The New and the Old

Consider these words of Jesus from Mark 2:21-23:

“No one would patch an old piece of clothing with a patch of new cloth; but if anyone did, the new patch would pull away, making the tear worse.  And no one would pour new wine old wineskins; but if anyone did, the wine would burst the wineskins, and both the wine and the wineskins would be ruined.  Instead, new wine goes into new wineskins.”

To tell you the truth, I have never really understood where Jesus is going here.  He says lots of confusing and cryptic things, but this is on the top of my list of “what?!” moments.

So I did some thinking and digging.

It is worthwhile to note that Jesus makes this statement in response to some people who asked him: “How is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?” (v. 18).

It would seem to me that Jesus is contrasting the religious traditions of the day with his own teaching and the kind of community he was beginning to create.  He was doing something different, symbolized by this new or unshrunk (literally, pure or unspoiled) piece of cloth that would act as a patch.  But the problem is that the new patch and the old garment are incompatible.  The cloth in the new patch is still dynamic.  It is in the process of changing, and trying to match that with the new old garment won’t work.  Likewise, the new wine was still in the process of fermenting, and the gases released would break and old and brittle wineskin, but a new and flexible skin would be fine to handle a little expansion due to fermentation.

In this context, I believe Jesus is saying: “We don’t fast because at this point I am breaking and reinventing the rules.  Not that we will never fast (v. 20), but I mean to say that the old structures and all the details about them do not necessarily serve the new things that God is doing.  If Judaism as it currently stands is not flexible enough to accept this new thing, well then we just need some new wineskins or a new garment.”

While God was doing something unique and very new in the person of Jesus — something never to be replicated or trumped — he is always doing something new in our world on some scale, and the question Jesus asks us here is whether the wineskins and the garments (i.e. the beliefs, traditions, structures, and institutions we have) are flexible enough to incorporate the new thing.  And if we still insist on trying to stuff the new God-movements into our old ways of doing things, our old systems will explode and we won’t be treated to all that has God has to offer either.

So what new things is the Spirit doing in your life and faith community and where does there need to be change in order for Him to accomplish this new work to the fullest?

What is the Gospel?

If I asked you the question “What is the Gospel?” and gave you 30 seconds to answer, what would your response be?  Take a moment right now and jot something down. 

I imagine someone might say something resembling the 4 Spiritual Laws.  I myself would say something like: “Jesus died so that our sins could be forgiven.  Our sin seperated us from God, but now, because of the death of Jesus, we can be in relationship with God.”  I asked a friend this question early today and he said: “Reconciliation between God and man.”

But if we go back to the source, we discover something quite different.  If we look at Jesus (and he would certainly know what the Good News is, if anyone did), we get a different picture.  In Matthew 4:17, we read the words which describe the beginning of Jesus’ ministry: “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’  Two things to note here: (1) This statement is likely a summation of Jesus’ message, a distillation of what he said into its purest essence — first and foremost, Jesus’ message was about the Kingdom; and (2) it says Jesus began to preach this message.  In other words, this was not the only time he said these words.  Likely, these words were part of many sermons and teaching he delivered.  And remember, the Kingdom of God/Heaven was a favourite topic of his in his teaching.  Numerous times we hear Jesus saying “The kingdom of heaven is like….” as a way of introducing a parable.

So if we take Jesus’ word on things, the most important concept for us to absorb is the imminence of God’s Kingdom.  Jesus came to say that the new world order, far from being a distant future to he hoped for, is here now.  Though the kingdom does not yet exist on earth in its fullest expression, the startling reality is that it is much more available than we typically think.  Jesus has come to offer us entrance into a new reality — those we follow him are in this very instant kingdom people, marching to the beat of a different drum, operating under different rules, and living different lives. 

There is space within this for the “traditional” notion of the Gospel, which is still 100% true.  We are invited into this kingdom through the deah of Jesus, who takes away the sin which separates us from God.  But the Good News goes beyond you and beyond me.  It is not merely that our personal invidual sins are forgiven, but that when Jesus set foot on this earth in the flesh, the forces of Sin began to retreat, and at at the cross were vanquished.  And the territory which has been reclaimed from the realm of darkness is what we call the Kingdom of God.  Here on earth.  Right now.  Today.

NB: This is essentially my own paraphrase of the second chapter of The Good and Beautiful Life by James Bryan Smith.  The chapter is called “The Gospel Many Have Never Heard.”

Wanted: More Preachers

I am revisiting the Gospel of Mark.  It used to be my least favourite Gospel, short and hurried as it is, without a lot of explanation; but ever since digging into it in Life Group over the course nine months this past year, it has stuck with me.

If you read the first few sections of Mark in the good ol’ NIV, you will run across John the Baptist preaching his message of repentance and the coming of the Messiah (1:4) and Jesus at the beginning of his ministry proclaiming the Good News about the arrival of the Kingdom of G0d (1:14) and later preaching and casting out demons (1:39).  That is not surprising.  But what caught my attention was the story of Jesus healing a leper in Mark 1:40-45.  Compelled by compassion to act, Jesus reaches out to touch the leper, and heals him.  In a move that I always think strange, Jesus sternly warns the man not to say anything to anyone (such is the forcefulness of the original Greek phrase), but the cleansed leper disregards this and goes about speaking freely about what Jesus had done for him (1:45).

In English this may not be noteworthy, but the Greek made me stop and think, because the same word is used in all these instances: for the preaching of John the Baptist, for the proclaiming and preaching of Jesus, and for the loose lips of the man whom Jesus healed.  Now, it is not much of a stretch to see how “preach” and “proclaim” could both be acceptable translations of the same word– they are nearly synonyms in my mind — but “speak freely” would lead the English reader to believe that an entirely different style of communication is in view concerning the former leper.  It is not the translation that I disagree with, but rather the unclarity that these different translations foster.

In my mind, the words “preach” and “proclaim” have a very religious or professional air to them (while “speak freely” has a very enthusiastic and non-religious tone to it).  That is to say, preaching is reserved for Sunday mornings and clergy people.  And while I don’t think these events were restricted to Sunday morning, John was a prophet and Jesus a rabbi, so they certainly qualify as religious professionals.  My feelings about “preach” are through no fault of its own, but rather centuries of perpetuating the distinction between the rightful duties and responsibilities of clergy and lay people, a myth that the NIV here seems to perpetuate by observing this distinction in vocabulary, though I don’t know why.

The Greek word in question is κηρύσω (kay-roo-so).  It definition is: “to proclaim after the manner of a herald, always with the suggestion of formality, gravity and an authority which must be listened to and obeyed; or, to publish or proclaim openly something which has been done.”  John the Baptist proclaims with authority the coming of Jesus, Jesus proclaims with authority the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, and the healed leper proclaims with authority (because it happened to him) the reality of his healing.

This makes the leper just as much of a preacher as John the Baptist or Jesus. And we too, if we have tasted the goodness of God and seen his hand and Spirit active in our lives and the world, are just as much called to be preachers.  Our authority comes from what we have seen and witnessed (see 1 John 1:1-3), and all we need do is tell people what we saw and know to be true.  It isn’t complicated or only for the religious professionals, but for all who have been touched  by Father, Spirit, and Son.  Besides which, what we think of as preaching (Sunday morning instructions from the Word) is most often actually teaching.  In Mark 1:21, when Jesus is speaking in the synagogue on the Sabbath, Mark says he taught (1:21).  Now, you could argue that teaching might be for those who have invested time and perhaps money in reading, thinking, and being instructed themselves, in order to keep a church’s belief system pure.  But preaching knows no requirement other than to be a witness and to be changed by what you have seen and experienced.