Luke 5:27-39
The Calling of Levi
27After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. "Follow me," Jesus said to him, 28and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
29Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. 30But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, "Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and 'sinners'?"
31Jesus answered them, "It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."
Jesus Questioned About Fasting
33They said to him, "John's disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking."
34Jesus answered, "Can you make the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? 35But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast."
36He told them this parable: "No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. 37And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. 38No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. 39And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for he says, 'The old is better.' "
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I don't think we can emphasize enough verses 31-32, and what Jesus was doing in his ministry. It's not the healthy that need a doctor, but the sick. He did not come to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance. He went into their homes, he ate meals with them, he KNEW them. They weren't just projects he was working on. He cared about them, they were his friends.
The wineskins parable has been used in a variety of different ways by people today, and I'm sure some people have used it in a manner entirely different than what Jesus intended. I won't overanalyze here, but in some ways, Jesus is saying: Look, times they are a-changing. I'm here, I'm fulfilling those prophecies of old, I AM the kingdom of God. I'm obviously different than what was expected, and our time here is short.
posted by FTN @ 10:08 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
vv 31-32 are one of my favorite scripture passages. It goes so straight to the point - the church is not a 'Bless-Me Club' where the Righteous can hang out together, away from the sinners. No, the only way you get to be a Christian is by being a sinner first; and really, at bottom, you never stop being a sinner. By God's grace, you might get holier as you go along (it is devoutly to be hoped that you will), but, this side of heaven, the Church is pretty much just the local franchise of 'Sinners R Us'.
Now, I confess that the whole bit about the wineskins has always gone a bit past me. I understand about the patches - I've had it happen to me, where the 'new' patch fabric tears away from the 'old' substrate. But, for the life of me, I've never understood why new wine would be any harder on an old wineskin than old wine would be. . .
I mean, I get the metaphor. . . I think. If we're gonna be filled with the Holy Spirit, we've gotta be 'made new' ourselves on some fundamental level, or things just break down. . .
The only way you get to be a Christian is by being a sinner first; and really, at bottom, you never stop being a sinner. By God's grace, you might get holier as you go along (it is devoutly to be hoped that you will)...
That's a good point. Our churches need to find that line where we are readily acceptant of even the worst "sinners," yet at the same time, some churches have become so accommodating that they've forgotten that Jesus doesn't want us to "leave the way you came."
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