The Sermon on the Mount Matthew 9:14-17 In the last blog I discussed the first part of this section that talked about joy of being with Jesus. The second part (16-17) is about the new ideas Jesus brought to the people of Judah. It is always hard to accept new ideas. In order to embrace them we have to change the way we think and see the world. Jesus was aware of this and he gave the following examples as proof of that. The first is that of mending clothes. New fabrics shrink. Old fabrics have finished shrinking. If you sew a patch of new fabric onto an old garment, when the new fabric shrinks it will tear the garment and make the damage worse. In other words, new and old fabrics are incompatible. Likewise, new wineskins, that were made of goat hide, stretch. Old wineskins have already stretched so are now stiff. New wine is still fermenting and expanding in volume. In a new wine skin this is not a problem as the skin will stretch with the wine. However, an old skin will break because it can not adjust to the increased volume within it. For the Jews of Jesus’ time there was a deep attachment to the Law. They were afraid of losing the protection they believed it offered and stuck inflexibly to the Law as they saw it. The trouble is this made them behave in uncaring ways and to be inflexible. This grieved God and brought condemnation on their heads from Jesus. In the same way, many Christians have lost their faith in Jesus and instead cling doggedly to the doctrine of their church. Their inflexibility results in uncaring ways that grieve God and bring condemnation on their heads from Jesus. If you worship, or have worshipped in a church, have you ever tried to, or witnessed attempts to, change anything about the way the church does things? Sometimes those changes are embraced but often the response is “We never did that before”. Those who remember their first love and live in the joy of worshipping Jesus are more likely to be willing to try new ideas and to behave in loving, caring ways. Barclay comments that this is the pattern of the church throughout history. It has clung to the old. In these verses, Jesus is saying that the time comes when new wineskins are needed and new garments are needed. Sometimes we need to completely throw out the old ways and start again. This is what He was asking His disciples to do. The old ways were no longer serving the people in their need to draw close to God. Barclay warns against the danger of worshipping the past rather than the living God. We must be flexible, like new garments and new wineskins. We need to be able to accept the challenge of the new things God asks us to do. It is the very nature of human beings to cling to what is safe and known, but Jesus calls us to step out in faith into the unknown and the unsafe. In short, we are to get out of our comfort zones. That is stressful, difficult and not pleasant, but the rewards of following Jesus are so worth it! I leave the final word to Barclay: “It may be that we would do well to remember that when any living thing stops growing, it starts dying. It may be that we need to pray that God would deliver us from the shut mind!”
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 23:49:12 +0000