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Mark 2:18-22
Fasting and feasting
I. Do you know any sinners?
Perhaps you have noticed the pattern in Mark so far. Especially over the last two weeks. I tell you every week that Mark wants you to see Jesus as a servant and one who suffers and that he wants you to see Jesus as the king of a new age. WE have emphasized each of these things even over the last two weeks, but perhaps you have seen this as well. This suffering and servant king really really loves sinners a lot.
He calls them from fishing boats and tax collector booths, he casts demons out of them and cures paralysis, leprosy and fevers, he eats with entire groups of these sinners and . . . he forgives them.
Jesus loves sinners. Can I be any more plain and obvious than that?
Do you know any sinners? Of course you do. Its the person sitting next to you in the pew, and the one in the pulpit and the one wearing your shoes. We are all sinners, but some of us, praise God, are saved by His grace. But what about those who are not. Do you have a family member who doesn’t know Jesus? A next door neighbor? Perhaps the friend on the football or soccer or volleyball team? Are you burdened by this?
Look at your prayer list insert in your bulletin. Turn it over to the back. Look at Long term prayer needs. At least for the last couple of years we have been praying hard for revival.
Revival.
As I was thinking about this sermon I glanced up at this prayer list and noticed that revival wasn’t on it anymore. I was intrigued and curious. How long had it been off? I went through my stacks of prayer lists. The last time I saw it on the prayer list was April 13. That’s exactly 6 months that this has not been on the prayer list. Perhaps it went off when we lost our secretary, perhaps when Doug Burgess started to miss prayer meetings due to health—he always reminded us of this need. I don’t know how it got off the list but I know it hasn’t hindered my prayers for Revival. I think about it and pray for it pretty nearly every day. I pray I never grow tired, but even more I pray that He will work.
If you are here and are not a Christian, this means we have been praying for you. Revival just means we have been praying that God would quicken (old English way of saying make alive) your heart. But not just yours. We have been praying that God would work in many hearts at once. We have been praying that a move of the spirit would happen in Poolesville that would rival Northampton under Edwards or Oxford under Whitefield.
Two weeks ago I mentioned in our sermon that our prayer list had on it only 5 people that needed salvation. This was somewhat interesting to me. I pray for a much larger list every week than that and it is for people that you have mentioned. Why aren’t they on the list?
I was curious about that and started thinking it over.
· Perhaps people don’t want to intrude on our time
· Perhaps they realize we would have to go to 2 pages on our prayer list
· Perhaps they grow tired of praying after so many years.
Recently I have felt an incredible urgency to seek out the lost and plead with them wherever they may be found that they come to Christ. I have prayed like crazy for your husbands and wives and coworkers and friends.
II. The neglected discipline
But I have neglected a discipline that is directly connected to serious and fervent prayer: fasting
I want to tell you where I am going here and what I am going to ask of you. I am going to ask that starting this Tuesday and every Tuesday for the next 4 weeks, we as a church commit to fasting for Poolesville and for those who are dear to us. We aren’t praying for wisdom in decisions, or physical healing—we are praying for one thing—their salvation.
Perhaps you think fasting is antiquated or for the super-spiritual among us. I hope to show you this is not true.
The text before us is a brief one and is found in Mark 2:18-22. This is found on page 208 of the pew Bible for those of you not familiar with Bible terminology.
18 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."
Pray
III. Why the Pharisees’ disciples fasted
The story begins with Mark telling us the context. John’s disciples and the Pharisees disciples were fasting. We know from other texts that the Pharisees did this twice a week. Now there was only one required fast and that would have happened last week on Yom Kippur.
But there were other reasons people could volunteer to fast. The Mishna (ta`anit) mentions three other fasts:
1. Laments for national tragedy
2. Laments for time of crises like war or plagues
3. Self imposed fasts for various personal reasons.
The Pharisees and religious leaders probably combined these. The tragedy and crisis that had come on them was one of a conquering Rome and they fasted to express their own repentance and to hasten the day of the Messiah.
These fasts were generally done in a state of mourning. Not only did they cease from eating, but they made themselves out to be miserably penitent.
It had become an act of piety and suffering and humility and penitence even being called by the rabbis “an affliction of the soul.” The Pharisees would often whiten their faces and shred their robes as proof of their penance.
IV. Why Jesus’ disciples didn’t fast
But their fast was not the problem; rather it was Jesus’ disciples lack of a fast that was causing concern. “Why don’t they have to fast as these other religious people do?
This is a very significant question. If all the religious people fast, why don’t you? I could ask the same question of many things that “Christians” do. If Christians don’t touch alcohol, why do you? If Christians don’t dance, why do you?” If Christians don’t smoke cigars, why do you?
Jesus in typical debate fashion, asks them a question back. How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? The answer. They can’t.
Why? Because fasting was something done with mourning and looking miserable. While John’s disciples and those of the Pharisees may be in that kind of situation, Jesus disciples were not. For them, the bridegroom has come. He has arrived and when grooms come, there is no mourning only great joy.
Then he gives two mini-parables to help make his point, or at least it kind of makes his point. Look at verses 16-17
“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. 17 "Nor do men 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.”
If you have old wine skins, they don’t give or stretch much anymore and new wine being poured in will cause them to burst. And an unshrunk patch put on shrunk clothes will begin to shrink and when it does it will rip off the old clothes. These are just basic facts that we all know. What does it mean?
This fresh wine and unshrunk cloth are the new kingdom. The kingdom of Jesus and if you try to fit his new world—the new age that has promised—in with the old skins and the old cloth, it just wont work.
A new age is upon them. They need to understand something huge—the bridegroom is here. He is there to subdue the world and to subdue hearts for the great king and create a people who believe him and follow him. These people are the new wine and they just don’t fit into the old way of doing things.
Although what he is saying here is certainly veiled somewhat, we do know that the OT has God pictured as a husband of his people Israel. Its in Isaiah 62:4, Hosea 2:19, Jer 3:20 and Ezek 16:8. Now Jesus is here claiming to be the husband of a new Israel. It may have been somewhat abstruse to them, but to us in the context of Mark’s gospel and with the Spirit of God living in our lives it is as clear as day. Jesus is making some considerable claims about his identity with God.
This is so huge, so huge. The people just can’t comprehend. Their can’t be any fasts while he is there. There is nothing whatsoever sad about this.
When a wedding happens, it happens for a week or more. And if the grooms wedding party is crying, that is the ultimate insult. Its just stupid. It doesn’t make any sense. The whole world is now perfect. Even more so the bride. When their eyes meet all is as near perfect as it could ever get. Do you remember that moment those of you who are married? All I can speak is from the groom’s perspective, but I have heard from many women it is very similar. Standing up at the front with the pastor in front of me. And hearing the music and seeing everyone stand. I had to move out of my assigned spot just to get a glimpse of the most perfect day ever made. There she was, my everything. Do you remember? Nothing else mattered.
I think Jesus is saying even that image is nothing in comparison to this groom coming. Everything you waited for is here. There is no more longing for the Messiah to come. Everything that you hoped for Israel is standing right in front of you. There can be no more sadness. This is the time for leaping up and down and out right unparalleled exhuberance, HE HAS COME!
And we Christians dare to stand in these pews and hold hymnbooks in front of us with songs like Rejoice the Lord is King, or Joy to the world, or This the day or ______and not be overflowing with joy. I know we are Baptists and we wouldn’t look kindly on jumping up and down or cartwheels, but there is something to that kind of excitement. I really miss Anne right now. She would step into the aisle right now with a beautiful smile and maybe give a shout of allelulia. Uninhibited joy. The bridegroom has come.
V. Then why should we fast?
But lets not go to quickly over verse 20
"But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast."
This seems to be a veiled reference to his death. When Jesus is killed, the fasting will start again.
So how does this all work? The current situation is that Jesus is gone. So the fasting and misery should come again?
Not exactly. There is a sense in which the longing has returned. We do have the Spirit within us but there is a longing for fullness. We want to be home with the groom. He came, he put the ring on our finger (the Holy Spirit is a seal of the covenant he has with us) and then he went away. I don’t know about you, but I am homesick. I want more.
Does this make sense? But there still seems to be some disconnect.
No fasting while groom is here
Fasting okay when groom leaves
But then, in the context it seems that fasting is part of that old system that the new age is ditching. The old fasting cannot contain the new wine of the kingdom.
How does this work?
The answer is simple. We have a different fast now. A new kingdom fast. We fast as children of the kingdom, in a kingdom where the bridegroom has already come and will come.
We don’t mourn over sin, or fear the danger of judgment. We live on the other side of the cross which means that Jesus has already saved, he has already conquered Satan. His blood has already covered, his death has defeated death and now the old way is just not adequate.
We already enjoy the fruits of the new kingdom, we have tasted of the ultimate gift. Sure there is more. That is what we await. That is what we can be satisfied by and only that. We await the consummation of joy.
So friends, what can we take from this small passage? I think the basic answer is what I started us off with plus a bit more. Basically the answer is, “Its time for a new fast.”
Not a fast like they did, but one that has a whole different purpose and a whole different result. One that exudes joy and satisfaction and expectation.
I could spend weeks training you on what it means to fast but let me see if I can make it very simple.
There are many out there who don’t know that the bridegroom is here. They live their lives in pain and he came for them. The doctor came to heal them.
I just want to make a quick aside here. We often talk about a world in pain who needs Christ. This is technically true, but this Jesus that I know is so much more. It is not only the weak and hurting that need Jesus. Perhaps you are here and you have an alright life. You more than make ends meet and you don’t really feel that guilty and you have a good wife or husband and your kids make you happy and if you lived like this for the next 30 years you would be fine. I need to tell you that Jesus didn’t just come for the miserable. He came for the perfectly ok as well. The problem, we found last week, is that its harder to convince those people that they are in desperate need. But Jesus came for the rich and happy as well. And he promised even them, perhaps even you, blessing so far beyond what you currently have that you cant even begin to imagine.
It would be like a 4 year old child born in the poverty of Ethiopia waiting to die being able to make believe about being a fat king at a 16 foot table crammed with every option of food. This child doesn’t even have the capacity to dream about something like that. But this is what Jesus has to offer.