From the Daily Lectionary for Friday in the First Week after the Epiphany
Mark 2:13-22
Jesus went out again beside the lake; the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him.
And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax-collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he said to them, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus said to them, “The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.
“No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.”
Jesus has a habit of calling out the elite and powerful for their callous hypocrisy. He also makes it a habit to call out the standard-bearers of his religion as well. The scribes and the Pharisees represent both. In any institution, whether it be religious or governmental, there is a decided tendency towards serving the status quo, resisting change.
Here, Jesus is challenging the way of things. One could interpret Torah that one shouldn’t associate with the so-called sinners of the world, but Jesus turns that on its head. His mission is to change the intractable social order by being proximate to those cast out by the system. Tax collectors enjoyed a degree of affluence, but they were reviled by the occupied population who saw them as agents of the empire. We’re not told what manner of “sinner” Jesus is hanging out with, but it was likely those who were shunned and shamed by “polite society.”
Jesus is a model of how we are to interpret scripture. We engage its authority to which the time-worn tradition has held it, but we also bring to scripture new knowledge, new context, and imaginative and critical engagement. If scripture has nothing new to say to us, then it loses its authority, its relevance. Jesus’ ministry and teaching is grounded in traditional Judaism, but it is also a radical re-interpretation given the present circumstance. In that regard Jesus was considered by the elite as an iconoclast, even to the point of blasphemy.
Change is always unsettling, often disorienting, but this world is change. I would argue that God is change. Jesus is arguing the proposition that God’s love is never punitive, but always looking for reconciliation, not just for the “righteous,” but for all manner of human persons. The change Jesus envisions is a more just world that includes all, especially the unloved and left-out, in God’s world of abundance. He will later say to the scribes and Pharisees, “Let anyone without sin cast the first stone.”
We are in the midst of accelerated and radical change in our world. It is causing extreme anxiety and disorientation. But “new wine” belongs in “new wineskins.” With courage and thoughtful integrity we must give ourselves to what is to come, because the world is still being created. We must be participants in the process of change recognizing that the Truth evolves as well. The truth is not bedrock standing firmly in the past. The truth is found in mystery, ever becoming, often surprising. But, good people, we’ll know it when we see it. We just have to be open to our God-given imaginations. The bedrock of the status quo is an illusion. Reality is that there is only possibility.
A Prayer for the Mission of the Church (BCP p. 838)
O God, you sent your Son Jesus Christ to reconcile the world to yourself: We praise and bless you for those you have sent in the power of the Spirit to preach the Gospel to all nations. We thank you that in all parts of the earth a community of love has been gathered together by their prayers and labors, and that in every place your servants call upon your Name; for the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours for ever. Amen.
