says He is the groom (and we should hear in this term a hint that we, the Church, are His bride—that’s a theme that is developed more elsewhere in the New Testament, especially in the book of Revelation.) He’s the groom, and His disciples are like the guests at the party. As long as He was physically there in their midst, it was just inappropriate for them to fast, because fasting typically had overtones of seriousness, or mourning, of being sorry for sins, or things like that. Jesus’ presence is so new, so different from anything that has ever happened before, that it calls for great joy and celebration, not fasting. Immanuel, God is literally with us in the flesh, and we have to party! It’s OK to suspend the rules for something like this. (He does say, though, that when He leaves, then it will be appropriate for His followers to fast. That’s another subject, but for now, just note that fasting is a spiritual discipline that Jesus says we should do.)

The other example of the newness of Jesus and how different that makes things had to do with the Sabbath, and Mark gives us two illustrations of how this played out. The fourth commandment, (Exodus 20:8-11) said not to do any work on the Sabbath, based on the fact that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. The Pharisees then, tried to carefully define what constituted “work”. For example, Exodus 16:29 says no one is to go out of his house on the Sabbath, but they wondered exactly how far a person could go and not violate this commandment. Most scholars settled on a distance of 2,000 cubits (about 3,000 feet)—unless on the day before Sabbath you went 2,000 cubits away from your house, and took two meals with you. You would bury one, symbolically representing your new “house”, and leave another one there to be eaten when you got there. Then on the Sabbath, you could go the 2,000 cubits to the new “home” and then another 2,000 cubits from there, resulting in a journey of 4,000 cubits, or 6,000 feet.[2]

This same attitude still exists in Israel today among observant Jews. When Barbie and I were in Jerusalem on the Sabbath, we were interested to find in our hotel room a “Shabbat clock”. This is like a timer you put on your lights when you are away: you set it for when you want the lights to come on and go off, so that you don’t have to flip the light switch during Sabbath, which would be work. Also, there are two sets of elevators, one set being used for those observing the Sabbath: There are two Shabbat elevators, and one stops on every even numbered floor, and the other at every odd numbered floor, so you don’t have to push the button for the floor you want, because that would be “work.”

A. The Sabbath was made for man 1 Samuel 21:1-6; Mark 2:27; see Exodus 25:23-30; Lev 24:9;

The Pharisees and their legal scholars, the teachers of the law, had set the pattern for this kind of thinking back in Jesus’ day when they defined thirty-nine different kinds of work that were forbidden on the Sabbath! Four of them had to do with food: reaping, winnowing, threshing (separating the wheat kernel from the husk), and preparing a meal. As the disciples walked through a field of grain on the Sabbath and picked some of the heads and rubbed the husks off and ate them raw, they were technically breaking all four of these rules.[3] The Pharisees were horrified, and expected Jesus to immediately correct His men.

Instead, He cited David’s actions in 1 Samuel 21 as justification for what they were doing. David had been running from King Saul who was trying to kill him, and he came to the tabernacle in Nob. On the verge of starvation, he demanded that the priest give him something to eat, but there was nothing there except the consecrated bread. This was bread that was set out on a golden table as an offering for God. It stayed there a week, and after that, they replaced the loaf with a new one, and the priest—but only the priest (Lev 24:9)—could eat the one they took away. (I’m thinking it was pretty stale by then!) But David was desperate, and he took the bread off the table and ate it and gave it to the men who were with him.

Jesus says this is an example of the principle that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). The Pharisees had it backwards—they started with the commandment about the Sabbath, and did everything they could to protect that, regardless of what it did to the people. They didn’t care about people; they cared about the Law, that it not get broken. They had the attitude that man was made to keep and protect the law. Jesus said, No, it’s the other way around. The law, in this case, the commandment about the Sabbath, was made for man’s benefit, to provide rest from our labor, and a day to worship God. If keeping the law in a strict way results in harm to people, like making them go hungry, then it’s OK to break it, because the whole point of the law is to do good to men, not harm them.

In our day of moral relativism, when everybody decides for themselves what is right and wrong, and that can change from moment to moment, based simply on what we want to do at any given time, we are likely to interpret Jesus as supporting our approach to the Scripture. In our culture, we are used to bumper stickers that say, “Question Authority”, and even the average Christian doesn’t pay a whole lot of attention to what the Bible says. I remember getting a call from a young man who had grown up in our church, and who wanted me to perform his wedding. It had been a few years since he had been in church, so I asked a few questions about his life, and discovered that he was living with his girlfriend. I said, What do you understand the Bible has to say about that? He replied, “I don’t believe in that part of the Bible.” That’s pretty much the way it is for a lot of people; if the commandments of God are inconvenient, or if they run counter to our desires, we just ignore them. That is not what Jesus is advocating here!

He’s saying that the Pharisees’ approach to the law, namely to define it down to the gnat’s hair, and to insist on keep all those man-made definitions regardless of the effect it had on people, was entirely misguided. The law was given for our good. It is good for us to take one day in seven to rest from our work and to worship God. But if circumstances prevent us from doing that for a time, it’s not the end of the world. We should be more concerned about following the spirit of the law than the letter of it. For example, I work on Sunday. It’s a work day for me. Yes, it’s a day for me to worship, but I have to find another day of the week to take off from work. So I effectively split the functions of the Sabbath into two different days of the week, but I still get the benefit of both. That’s the kind of thing I think Jesus is talking about.

Jesus goes on to offer another reason why He is not going to rebuke His disciples, and it has to do with the “completely new thing” that has happened. Mark 2:28, “the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

This is the second time in Mark’s gospel that Jesus has used the title “Son of Man” to refer to Himself. In Mark 2:10, Jesus said to the teachers of the law, “But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins…”, and then He told the paralytic to get up, take his mat and go home. What does He mean by this title, Son of Man?

First, it is a clear statement that He is a man. The phrase is used several times in the Old Testament to emphasize the humanity of someone. For example, Psalm 8:3-4, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, [4] what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” In comparison to the universe that God has made, humans are so small and insignificant that it is amazing God even notices us. Jesus is emphasizing that He was born of Mary, that He was fully human like we are.

But this title is also a reference to Daniel 7:13-14 which gives us a very different picture: “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. [14] He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations and men of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” This “Son of Man” is no mere human! He has authority, glory, sovereign power; he is worshiped by everyone on earth; He rules forever. So Jesus uses this title to neatly say both of the two most important things about Himself: that He is fully man and fully God.

In Mark 2:28, He says, “So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” In His role as the one with supreme authority, Jesus has the right to authoritatively interpret the commandment about the Sabbath (and every other commandment, too!). He can say what it means and does not mean; He can determine when it is appropriate to break the law and when it is not. He is the Lord of the Sabbath; He calls the shots.

Mark then gives us another instance of Jesus doing just that. Mark 3:1, “Another time he went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. [2] Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. [3] Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’ [4] Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent. [5] He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. [6] Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”

The rabbis had interpreted the commandment about not doing any work to apply to the work of healing. They said it was lawful to save a life on the Sabbath, but not do any other kind of healing. So here are the Pharisees in the synagogue, not to worship, but to spy on Jesus and find some fault with Him. Jesus sees the conflict coming, and wades right into it. He has the man stand up in front where everyone can see what He is about to do, turns to the Pharisees and asks them a penetrating question: You are so concerned about what is lawful and unlawful to do on the Sabbath—is it lawful to do good to someone like this poor cripple, or should I do evil by not healing him when it is in My power? Should we save a life or kill someone on the Sabbath? The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; what does that mean I should do for this man today?

Their silence revealed their hard hearts –the word translated stubborn literally means “calloused”; they were insensitive to the man’s needs, and that made Jesus really angry. They cared more about the law than they did about the man. In some ways, I am a lot like the Pharisees: I think there are many suffering people whose pain I do not feel; I certainly do not feel it the way they do. But Jesus does. He knows what they are going through, and it grieves and angers Him when His people do not care about those who are hurting.

He told the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He did stretch it out, and his hand was completely restored. That was a command to do something he could not do before. The command to do something—anything—coming from Jesus, carries with it the power to obey. It’s like His commands to us to be holy, to not sin, to avoid sexual immorality, to forgive each other, to be active in sharing our faith, etc. In our own strength, we may not be able to do these things, but when Jesus commands us, He also gives us the power to do them.

What is Jesus asking you do to that you don’t think you can? Maybe it is something you have never been able to do before—you’ve always failed at that. But you know that’s what He wants you to do. I want to encourage you to try again. Many times I have complained to God that I can’t lead this church, but every time He has said, That’s my call to you. Don’t whine that you can’t, that you’ve tried before and failed. Keep trying, and I’ll make it work. I’m slowly coming to believe this. Believe that when Jesus orders you to do something, He gives you the power to do it, and try again, in His strength. This man’s hand was shriveled; what is the shriveled, non-functioning part of your life? What are you not using for God’s glory? Is there a talent you have buried? A relationship you have neglected? Stretch it out, in the power of Christ, for the glory of God.

Jesus Christ was a completely new thing, something no one on earth had ever seen before: God in the flesh, the heavenly Son of Man, Immanuel. And His presence made everything new. He brought a new covenant between God and man, that would change forever the way people worshiped God. He changed our values, so that people were more important than laws. He came with the authority to reinterpret the Old Testament commandments, because He was the author of those commandments.

If you were to characterize your life, would it be more like an old, cracked, dried up wineskin, or a fresh, flexible wineskin filled with flavorful new wine? Are you stuck in an old religion filled with rules to keep so you can earn God’s favor? Or do you have a relationship with Jesus, the Son of Man, who makes all things new?

We are going to baptize a number of people this morning, many of them teens, who have found a new life in Jesus Christ, and want to mark that by their baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection. I pray that you will examine your own heart, to see just where you are with God this morning, and make sure that you have Jesus, and the new life that He can bring you.

[1] J.F. Ross, ”Wine”, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol.4 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1962), p.850.

[2] T.S. Kepler, ibid., p.141

[3] William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975), p.63.