670px fix ripped jeans step 6
Have you ever wondered why we find so many speeches by Jesus in the gospels in which He groups together parabolic sayings that seem to have no relation to one another? Mark 2 is a good case in point. What do the children of the bridechamber who fast have to do with new wine bottles, old cloth on new cloth and David eating the showbread?
Well, that is not actually the main issue here. The main issue is not our lack of understanding of the immediate thematic context which causes us to assume that these parables are thrown together for no reason, but are almost non-existent understanding of the thematic context of the whole of the New Testament. That, in turn, causes us to assign puerile interpretations of the symbols within any parable itself.
Where “bottles” are rendered as “believer,” “wine” as “Holy Spirit,” David presumably eating showbread unlawfully about going to the Church for spiritual sustenance, or about why Abiathar was used for Ahimelech as the high priest.
We must ask ourselves why we have a preference for bromidic utterances not only from our expositors but from what is presumed to be a being of limitless intelligence and craft. Particularly knowing His ability and desire to hide, as the gospels abundantly show, the truth from the defiled hands of those who are in the occupation of trying to keep any conception of righteous religion strictly within the affections of fallen man.
On reflection, we really want to resist at all costs reducing all of these significations to one predominant topic that Jesus cared about. Instead, we want them to be handled by the motivational idea that, essentially, a religious symbol’s meaning must reflect what our own natural preference for content is over ultimate containers. Where content is the thing and container is what controls the presentation of that thing.
Our natural predilection is for thinking that “container” is apparent, “content” is what is hidden within it. We like to think that content is about what is inside and normally obscure and more difficult to see, but it’s not when this dichotomy is used in the relationship between object and its law, which is a far more genuinely religious idea. Here, spiritually, content involves concepts, ideas, beliefs, or any kind of mental object. Containers would then be more like a background field of information, memories, logic, and reason, which control those ideas and beliefs. Therefore, since our preference as fallen creatures is for pat answers, the easy and obvious over that which requires effort, apparent objects instead of mentally discerned ones, creedal statements instead of the biblical information which demands them, it is the lawful container of our religious ideas that dysfunctionally take the back seat in interpretation.
The “container” of Jesus’s parabolic symbols is never presumed to be consistent and have a singular dominant kind. It’s always, in our exegesis, completely determined by our false idea that content should receive the focus, forgetting that these parables are not physical things, but are spiritual things and meant to reside and be evaluated and understood in the mind. “Bottle” is a “believer” because the believer is an object content that can obtain to its own unique container or motivational information that controls our faith statement, which we like because it releases us from the responsibility of setting a universal container for the faith of all Christians. The “come as you are” slogan, in our practice, also means “come for whatever reason you so choose.”
I don’t ask you to do anything but try to determine if there was one thing that Jesus wanted to convey to us about what kind of container was to control all our ideas about what constitutes righteous religion and faith. I believe that this container is the accumulated information of the words of the prophets concerning the coming Messiah and the miraculous phenomenon of fulfilled prophecy of Messiah Jesus. All NT symbols are prophetic. They control, as a law, all our religious conclusions, and these prophetic scriptures are the container and the control of Jesus Himself as their apparent object, which Jesus was in the world to fulfill by the will of the Father.
Now, finally, what is this passage about in Mark? What is the interpretational container or, for that matter, the container of Christ, the “Word of God?”
What it’s about is what all the parables are about. It’s about itself, the Word of God, that being about the credentials of Jesus as Messiah. Not conclusive statements about Him. It is consistently about Jesus as Messiah by the prophets, by messianic prophecy. It is the 1700-year-old war of the Church on this distinction between Jesus’s narrow understanding of what is quintessentially Himself and scripture, and a squishy, open and general conception of it that worldwide, monumental Church edifices are built upon, that is at the root of our sin.
All we have to do is to remember that Jesus is this prophetic Word of God. They are interchangeable, Christ with objective truth, and we subconsciously fight this. When we say He is merely the Word of God as a general document in all its levels of quality, clarity and messianic import, what we are really saying is what we want is a Jesus that is open to unlimited interpretation according to any little corrupt affection of our fallen natures. To that nature, his container is unbounded biblically, which means essentially that he is, quite to the opposite of what He came to accomplish, dimmed, not the highly polished and sharp lens in which we are to see God.
When he refers to Himself, particularly the Son of Man, His messianic title, he is asking the hearer to confirm the main signification for that symbol, the miracle of Scripture. Not mainly that he is part human, or lowly like Ezekiel (used in 94 verses), but that he is the Prophetic Word. He refers to the prophecy of Daniel 7, and as its embodied equal. He is the Messiah of the Prophets, and that revelation, himself, is now to be the driver of all conceptions of righteous religion.
Daniel 7:13-14 (KJV) I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.
This understanding of Jesus is confirmed in Mat 26: 63-65 and Mark 14:61-63:
Matthew 26:63-65 (KJV) But Jesus held his peace. And the high priest answered and said unto him, I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven. Then the high priest rent his clothes, saying, He hath spoken blasphemy; what further need have we of witnesses? behold, now ye have heard his blasphemy.
We must remember that what his antagonists loved the most was religion for its ability to confer on them some personal benefit, and what they hated most was the idea that religion was to be exclusively motivated and controlled by Jesus, particularly the Truth, the pure scriptural fact and experience of the fulfillment of God’s will in history as foretold by the prophets. That they hated the idea of an actual appearance of God. They preferred a mere possible parousia sometime in the future, which future was the only thing they had prior to Jesus, but not meant to become an excuse for what is essentially a spiritual industry for self-aggrandizement.
This passage in Mark begins at verse 15:
“And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him.”
This is an image of those who were thought as living in a condemned state in relation to the Law, according to the above religion, but who know the scriptures and the promises of a coming deliverer and see there a solution for their status before God. Jesus Messiah will forgive sins, not only confirm them as in an estranged relationship with God. But their understanding of how this can happen is not because some guy is going around performing miracles that says that He will forgive sins. How could he if he were not the divine Messiah? They believed it because these miracles and this man were prophesied out of the very scriptures that the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Scribes deceitfully used to condemn Him. The indignation of the Pharisees and Scribes in the next verse is then one a contempt for the prophetic messianic scriptures, which is enfleshed in Jesus. This point cannot be missed.
Mark 2:17 When Jesus heard it, he saith unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
The indignant ask why Jesus eats and drinks with sinners?
“The righteous” are not those actually righteous, but who think they are. The sinners are those who think they are. This is called haughtiness vs. humility. Again, with respect to and over against this informational faith rule. This is a prophesied call of sinners, please keep in mind.
The calling of sinners to repentance is not just by Jesus, but by those prophetic scriptures, which call was prophesied. He can only call those that can hear the call. Those that can’t hear it are therefore those that prefer that religion of self-benefit, lies, greed, carnality and of prophetic failure and relegation. Jesus is, in fact, saying that the only sin that cannot be forgiven is a denial that He is that Person of messianic prophecy. Repentance is only possible, therefore, by confessed sinners, those who are both honest about their failure to perform the letter of the Law and those, in turn, living for the coming of the deliver who is the only one capable of forgiveness. Therefore that waiting is one of waiting for the Person who will forgive as well as waiting for His prophetic, informational entity to be realized so that there would be a certain reason for saving faith.
I urge you to go to first a page like this and read what you already know, the pedestrian, cultural take on these parables. That link is a compendium of many of our historical divines of old, but the modern one is actually worse even than these.
In v. 18-20, there is assumed the same relation between messianic prophecy (which is embodied by Jesus) and the disciples of those scriptures.
8 And the disciples of John and of the Pharisees used to fast: and they come and say unto him, Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but thy disciples fast not? 19 And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them? as long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. 20 But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days.
Jesus is asked by the haughty, the self- described righteous, why his disciples don’t fast like those of John.
John and his disciples were looking toward Jesus’ coming. The only way they can do this is through knowledge and faith in the Prophetic Word and trust in the faithfulness of God to perform it. They fast as an acknowledgment that this has been predicted but has not been accomplished.
The disciples of Jesus (the children of the bridechamber) do not fast because they perceive those scriptures that this Prophetic Word is now standing before them, that it has been accomplished. Jesus (and the prophetic scriptures) say that there will come a time when the Person of this prophecy will leave the earth (John 14). This was predicted in the OT and it is a prophetic utterance as He stated it. You fast when you don’t have the fulfillment of the prophets, but are waiting in hope for them, knowing that it brings Messiah and an end to the storm and stress of standing in wanting truth but not having it. When it is fulfilled, when Truth is here, you no longer fast. However, this brings another question: what happens when, in an important sense, “fulfillment” then withdraws?
A true lover of Truth waits for it. In that state they are incomplete. When Truth has come, they are complete. If Truth was then to withdraw it withdraws not what it has fulfilled, but, being what it is, the plan of redemption in a prediction by God, to bring in all the people who would believe it leaves that gap to fill up before the end of the redemptive plan comes, and those people are numerically and qualitatively ready to fill that waited Kingdom. Messianic prophecy is fulfilled and that prophecy withdraws to make a New claim and prediction on history upon which this particular faithful wait in the mourning. In his state mourning begins (Romans 8:23, 2 Cor 5:2) of that final redemption and its Agent’s return as King. This King that they mourn for is then not only a person but a complete fulfillment of the Word which is his biblical equivalent.
New Cloth
Since the subject of the Prophetic Word of Christ as the rule of faith has been introduced with the subject of the true and false believer in God, Jesus explains how this works when the Bridegroom comes to his own people for his own Kingdom as opposed to what happens if coming to a present prople of a corrupt religious state where such fulfillment and such a Kingdom and King is not wanted.
We then have this statement: Mark 2:21-22
No man also seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment: else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles: else the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles.
Many different takes on this have been offered, but the most obvious is rare
Thre are two figures here, New Cloth and New Wine. This is opposed to Old Cloth and Old Wine. These, in turn, relate to the Pharisees, Sadducees and Scribes, the Old, and the New are those believers only in the fulfilled Prophetic Word and its enfleshment, Jesus.
The “man” is ultimately Jesus Messiah here. The old garment is the faith of the Old Covenant believer and pice of new cloth is from the New truth garment of faith motivation of Jesus Messiah. Old faith garments, those which await renewal but are worn by unbelievers as if they were never to be replaced, develop in time rips, breakdown, damage as they age. It’s only supposed to be a provisional faith created in advance of the Truth for which it was intended. When the old garment inevitably forms tears due to age, which is uncertainty, doubt, and skepticism, there must be some solution. The problem is that you can only fix this obsolescence by a piece of the same old cloth, not a new piece, a new Truth since it is old. If you, the tear widens, meaning that a faith breakdown of what exists accelerates.
When that Faith object comes, the faith tailor, if you will, the Old Garment can only be replaced by a new one. If any tears to faith then occur, and faith dysfunction in the New Garment, it can only be fixed by a piece of the New Truth. These figures are set to illustrate that when Truth comes to call for its people, the Old people, those who will not accept such a King and a Kingdom of this Truth, are not fit for it.
This old to new as a demand of the New Truth, the fulfillment of Messianic Prophecy, is everywhere, most notably in John chapter 3 when Jesus told Nicodemus “you must be born again,” meaning that he is wearing an old faith garment and this is why he can’t recognize is Messiah, even when we stand before him. His faith motivation must be cast out for the New one, Christ and his Word. “Lifting up” Messiah for a religious leader is then lifting him up only by the Prophetic Word, not religion.
But the self-assumed job of the Pharisees was to make sure no new-fangled “piece” such as this, much less an entirely new faith garment, is going to be allowed to replace or applied to their old faith garments. If holes appear you keep using a piece from the same cloth. But the result in time is a ragged, ugly and threadbare covering that is only fit for the fire. And, yes, it was, historically, literally, thrown into the fire.
Wine Bottles
The cloth is flexible, soft and is worn openly, publically to cover sin, our distance from God, our nakedness. A bottle is hard, enduring and meant to tightly contain something. However, the bottle ages too. It becomes brittle and weak. Both cloth and a bottle are containers for what is inside, the spirit of a person. An individual spirit is a sinner but also a builder. One is far down on the relative ontological scale in comparison to God but is also one who fights against it in building up an external means of mining, explaining, presenting and building up the Truth that he has. one is a spiritual state and the other a spiritual work. Each is to display or contain externally, by profession and by learning and developing the faith, essentially a means a religious motivation as the main ingredient to a sinner’s spirit and the truth builder’s spirit. Bottles are like religious, spiritual Works, the structured, disciplined, systematic expressions of the faith motivations, and cloth is like spiritual faith confessions of that interal motivation. The outer confession of religion has to match what is inside in quality. If it does not and we speak of a righteous faith and its industry, it means that what is inside must be new, not old. If new, it won’t be able to cover that inevitable breakdown by obsolescence of faith tears or the coming futility and diminishing of meaning for real religious works.
What is taken away from this is that faith and the Old Testament scriptures have been fulfilled and Jesus Himself is one and the same as those scriptures. The “man” Jesus, the same which is expected by God to be the wine-maker of faith as was the tailor of the faith, Jesus of the prophets. New wine is robust, strong, effervescent, bursting with joy. But most importantly, again, it is the truth of the realization of the oracles in Jesus Messiah which now fills up religious faith, not more of the Law, or else it will only result in its shattering.
What happened, of course, was that the Old did disintegrate, both the cloth and the bottle, when the New Truth came as the faith ruler, Messianic Prophecy and its Fulfiller. But when you are dead-set on keeping them no matter what, you continue on with them living your faith only among piles of ruined garment and shattered glass.
David and the Shewbread
In the remainder of the Chapter, Jesus says that both He, the Person and the prophetic scriptures as His signification, are the Lords, the controllers, the creators and overseers of all religion, whether we wish this to be the case or not. The title “Son of Man” carries the dual meaning.
David and his men (1 Sa 21:2-6) are Jesus and His believers. David and his men are also those that understand that the accomplishment of the messianic mission, the type of which is David and all his doings as he flees from Saul as Jesus did from his Great Enemy, is superior to those things of the Temple which only look forward to the accomplishment of that mission. Part of that mission is to assure that stregnth remains to accomplish it, and so that bread is fair game. The shewbread only looks forward to the fulfilled Word of God, inferior to the real Word of God which is the Propheitc Word of Messiah which must come to the full. This is why it is permissible to eat it: its reason for existing is ready to be consumed and transferred to reality. But the notion of the Sadducees or Pharisees was that doing with the shewbread as “Abiathar” had done was unthinkable to them.
Jesus ends with this: Mark 2:27-28:
And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath.
The Sabbath is but a means for God to communicate to man some sublime truth. It came after man, not before him. Unlike the religion of the Pharisees, we are not made to be subject to it as to a god, blindly following its will over us. The purpose of it is to teach us about something greater. The Sabbath was instituted in effect as a prophetic symbol of what was to come, and as such it represents, as does Jesus, a prophecy of the Messiah. Jesus is the Sabbath, and the Sabbath is the rest from striving, labor and wresting for truth since it has now been settled for all time. David and his men are greater than the shewbread if he is a type of Messiah. Man is greater than the Sabbath and the shewbread if he is a believer in its fulfillment. Jesus is greater than them all if He created them to represent Him. And, most importantly for the Pharisees, the Prophetic Word of the Messiah is the greater in religion as a motivation than that which is based upon affection for tradition, creeds and slogans, religious sensibility and self, or any other biblical teaching about the existence and nature of God. If the Pharisees had this in mind, they would not have denied and crucified their Messiah.
The great thematic context for the New Testament is the messianic prophecy of Jesus Messiah. It’s not about old religious and insular objects, it’s about eternal transcendent information. You want truth? Toss out that old stuff and build a new container for the new Truth. If they had any fucntion before, it was only to point to this one, which is now come.
Othewise, we can still crucify Jesus, but its not so public a crucifixion as it was 2000 years ago.
Take a look at these:
When I Survey the Wondrous Nace, part 1: Passing by Nehushtan
Romans 1: Apostasy of the General Revelation of the Gospel
This website uses cookies.