A (0:02)

Welcome back to our Bible study on the Gospel of Mark. Last time, we left off with Jesus healing the paralytic, first of his sins and then of his paralysis. And we saw that Jesus was enacting a new Exodus with this event. And he describes it, noting their hardness of heart. And he says, why do you say in your hearts? And then he goes on to show them, as we saw, so that you may know. And we saw how that was a refrain in the story of the Exodus with Pharaoh and Moses and that great confrontation. And now Jesus is the new Moses, and he's confronting a surprisingly new Pharaoh. The Pharisees and the scribes, by their doubting and opposing Jesus, they've put themselves in the place of none other than than Pharaoh himself. And so Jesus says, so that you may know, because they don't know God's ways and they don't recognize God's ways. And so for Pharaoh, he didn't recognize Yahweh. For the Pharisees, they don't recognize that God is Jesus, that Jesus is the son of Yahweh, and that he is enacting a new Exodus. And in this new Exodus, it's not the delivery from. From Pharaoh's soldiers, it's the deliverance from sin and the forgiveness of sins is going to mark the new and deeper liberation that Jesus new Exodus will usher in. And then he goes on and he says, but so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth. Now, this half of the phrase doesn't go back to the Exodus story. It goes back to a key prophet, the prophet Daniel. In Daniel, chapter seven, Daniel has a mystical vision of the heavens. And he sees that there will be a time of four kingdoms that will rule over Israel. But God will vindicate the people of God after they suffer a great deal. And he will send one like a Son of man, who will be the Messiah. And probably more than a messiah, because the Son of Man goes up to heaven and is presented before the Ancient of Days, before God the Father, who's described with a white beard. That's why we get God the Father with a white beard, thanks to Daniel 7. And he goes before the Ancient of Days. And the Son of Man receives from God the Father all authority and power and a kingdom that will last forever. So when Jesus says, so that you may know that the Son of Man has exousia, that Greek word for authority, that's exactly the word given to the Son of Man by the Ancient of Days. In other words, Jesus is saying the authority by which I forgive sins is a divinely sanctioned authority. And I am the Son of Man, who Daniel saw receiving all the authority of God and the kingdom from God. And that's by which I act. And so Daniel 7 is the backdrop. And that's why he says, so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth. And here's the twist to Daniel 7. The son of man in Daniel goes up into the heavens to receive authority. But Jesus is saying that now the Son of Man is on earth with the divine heavenly authority. So Jesus is on earth with heavenly authority. So the power of heaven is being unleashed in the midst of the earth. That's the point. And then, of course, the crowds respond with amazements and they glorify God, saying in verse 12, we never saw anything like this. Which echoes back to the idea of a new teaching and a new authority that we saw in chapter one. We never saw anything like this. And then he went out again beside the sea, and all the crowd gathered about him, and he taught them, and he passed on. And as he passed on, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax office. So this is Levi, whose other name is Matthew, the writer of Matthew's Gospel. And notice, Jesus passed by again, the same verb that we saw in chapter one, verse 16. And following with the calling of. Of Peter and Andrew and James and John, and the same thing, he passes by Levi and calls him. And he says to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him. So we saw the paralytic rise, and now we see a sinner rise to follow Jesus. Because every conversion is like a resurrection from the dead. And so that word for rise is a favorite word of the early Christians. They're using it all the time. It's charged with meaning. Because for the early Christians, the greatest event ever is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so, as you see people rise from paralysis or rise from a tax office, it's a metaphor for something more. Now, there is a great scene of this calling of Matthew that Caravaggio, the great artist during the Italian Renaissance, painted. And I have it right here, so you can see the calling of Matthew. It's in Rome. If you go to the Church of San luigi, which means St. Louis, who is the king of France. The French took care of this church. And there was a commission given to Caravaggio to do several paintings for the Great Jubilee Year 1600, when all these pilgrims would be coming. And there was a lot of Huguenot Protestants who had just converted back to Catholicism. And they were making pilgrimage to Rome. And so this jubilee year of 1600 was a great time. And the years around that time were a great time of reconciliation of these French Catholics who had left the Church and become Protestant and had now come back and reconciled with the Pope and with Rome. And so these commissions were in that church for all these formerly Protestant pilgrims to come back and reconcile with the Church. And so what do we have here in Caravaggio's painting? And Caravaggio was the greatest artist of his day, of his generation, but he always worked with theological advisors who helped, and we'll see some of that here. So Caravaggio was a master of. Of the play of light. He loved. In fact, you could kind of say Caravaggio is kind of like what Mark is as a dramatic narrator. Caravaggio is a dramatic artist. Caravaggio loves action and he loves drama. And he uses light as a character. Because the problem when you paint something is all the action is captured in a moment and it's still. And so what Caravaggio does to. To create action and activity in his paintings is he brings light and darkness as this contrast. And it's the light that puts energy into his paintings. And the contrast, the shadows and the darkness, is something that creates a sense of drama and action. It's kind of a visual action for us. So over here to the far right, we have Jesus, Notice the most subtle halo over Jesus. And you can see this painting in our workbooks. So in our Lectio workbook for this study, we have this image. And so you'll see Jesus. And Jesus is calling. He's reaching out, like he reached out to the leper. But this time he's reaching out to Matthew, the tax collector. And then you have to decide in the house of Matthew, in the tax collecting office, and you see money on the table. They're gathering, they're counting their money. Which one is Matthew? And there's a. You have to think about that. You have to enter into the scene which character is Matthew. And then, of course, we have a character right next to Jesus who is Peter. So Peter is right beside our Lord. And notice Peter's hand is pointing as well. So you have Jesus hand pointing, and you have Peter's hand pointing. In other words, Jesus leads the way, but Peter imitates and follows Jesus example. So we see Peter, who represents the church, who is also calling. And in San Luigi, Jesus and Peter are calling those Protestant Catholics to come back home, to be reconciled to the church. And notice, to get to Jesus, you have to go through Peter, that was a theologically very significant thing here at the time of the Counter Reformation, at the time of the Protestant Reformation. The idea is that, yes, you want to go to Jesus, but you go to Jesus through Peter, through the church. The church is to mediate and bring you to Jesus. And the church is to go out in Jesus name and call and summon the lost and bring them home. And so you have both the sense of Peter here, and we have these different figures. The figure who is Matthew is the figure in the middle. And notice he's pointing, Jesus is pointing, Peter's pointing, and Matthew's pointing to himself, saying, me, I'm sorry, you want me? You got the wrong guy, right? Matthew can't believe that Jesus is calling him. And here's the beautiful thing. Jesus doesn't call the perfect and the holy. Jesus doesn't call those who are equipped. He equips those whom he has called, Right? We don't have to be worthy. Thanks be to God, Jesus wouldn't have many disciples if they had to be worthy of him. We don't have to be worthy. We don't have to be perfect. We just have to answer the summons. When Christ passes by, we have to respond. When his grace reaches out for us and wants to grab us and. And summon us and invite us, we have to get up, we have to rise. As Matthew will rise from his seat and notice in the figures around Matthew, and we know, and this is before Matthew's answered the summons yet we know Matthew will answer the summons. He will rise from that seat. But notice the gravitational pull of the money. The further away from Jesus you go, the more powerful that money is. So the figure the furthest from Jesus has his head down. He doesn't even see Jesus. He's looking at the money, right? And maybe he's afraid. He's afraid to look at Jesus. He's afraid to hear the call. He wants to pretend he doesn't hear. He wants to pretend he doesn't see. Now, there's many fascinating features about this. Notice that the light is not coming from the window and there is the outline at the top, a subtle hint of a cross. Caravaggio is doing realism. The symbolism is hidden in the realism. This is not iconography, where the painting is the symbol and the symbol is front and center. Caravaggio wants you to put yourself into the scenes of the Bible, because art, according to the Council of Trent, which just happened, art has to serve prayer and meditation. So religious art is to help you enter into the scene and to meditate on it. And that's why the people are dressed like Italian Renaissance. Because the idea is you want to imagine this scene as if it was in your own day. And the light, though, is not coming from the window, the light is coming from behind. It's a divine light. And that divine light is on a trajectory that's enlightening Matthew to call him home, right, and notice Jesus hand. It's a bit odd the way his fingers are not pointed directly. They're kind of, you know, it's kind of a little bit limp. He's stretching out, but then his hand is a bit limp. That hand Caravaggio copied from another great work that just preceded him a generation before Michelangelo painted that hand for Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And it's when God the Father is reaching out to Adam, and Adam is reaching out, but his hand's a little bit limp, right? But the idea, Caravaggio's having a little fun for those who have eyes to see, right? They could see Michelangelo there, but he's showing that Jesus is the new Adam. Jesus is the new Adam. So it's a powerful scene here in that chapel. There's two other paintings of Matthew. There is the inspiration of Matthew that's right over the altar. And here, notice Matthew is primarily in black with a little bit of a red tunic, but he's primarily in black with even a black hat, right? Deep velvet black. And the next painting, after his conversion, where he's inspiring and writing the Gospel of Matthew, he's in orange and red on flame, on fire. His heart set a fire for Christ. It's really a beautiful. You see here, just as he's being called with black. And then in the next painting, as he's inspired by the Gospel, he's in oranges and reds like a flame. And then the third painting of Matthew is his martyrdom, where he's giving his life to Christ. And so it's a beautiful scene in San Luigi. It's a great church. When you go to Rome, you have to go to San Luigi. You have to go see these beautiful, extraordinary paintings of Caravaggio, which are showing the call and the summons of Jesus. And it's a beautiful painting about the call to conversion in the midst of our world, in the midst of our preoccupation. The light is there. A divine light is there. Subtle, but there. And God calls us. God calls us to follow him and will we follow. And Peter is there to mediate and to imitate Christ and to call out the sinners so it's a great painting for this beautiful scene. And Jesus summons to follow me. And then, of course, he's going to eat at table with tax collectors and sinners. And the scribes and the Pharisees are going to be scandalized by this. And they say, why does your. They say to the disciples in verse 16, why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners? So they're scandalized by who Jesus is eating with. We'll talk more about meals later on. But when Jesus heard this, he said, and those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners. And 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. Now, notice the question that's been going on in these two scenes. Two different episodes. Mark brings them together. But first, the Pharisees go to Jesus disciples and say, why does your teacher eat with sinners and tax collectors? They're trying to put a wedge between Jesus disciples and Jesus. And now they. They come to Jesus and they say, why do your disciples not fast like the disciples of John the Baptist and the disciples of the Pharisees? In other words, your disciples aren't living up to what you know, the kind of quality of discipleship that we're seeing with John the Baptist as well as our own disciples. So again, now they're trying to make Jesus critical of the disciples. This is the strategy of divide and conquer. What the Pharisees are doing by questioning and what the devil will do repeatedly is he wants to separate Jesus from Peter. He wants to separate Jesus from the disciples, Jesus from the church. This is the ploy of the devil to make it look like, oh, look, you can't have the church look at how broken and bad the church is. Can it really be associated with Jesus? And what we're going to see is Jesus will defend the disciples. And Jesus and his disciples belong together. Jesus and the church belong together. Now, in this question, why do your disciples not fast? Jesus responds. And here we get one of those great little sayings that I'm going to take as one of those interpretive interludes, as one of those key phrases or images that has a lot of interpretive power in the story of Jesus. Jesus is going to say, can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot Fast. Now, Jesus is alluding to a wedding feast, but he's also alluding to a custom that the Pharisees as well as John's disciples would have followed. And that is, a Jewish wedding lasted seven days because seven was the number of covenant, and marriage was seen as a covenant. Now, you'd celebrate a wedding for seven days. That's why, by the way, in the beginning of the Gospel of John, Jesus goes to a wedding, he brings his disciples, and quickly they run out of wine, right? Making an allusion to Jesus disciples, perhaps. But the idea is that feast would have lasted for seven days. So you got to have a lot of wine for a wedding feast, right? But during a wedding feast, two days a week, the Jews would fast. Since the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC, the Jews had a practice of fasting. And you can find this in the prophet Zechariah as well as in other places. But in Zechariah, you had the idea of fasting in memory of the destruction of the temple. And why do they fast? Because God's spirit left the Temple, and they're fasting because they're mourning the absence of God with his people. And so for the Pharisees, you would fast two days a week to remember and to do penance that God, his spirit has left the Temple before the Temple is destroyed. Now, wait a minute, the Temple is being built right now, right? Herod the Great was rebuilding the temple. It wasn't completed yet. And unlike Solomon's Temple, when it was complete, the Holy Spirit and this glory cloud came, the Shekinah filled the temple, and everyone could visibly see the spirit of God resting upon the sanctuary and upon the Temple. No visible manifestation of God's presence returning to the temple had been seen yet. So all the Jews of Jesus Day were waiting for the return of God's spirit in the temple. They had the temple, but it was vacant. And so Jesus is saying, well, remember, your disciples are exempt. When there's a wedding and the bridegroom is present, you can't fast. So if you're a Pharisee and you fast two days a week, but you're invited to a wedding feast, the wedding feast trumps the fasting rules. And you don't have to fast that week. So you were probably likely to take every wedding reception invitation you were given, right? It was a great little exemption from fasting. And so Jesus is saying, my disciples don't fast because the bridegroom is with them. And he's suggesting something powerful by that he is suggesting that he is the bridegroom. Now, In Isaiah, chapter 54, God describes Himself as the Redeemer of Israel, that he's going to come and redeem Israel. But he's not just coming as any Redeemer. And Goel is the Hebrew word for redeemer. It literally means kinsman redeemer. But he is not just kind of a distant kin. He is coming to Israel as Israel's bridegroom. That's how motivated he is to come as a Goel Redeemer. He's not coming as a distant nephew or uncle. He's coming as the bridegroom. And so in Isaiah, Jesus, God himself, Yahweh is described as the bridegroom who will come and search after his lost bride. And for Jesus, to use the imagery that his disciples cannot fast while they have the bridegroom, he is saying he is the bridegroom. In other words, he's saying for those who have ears to hear and know the prophecies of Isaiah, he's saying he is Yahweh. He's saying he is Yahweh. He's the divine bridegroom. That is the point Jesus is making here in an elusive way. He says the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day. And that's why the Christian tradition has fasting on Fridays, because that's the day the bridegroom was taken away. That's the day that Jesus was crucified. And for the Jews, they fast in commemoration of the destruction of the temple. And. And Christians fast in memory of the destruction of the true and ultimate temple. The temple being Jesus, body crucified on the cross on Good Friday. Now, Jesus goes on and talks about new wine. And you can't put new wine in old wineskins, lest the wineskins burst and they'd be torn asunder. Right? And so again, the idea of new teaching, new wine, something potent and new is here. And then in verse 23, we have a Sabbath again. And Jesus is going on the Sabbath, and they're making their way through a grain field. So we hear about wine, and now we're going to hear about grain. That's going to be something that Mark's Gospel likes to parallel. Wine and grain are something that's oftentimes juxtaposed. So it's a Sabbath. They're crossing on a grain field on the Sabbath. And his disciples began to pluck ears of grain. And the Pharisees seeing this, said to him, look, why are your disciples doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath? Notice they're trying to push Jesus away from his disciples, just like the question of fasting. And now it's a Sabbath, and they're plucking grain, which is a work of harvesting. So the Pharisees say, aha, we caught you. Why are your disciples doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath? Now imagine the scene. Do you think if they're cutting through a grain field, they're going off road? Jesus and his disciples, do you think they did that with the Pharisees? No. Do you think Peter and Andrew and James and John would pluck ears of grain with Pharisees spying on them, being right there with them? Of course not. So where are the Pharisees in this story? Spying on Jesus and his disciples. They are being pursued and followed and spied upon. The Pharisees are spying on Jesus and the disciples. And they jump out and say, aha, we caught you, you Shabbat breakers. And Peter's probably choking on the grain he's got in his mouth, you know. And then Jesus comes to the defense of his disciples. And notice, by the way, the word satan for the devil that was used in the beginning. The word satan is the Hebrew word for accuser. And so it is the work of the devil to accuse, to accuse, to accuse. And Jesus defends. He wants to defend us from the devil. He wants to defend his disciples. And it's a beautiful thing. And then Jesus says, have you never read what David did when he was in need and was hungry and those who were with him? And how he entered the house of God when Abiathar was high priest and ate from the bread of the presence, which is not lawful for any but the priest to eat. And also he gave to those who were with him. Now that's a reference back to First Samuel, chapter 21 and following. And in First Samuel 21, David is being pursued by Saul, who wants to kill him. And notice, by the way, Saul is the leader of Israel who's going against David, the Lord's anointed. Do we see the leadership of Israel pursuing Jesus? Yes. And David is accused of treason falsely by Saul. He runs and has to find provisions. And he goes to the town of the priests, and he goes to the priests, and he goes to Eviathar and to the priests, and he says, I need food. And they say, we have no bread here today except the bread of the presence. In other words, it was illegal to cook bread and bake bread on the Sabbath except For one group, the priests, the priests had to break bread because the rule in the. In the law was that the bread of the Presence had to be given every day. But the law also said you weren't to do cooking and to do work on the Sabbath. So Jesus taking this classic contradiction in the law, you can't work on the Sabbath. But the priests are exempt from that law because they're doing the liturgy, they're doing the Lord's work. And so the priests give David the bread of the Presence, which is only lawful for the priest to eat. But David was the Lord's anointed, and he's being persecuted. And so Jesus is saying, my disciples are able to pluck grain. He's giving his disciples priestly privileges. Because just as David and his men were persecuted and could eat the Bread of the Presence on the Sabbath, Jesus on the Sabbath and his disciples can eat the bread that's plucked from the grain. In other words, Jesus is saying that they have a priestly prerogative. And what's more, what happens in the story of David is that there's someone spying on David that day, named Doeg the Edomite. He spies on David and he goes back and reports this to Saul. Saul comes back, David's gone. But Saul slaughters almost all the priests except for one, Abiathar. And so the point here is Jesus is saying to the chief priests, have you never read the story about David? That's kind of a little dig. And then he's saying, you know, I'm doing what David did. So just as David had a motley group of men who followed him and were persecuted by the leaders of Israel, Saul, Jesus is the new David. And he his men are following him, and they're being persecuted by the leaders of Israel, the Pharisees and the scribes. And they have priestly prerogatives on the Sabbath because they're being persecuted and Jesus is the Lord's anointed. So Jesus is saying he's the new David, and his men are the new group of men who follow David, just like in the time of David. So then he ends by saying, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. And then he goes on, so the Son of Man is Lord, even of the Sabbath. In other words, God's divine law in the temple could trump the laws of the Sabbath. And Jesus as the Lord can now trump and overrule the those lesser rules for the sake of the Lord's anointed. And so Jesus has that power of exemption. So it's a powerful law. Now, in the next story, we're going to get another story of a synagogue and a Sabbath day, which kind of will bring that together. But we're seeing here the idea that for the sake of the bread, of the presence in the temple, the priest could violate the laws of the Sabbath. And Jesus has taken a priestly role in this sense, and we're seeing him that there's the new wine and that he is doing a new exodus. There's something radically new at work as Jesus works, and we're going to see that fulfilled in the next story as well.