Jesus Is Bigger Than Your Box
Mark 2:18-22
What’s it like to walk free again after years behind bars? Lee Horton and his brother Dennis know the feeling. They were convicted of robbery and murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. They always maintained their innocence. Back in 2021, after being locked up for a quarter of a century, they were granted clemency and released.
Here’s Lee Horton’s story:
I’m going to tell you honestly. The first thing that I was aware of when I walked out of the doors and sat in the car and realized that I wasn’t handcuffed. And for all the time I’ve been in prison, every time I was transported anywhere, I always had handcuffs on. And that moment right there was … the most emotional moment that I had. Even when they told me that the governor had signed the papers … it didn’t set in until I was in that car and I didn’t have those handcuffs on.
And I don’t think people understand that the punishment is being in prison. When you take away everything, everything becomes beautiful to you. … When we got out … we went to the DMV to get our licenses back. My brother and I stood in line for two and a half hours. And we heard all the bad things about the DMV. We had the most beautiful time. And all the people were looking at us because we were smiling and we were laughing, and they couldn’t understand why … And it just was that – just being in that line was a beautiful thing.
I was in awe of everything around me. It’s like my mind was just heightened to every small nuance. Just to be able to just look out of a window, just to walk down a street and just inhale the fresh air, just to see people interacting. … It woke something up in me, something that I don’t know if it died or if it went to sleep. I’ve been having epiphanies every single day since I’ve been released.
One of my morning rituals every morning is I send a message of ‘good morning, good morning, good morning, have a nice day’ to every one of my 42 contacts. And they’re like, ‘how long can (he) keep doing this?’ But they don’t understand that I was deprived. And now, it’s like I have been released, and I’ve been reborn into a better day, into a new day. Like, the person I was no longer exists. I’ve stepped through the looking glass onto the other side, and everything is beautiful.[i]
Religion leads to rules. Faith leads to freedom. Religion is my attempt to become acceptable to God – to be a “good person.” Faith recognizes that in my own strength I cannot do that, and accepts God’s salvation as a gift of grace. And then in faith I respond to grace with gratitude and cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in my life. Religion leads to legalism. Faith grasps ahold of grace and embraces transformation. In Galatians 5:1, St. Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” And Jesus, talking about himself, said, “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (Jn. 8:36). But Jesus didn’t just talk about it. He lived it. Turn with me to Mark 2:18-22.
This looks like a passage about fasting, but it isn’t. Jesus neither mandates it nor forbids it here. He’s simply using the situation he finds himself in to illustrate a deeper point about life in the kingdom of God. Mark begins by telling us that both John’s disciples – he’s talking about John the Baptist – and the pharisees were fasting. Jews in the Old Testament were only required to fast one day each year – on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Fasting on that day every year was a symbol of repentance in preparation for receiving forgiveness and cleansing as the high priest offered sacrifices in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. But by the end of the Old Testament, many Jews had taken to fasting at other times as well, commemorating significant tragic events in their history like Moses breaking the tablets of stone containing the Ten Commandments, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and the siege and capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
People sometimes fasted as an expression of repentance on their own, or in times of mourning and grief, or as an expression of their commitment to God, setting themselves apart as faithful to him. By Jesus’ day, the pharisees had taken to fasting voluntarily every Monday and Thursday as a sign of their commitment to the Law of Moses, and they made sure that everyone knew that they were fasting. For them, the really spiritual people fasted those two days every week.
Now, in the gospels, the pharisees are usually viewed in a pretty bad light. They’re one of the main enemies of Jesus. But in that day, the general population didn’t view them that they. They looked up to the pharisees. They admired people who were so disciplined in their approach to following God’s law. They admired the people who could live in ways they weren’t disciplined enough to live.
Kind of the way we admire the discipline elite, star athletes are known for, even in college. Division 1 college football and basketball players are surrounded by teams of professional strength and conditioning, dietary, and physical therapy professionals, plus the always present athletic trainers. The calories they burn every day, even when they aren’t exercising are tracked, as are the calories they take in. Their sleep time and quality are tracked. When the caloric output and physical stress put on their bodies gets too high, coaches are encouraged to go with lighter practices – maybe walk-throughs instead of full contact practices, to allow the athletes’ bodies to recover. These athletes have their physical and emotional stress, nutrition, and physical condition hyper-analyzed so that they will be in peak physical condition when it’s time to take the field or court again. Many of us say, “I couldn’t do that. But I really admire them for doing it. And I REALLY appreciate it when my team wins on Saturday afternoon. That’s the way people viewed the disciplined lives the pharisees lived. They weren’t looked down on. They were admired.
And they were fasting every Monday and Thursday. So were John the Baptists followers. But Jesus’ disciples weren’t. Once again, Jesus and his followers don’t fit everyone else’s expectations of what a true, committed Jewish rabbi who was trying to help the people follow the law of God would do. Jesus doesn’t fit into their box.
Now remember, the pharisees were passionate about God’s law. And they were passionate about applying God’s law to everyday life. That’s what they wanted to do, and what they wanted to help other Jews learn to do to. And that’s a good thing! The problem came when they started trying to control how other people applied God’s law to their lives. So God said, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Ex. 20:8-11). That’s one of the Ten Commandments.
So the pharisees took that and started to spell out exactly what people – and domestic animals that worked like horses and camels and donkeys and oxen – could and couldn’t do on the sabbath. Their teaching on everything was preserved in a document called the Mishnah. The Mishnah has 24 chapters just on keeping the sabbath. Instead of focusing on rest and relaxation and worshipping God, they focused on making sure that everyone followed the same rules every sabbath.
You see, legalism focuses on the outward behavior of others, and wants everyone to follow the same rules. The legalist judges the spiritual health of others by focusing on their external behavior, when they should be paying more attention to their own thoughts and attitudes and their own spiritual maturity. Faith focuses on the inner attitude of the self, making sure that my own heart and mind are in tune with where God has me, rather than on whether everyone is following God in exactly the same way. Yes, there are some things that need to be confronted in others. But ONLY after making sure your own heart and mind are clear before God. That’s why Jesus tells us “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Mt. 7:3-5).
Eugene Peterson was the Presbyterian pastor who wrote The Message paraphrase of the Bible. In his book, Traveling Light, he says, “There are people who do not want us to be free. They don’t want us to be free before God, accepted just as we are by his grace. They don’t want us to be free to express our faith originally and creatively in the world. They want to control us; they want to use us for their own purposes.”[ii]
So how does Jesus respond to the pharisees and their legalistic concern over whether or not his disciples are fasting like they are? Look at Vv. 19-20. Jesus uses the imagery of a wedding feast. And that’s significant imagery in the Bible, because a wedding feast is the biblical image for life in the kingdom of God in eternity. One of the biblical analogies for the church, the people of God in the world is what? The Bride of Christ, right? And he is the bridegroom.
And Revelation 19:6-9 depicts the final victory of God as … a great wedding feast. St. John says, “Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out, “Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure” – for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints. And the angel said to me, “Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are the true words of God” (Rev. 19:6-9).
The book of Revelation actually includes multiple genres of literature: especially epistles (those are the letters to the churches), apocalyptic literature, and prophecy. And neither apocalyptic nor prophetic literature require an exact literal reading. They are, by definition, figurative, although they are talking about very real events. But in human terms, the only way to describe the eternal and infinite to a temporal and finite humanity is with imagery. It neither rules out nor requires an exact literal interpretation.
And what does the imagery of a wedding feast point us to? Deep, loving intimacy and overflowing joy. Those are, and have always been, the core components of a wedding. Yes, we may cry at weddings, but they are tears of joy. A wedding is a joy-filled celebration of deep, loving intimacy. And at a feast … there’s more than enough, an abundance, for everyone. Yeah, even you. And that is the image Jesus chose to describe life with him in God’s kingdom in eternity.
Tears and mourning and sorrow and fasting have no place in the presence of the groom. But look closely at V. 20. Even then, early in his ministry, he was hinting at the truth, the reality, that he would be going away – he was hinting at the cross – and then they would again mourn. But the joy they were experiencing now, in his presence, was a hint of the unending joy we will all one day experience in his presence.
But Jesus doesn’t deny his followers the right to fast, living in this world, if we wish to do so. Jesus himself drew away to fast and pray. Fasting prioritizes feasting on God over feasting on food, and is a spiritual discipline designed to teach us to place the Kingdom of God in a place of highest importance in our lives, even over physically necessary things like food. And it’s a great way to determine what things of this world control and bind you. Because you can fast from far more than just food. You can fast from technology, from entertainment, from certain kinds of food or drink, even from talking during a silent retreat. It’s a spiritually healthy thing to do. And Jesus neither requires nor condemns it.
One author says, “Fasting makes me vulnerable and reminds me of my frailty. It reminds me to remember that if I am not fed I will die … Standing before God hungry, I suddenly know who I am. I am one who is poor, called to be rich in a way that the world does not understand. I am one who is empty, called to be filled with the fullness of God. I am one who is hungry, called to taste all the goodness that can be mine in Christ.”[iii]
What he condemns is using it, or any other spiritual discipline, as a measure of spiritual maturity, or to show everyone else just how spiritually mature you are. Which is exactly what the pharisees were doing. No, his point is, the kingdom of God is a kingdom of great joy and celebration of intimacy with God, not sorrow and grudging service.
And then he adds two more images – really one image in two different forms. Sewing repairing cloth with a patch, and putting new wine in old wineskins. The principle in both is the same. Clothing that has been washed and dried several times shrinks, right? I mean, they didn’t have polyester and rayon and all the kinds of cloth we have today. Natural materials shrink though. And in those days, if you patched a hole with new, unshrunk cloth, when washed the patch would shrink and tear new holes in the old cloth is was supposed to be repairing.
New wine wasn’t yet fermented, and the process of fermentation lets off large amounts of carbon dioxide. Old wineskins that had lost their ability to stretch would burst if new wine that still needed to ferment was put in them, and it would make a mess. New wine had to be fermented in new, pliable wineskins that could expand without bursting.
What’s his point? Jesus makes new. He doesn’t patch up the old. We cannot add Jesus to what we are already doing as some kind of patch or fix. Something new in the mix, but just a part of the whole. No, he renews and recreates. That’s why he calls entry into the kingdom of God a new birth or being “born again.” When human tradition replaces the truth of Christ as ultimate truth, when we’re more concerned with our traditions that we are Jesus, we aren’t living in the kingdom of God. We’re just trying to use Jesus as a patch, and that won’t work. And that won’t work. Legalism causes more damage than it fixes. We must keep our eyes on, and place our faith and trust in Jesus. Life in the kingdom of God isn’t about a list of rules that those who are “in” must abide by. It isn’t a system of do’s and don’ts. It’s a living, dynamic, growing relationship of intimacy with God through Christ. And in that kind of relationship, the Holy Spirit is at work, transforming us into the image of Christ. But let me promise you this: Jesus will NOT fit into YOUR box. He will not always meet YOUR expectations. He doesn’t intend to. Let us pray.
[i] Sally Herships, “Lee Horton Reflects On Coming Home After Years In Prison,” NPR Weekend Edition (4-11-21)
[ii] Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light: Modern Meditations on St. Paul’s Letter of Freedom (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishers, 1988), 67.
[iii] Macrina Wiederkehr, A Tree Full of Angels (HarperOne, 2009), p. 36
