New Wine - New Wineskins (Matthew 9.14-26)

Introduction

Stephen Lungu is the oldest son of a teenage mother from a township in Zimbabwe.

She was trapped in a difficult marriage to a man more than twenty years her senior. She dealt with her struggles by drinking heavily.

One day, when Stephen was three years old, his mother took him, his brother and baby sister into town.

Saying she needed to go to the toilet, Stephen’s mother left him holding his sister in the busy town square, while his brother John played on the ground.

Two hours later she had not returned. Their mother had run away, leaving the three children in the reluctant care of an aunt.

By the age of eleven, Stephen too had run away – preferring to live on the streets.

Growing up, Stephen developed a strong bitterness against God. As a teenager he was recruited into one of the urban gangs, called the Black Shadows, which carried out violence, theft and destruction on the streets of Zimbabwe.

When a travelling evangelist came to town to speak to thousands of people about Jesus in a large tent, Stephen went to firebomb the event. He carried a bag full of bombs. He wanted to attack the event because he hated God.

As Stephen awaited the moment for his attack, Shadrach Maloka, a South African evangelist, took to the stage and announced that the Holy Spirit had warned him that many in the audience may die soon without Christ.

Astonished, the Black Shadows thought someone had figured out their plan. Stephen was captivated by the preacher.

The speaker’s words convinced him about his sins and drew him into an encounter with Jesus. He experienced God’s presence. He heard about God’s grace and peace.

Stephen staggered forward to the stage, grabbed hold of the speaker’s feet and began to sob. That evening, he became a follower of Jesus Christ.

I’ll tell you what happened next at the end of my talk, because there are two amazing twists that follow. But I start with that because it is a modern-day example of where we left off last Sunday. 

If you were here then, you might remember that we left Jesus partying at Matthew’s house with a pretty colourful crowd.

People with a shady past and a dodgy present; a bad reputation, and all of them alienated from the synagogue.

And the self-righteous do-gooders, known as Pharisees, see all this going on and they thoroughly disapprove.

They ask Jesus, “Why are you eating and drinking with sinners?” What do you think you are doing having a good time with this low life scum? What will the neighbours think? This isn’t a good look.

As we travel through Matthew’s Gospel together, we’re going to see that the gap between Jesus and the religion of his day just gets wider and wider with each chapter.

What starts as a curiosity and a novelty for them, this new preacher who seems to have miraculous powers, becomes increasingly, in their eyes, an irritation and a nuisance and a defiance of their authority.

And this clash between the new and transformational of Jesus and the old and impotent of dead religion is the dominant theme of the passage of Scripture we arrive at today.

Here’s what it says in Matthew 9.14-26.

Then John’s disciples [this is John the Baptist] came and asked [Jesus], “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus answered, “How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast. No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment, making the tear worse. Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

While he was saying this, a synagogue leader came and knelt before him and said, “My daughter has just died. But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” Jesus got up and went with him, and so did his disciples. Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment.

When Jesus entered the synagogue leader’s house and saw the noisy crowd and people playing pipes, he said, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. After the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took the girl by the hand, and she got up. News of this spread through all that region.

Prayer…

Old Questions – New Answers

So this tense stand-off between Jesus and the religious powers-that-be leads, in v14, to a question from John the Baptist’s followers.

John the Baptist, we met him in chapter 3, wears coarse clothes. He has a rudimentary diet. He lives out in the wild. He’s a proper rugged kind of guy. He puts himself through no end of inconvenience for God.

“Why aren’t you a bit more like John?” they ask. Religion should be about sobriety and self-denial. You don’t seem to take it seriously; it’s all parties and having a good time with you. It doesn’t feel right.

John’s disciples really take the fun out of fundamentalism.

But, tellingly, they don’t seem to really know why they fast. “How is it,” they ask, “that we and the Pharisees fast often?” Typically for ultra-religious people, they engage in all kinds of pious activities and repetitive rituals and they don’t have the first idea why. 

The law of Moses actually only legislated for one fast a year, on the Day of Atonement. Yom Kippur. But John’s disciples are so earnest and devout they go way beyond what Scripture calls for and they make a regular rule of it.

The Pharisees do too, and they brag to everyone about how they fast twice a week. 100 times more that the Bible says. Oh, everyone knows how holy they are…

Does it bring them closer to the Lord? Does it make them godlier, more prayerful people? Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit? Joy and kindness and patience… Or does it just make them look holy and make everyone else feel small?

So why doesn’t Jesus go for this austere way of life? Jesus responds to this question by talking about weddings.

I went to a wedding last month. Our youngest son Ben got married to the beautiful and intelligent and gifted Emma. There they are leaving the church under a hail of confetti. It was easily the happiest day of my year so far.

First Century Jewish weddings were in another league though. They totally rocked. It was open house for the whole village. There were no invitations, because everyone was invited by default.

It was free for all comers. The whole shebang was paid for by the bridegroom’s family and it was immense fun; eating and drinking, entertainment, hilarity, laughter and dancing.

And it lasted for days on end, often a whole week. It was special; such feasting and merrymaking would be a very rare experience for poor people.

What a fantastic picture that is of the kingdom that Jesus brings! Jesus hints that we can save the tears for Good Friday, but for now, with life-changing healings, deliverance and forgiveness, this was no time for hair shirts and flagellation. 

Sometimes, the things Jesus talks about gives you a window onto his living standards and v16 is a good example of that.

“Nobody sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch will pull away from the garment making the tear worse.”

People with money threw their old clothes away and replaced them new ones. But the poor had to make do and mend. Jesus knew from experience that new material patched onto old clothes would shrink in the wash and then pull on the tear, making it worse than before.

But this isn’t a needlework lesson. What is he saying? Jesus is saying that he hasn’t come just to patch up the tired old regime of ‘do this, do that.’

He is bringing something totally new – and, in fact, incompatible with a religion of works.

People categorize Jesus as a religious leader. But Jesus is not about religion at all.

Religion is like me turning around to my children when they were young and saying to them,

“OK kids, here is a list of things that are important to me so I hope you’re taking notes. Rule #1: You tidy your room to an immaculate standard every day. Rule #2: you get top grades at school. Rule #3: you do not answer back. Rule #4: you clean your teeth three times a day. And if you obey these simple rules, then I will be your daddy. And if you fail at any point, I won’t love you anymore and I will leave you.”

My kids always knew – at least I hope they did – that they could, in theory, have water balloon fights in the house, they could put scrambled eggs in my bed, they could make paper airplanes out of all the pages of my precious books and write swear words on the kitchen walls with ketchup...

To be fair, they also knew that I wouldn’t be happy about it. And that there would be consequences that would really spoil their day. But crucially, they knew I would never, ever, not be their daddy any more or stop loving them.

But Jesus wants to make absolutely sure that people understand the difference between him and religion, so he talks about wine and wineskins.

In those days, they didn’t have bottles. They used goatskins as containers because the skins had two important qualities; 1) they were watertight and 2) they stretched with age.

When wine ferments, as the sugar turns to alcohol, it bubbles up and expands so its receptacle needs to expand as well – otherwise it bursts and you lose your wine.

A new wineskin (like the lighter coloured one on the left in the picture) is quite elastic and supple, so it doesn’t matter that the fermentation process stretches the skin.

But as the skin stretches, it becomes more brittle until there’s no more “give” in it. If you put new wine in it then, it will burst open.

Here’s the point: the Pharisees with their old religion are like fully stretched, used wineskins. Their hearts have grown hard and inflexible and resistant to the new thing Jesus brings.

The Law of Moses that the Pharisees love so much is actually very good. It’s God’s word.

Like an echo cardiogram scan that shows us if we heart disease, the Old Testament Law shows us we need God. It is vital for an accurate spiritual diagnosis of our lives. But a scan, helpful as it is, can only tell you what’s wrong with you.  

Unfortunately, we need more that a heart scan; we need a heart transplant. Echo cardiogram scans cannot operate on you with a scalpel and make you healthy again.

Spiritually, we need open heart surgery. And that’s what Jesus came to do; give us a new heart.

Are you going to let Jesus soften your heart this morning, and change your cold, hard, heart of stone for a warm, generous heart of flesh?

Jairus

You know what it’s like when you’re busy explaining something important, and someone suddenly interrupts you? Welcome to Jesus’ world. Just as he is busy getting this vital teaching across, someone butts in and tells him that a little girl is terribly unwell.

If you have ever been a parent to a very sick child, you know just how worrying it is. You can’t think, you can’t sleep. You feel sick with anxiety, don’t you?

So we really feel for this synagogue leader, don’t we? Matthew doesn’t name him, but we know from the Gospels of Mark and Luke that he is called Jairus.

His little girl has been ill for some time. Nothing changes. He gets a second and third opinion. No improvement…

Why her? Why us? What’s wrong with her? Why isn’t she getting better? Why can’t the doctors fix it? Why isn’t God answering my prayers? Why this silence?

And as he watches her getting weaker and weaker, paler and paler, thinner and thinner, all the life draining out of her, he feels hopeless. “It’s no good. Nothing is working. There’s nothing I can do now.”

Jairus finally decides to go to Jesus to ask him to intervene. It’s his last hope. But it’s also his best hope. Why do we so often turn to Jesus last of all?

But by the time he finally gets to Jesus, she’s dead. It seems to be all over. What, after all, is more final than death?

But amazingly, Jairus says, v18, “But come and put your hand on her, and she will live.” What faith!

Jesus, of course, agrees to go, but - yet again - he gets interrupted on the way.

The Woman with Bleeding

This time it’s a woman with a gynaecological complaint. She must be low on iron, anaemic and exhausted.

Her menstrual bleeding never stops. Matthew says it’s gone on for 12 years. Just think of the fatigue, the attrition, the sense of being ground down.

And worse still it’s a condition, in her world, that pushes her to the margins of her society. People avoid her.

But she says to herself, “if I just touch the edge of his clothing, I will be free from my suffering.” And she does, and she is.

Again, it’s a moment of amazing faith in stark contrast to the formalism of sterile religion.

Religion says, “Perhaps God will love me if I just perform a bit better.” Faith says, “No! God loves me so much already. Because the Bible says so.”

The Bible says, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, [that means when we were still all over the place, when our lives were a mess - think about your life as low as you’ve ever been… it was then that] Christ died for us.”

Religion says: “Maybe if I do well enough and become a better person, then God will love me.

That’s like saying, “If I can just make myself clean enough, I might earn the right to take a shower.”

But faith says: “No! The shower is waiting. I just come as I am. God already does love me.”

And this woman’s faith here teaches us a profound lesson: you can be near Jesus all your life, but at a safe distance. You can be around church for years, but never reach out and touch the Lord.

Is today your day to come out of the shadows, and reach out and touch Jesus in faith?

Jairus’ Daughter

By the time Jesus gets to Jairus’ house, news of the little girl’s death has spread.

A dignified silence and discreet wiping away the tears when someone dies are what we do here. But that was seen as terribly disrespectful and bad-mannered in that culture.

Loud and emotional wailing were what you did in the Middle East. And tragically, as we’ve seen this week, it still is.

So Jesus arrives and there’s all this racket going on. Mourners are wailing and howling and beating their breasts and pouring dust on their heads and playing mournful dirges on flutes. In those days, and in that land, you hired people to do this.

That’s why they stop crying so quickly and begin to laugh when Jesus says, v24, “Go away. The girl is not dead but asleep.”

With Jesus, it’s never hopeless, there is promise, there is power, there is always the possibility of grace breaking in and changing everything.

If you feel utterly powerless and without hope or afraid or anxious, or confused or bewildered – and some of you might well feel that way today – look at your problem from Jesus’ point of view. Try and see your life through Jesus’ eyes. It’s a great view.

Jesus simply goes to the girl, v25, takes her by the hand, and lifts her up! The noisy crowd in Jairus’ house thought it was all over.

It’s never too late to ask the Lord to do something new in your life. Even when it seems too late for anyone else to help, the Lord can change everything with a word.

Name a situation that looks hopeless to you. It’s not hopeless for God. Nothing is impossible for God. He just says a word and vast galaxies, light years across, with billions of stars, spin into being from nowhere, all of it made from nothing.

He brings healing in broken relationships that seem beyond repair (and indeed are beyond repair without a miracle from God).

He brings release from addiction where all rehabilitation programmes fail.

He brings forgiveness and restoration that heal the deepest and most painful emotional scars.

Ending

I began by talking about Stephen Lungu from Zimbabwe.

The morning after he gave his life to Christ, he presented himself at the local police station and confessed all his crimes. The desk sergeant looked at the long charge sheet, listened to his story and released him without charge.

Boarding a bus with the morning commuters, Stephen felt so happy that he started to tell all the other passengers on the bus about what had just happened in his life. Ever since, he has been telling people about Jesus.

Stephen now speaks as an evangelist all over Africa.

At an event a few years ago, a woman came forward wanting to follow Jesus. It turned out it was his own mother who had abandoned him all those years ago.

This is Jesus. This is amazing grace. This is hope for the hopeless. 

This is what Jesus always did. And this is what he still does.

Let’s stand to pray…

Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 15 October 2023

Get Up! Follow Me! (Matthew 9.1-13)

 

Introduction

For the benefit of those of you who are joining us today, since July, we’ve been reading through Matthew’s Gospel together. This is basically an eye-witness account of Jesus’ life, and especially the last three years or so of it.

And what we’ve been seeing, particularly over these last few weeks, is that Matthew, writing his Gospel, has been very eager to highlight the authority that Jesus has.

Chapters 5 - 8 expressly mention the note of authority to what Jesus’ says, his authority over disease and sickness, over nature itself and over the dark realm of the occult.

As we step into chapter 9, Matthew’s going to tell us that the authority and dominion of Christ extends still further. So let’s read chapter 9.1-13.

Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town. Some men brought to him a paralyzed man, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.” At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, “This fellow is blaspheming!”

Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, “Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “Get up, take your mat and go home.” Then the man got up and went home. When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to man.

As Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” he told him, and Matthew got up and followed him. While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Prayer…

Well, I’ve got just two points this morning; number 1 – get up! And number 2 – follow me! (meaning, of course, follow Jesus).

1. Get Up

This first story we read today tells us that Jesus has authority over sin.

I once had a computer that started to run slowly and crash unexpectedly. It got more and more unstable. I was told that the software on it was infected with a virus. It had to be dealt with before it could operate efficiently again.  

That’s what sin is like. A computer virus that makes everything go wrong. Sin is everything we do and say that falls short of God’s perfect standard and it just makes everything in life turn sour.

But Jesus is like antivirus for people; he has what it takes to say to someone, “your sins are all forgiven. It’s like a factory reset; now, you can function well again.”

The problem in Jesus’ day is that the powers that be make it quite clear that, in their view, Jesus does not have the right to forgive sins.

Imagine walking into a Category A prison like Franklin or Belmarsh. Those places are high-security buildings, populated by people doing time for murder, firearms offences, violent robbery, terrorist attacks, rape and drug trafficking.

Imagine you go in and say to inmates there, one by one, “You’re not guilty anymore, your conviction has been quashed, your life sentence is cancelled, and I am granting you today an unconditional pardon and immediate release; come this way to collect your belongings, you are free to go.”

What would the governor and prison officers say about that? I know exactly what they’d say, and it is not the sort of vocabulary you hear in church very often. 

Because it’s not your gift to bestow a royal pardon. You don’t have the power to do that. It would be dangerous if convicted criminals were allowed to walk free just because you or I said so.

And this is precisely what the highly qualified religious leaders of Jesus’ day think about him saying to people, “your sins are all forgiven.” 

Jesus has no proper qualifications. He never went to theological college. He hasn’t got a doctorate in theology, but he doesn’t need all that. 

In v8 people marvel - not at the prestigious university on his CV, or the many letters after his name - they are awed by his authority. He has what it takes to change lives - and that’s what people want.

The teachers of the law watch Jesus forgive the sins of a paralysed man and they say, “Hang on, what’s this about? He says he can forgive sins? How can that be right? Only God can do that. Who does this nobody from Nazareth take himself for?”

And then Jesus heals the paraplegic, who then slowly gets to his feet and walks off with his mat, and people say, “Oh, OK.”

Here’s how this scene is depicted in the TV series The Chosen.

Isn’t it sad, indeed tragic, that instead of applauding what Jesus does in this poor man’s life, the religious people criticise it and find fault. 

Unfortunately, cynicism and jealousy are attitudes that are common in religious circles today. 

These teachers of the law have the attitude, “We’re good, you’re bad. We’re the teachers of the law. You’re the learners of the law. You have the needs; we have the solutions. You have the questions; we have the answers.”

I’m OK, you’re not OK. We are literally holier than thou.

And notice, they don’t come with an open mind, curious and inquisitive. Like many people in our society, religious and otherwise, you meet them every day, they have already made up their minds, they have shut their hearts, they are totally unreceptive to the idea that their views about Jesus might be wrong.

Have you perhaps closed your mind? Did those testimonies before the baptisms make you wonder? What if there’s more to all this than I previously thought?

Jesus doesn’t let prejudice and narrow-mindedness set the agenda; he just focuses on the person before him.

“Take heart son,” he says, (v2), “your sins are forgiven.” No other religious leader in the entire history of the human race ever said that. Buddha didn’t. Krishna didn’t. Mohammad didn’t. Nor does the Dalai Lama or the Chief Rabbi.

Other religious figures tend to say things like, “You need to bathe in this sacred river, you have to sacrifice this animal, you’ve got to visit our holy shrine, you must fast every day for a month, or cover your head, or suffer and get reincarnated until you purge your soul. Somehow, you have to make yourself good enough to earn it.”

But Jesus just says, “You are forgiven, because I say so.” This is what we call grace. Being forgiven and welcomed into God’s family is shockingly simple.

To become a Christian and get your past record wiped clean, whatever it is you’ve done, is almost ludicrously straightforward.

There’s no need for any elaborate ceremony, no religious palaver, no long-winded litany, no prolonged self-flagellation, no great sacrifice, no intensive study programme, no weighing your good deeds against your bad deeds, no requirement to go off and slay dragons, no sweating for centuries in purgatory… we just come to Jesus, as we are, empty handed. 

And when we do, we find he has already turned towards us. And it’s done. And it’s free. There is no long, nervous, agonising wait while God goes off to consider his verdict. His mercy is instant.

Whenever you feel dirty and guilty, and ashamed, and defiled, you can go to Jesus in simple faith and he’ll make you new again.

In fact, so new, Jesus calls it being “born again.” There’s a new you. That’s what the 4 who were baptised today are so excited about. 

Jesus says to this man, “Get up.” Stand up. It is a visible, physical outward response to what God had just done inwardly in his heart. That’s exactly what the 4 who were baptised today have done.

Is it time for you perhaps to stand up and be counted?

2. Follow Me

As Jesus goes on from there, Matthew writes about an encounter that changes his life forever. We’re in Capernaum, Jesus’ adopted home town.

Matthew (v9) is the man in charge of the inland revenue booth there and people have to line up and pay their poll tax.

How do you get to be a tax man in Jesus’ day? You put in a bid to the Roman authorities and the contract goes to the highest bidder.

Yes, you actually pay for the privilege of being the most unpopular person in town, but you recoup your investment in no time because you work on commission and you get rich quick by ripping people off for more than they actually owe.

It’s a racket. It’s naked corruption. It’s an open secret. Everyone knows it. But Rome doesn’t care. As long as Caesar gets his money they aren’t bothered.

So people queue up to pay their tax to Matthew at his booth, and they screw their faces up with resentment. They hate him.

Their hard-earned money pays for all Rome’s squalid excesses. Caesar’s drunken orgies and pagan entertainment is all funded by their taxes and it makes them upset.

This is why tax collectors are all shunned as traitors and automatically excommunicated from the synagogue. Even their families disown them.

There’s little doubt that Matthew will have heard about Jesus before. Jesus has already done sensational things in this area as we saw in chapters 4 and 8. Word will no doubt have got around.  

Nevertheless, what happens next is totally out of the blue. No one expects it: Jesus walks by, turns and looks at this crooked, money-grabbing ratbag and says, “Matthew, come with me.”

Here’s another clip from The Chosen.  

Verse 9 could say that Jesus asked him, or Jesus invited him, but it doesn’t. It says Jesus told Matthew to follow him. This is no polite request; it’s a summons. And yet another proof of Jesus’ authority right there. 

Did you know that God loved you long before you ever even thought about him.

It’s not that people just decide to get up and follow Jesus one day as if it all depends on our initiative.

That’s what it feels like to us, but the truth is that behind the scenes, before we were even half aware of any spiritual reality at all, God already knew us, and loved us, and chose us.

He drew us to himself and gave us the gift of faith. Of ourselves, we are totally unable to respond to God; without the grace of God, we are spiritually lost.

“It is by grace you have been saved, through faith – and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God – not by works, so that no one can boast.” (Ephesians 2.8-9).

Matthew gets up. He leaves his tax ledger and his piles of coins on the desk. All that was once so important to him; the wealth, the power, the bodyguards, the luxurious lifestyle, that’s over.

His security guy, dressed in his military uniform, is saying, “Hey, wait! Where do you think you’re going? What about all these people in the queue?”

But Matthew doesn’t hear him. He hands in his keys. He doesn’t even know for sure where this will all lead; he just knows he’s never going back.

Have you ever walked away from an old way of life, to follow Jesus? If you haven’t, you should do it today! Nothing is more exhilarating, more freeing, more thrillingly audacious than that.

The next scene is at Matthew’s house. Probably, given his wealth, a prestigious mansion in the posh end of town. He has been with Jesus for just a few hours, or maybe a couple of days, but already he’s learning that following Jesus means accepting his agenda from now on.

Jesus says, “We’re having a party tonight – and, congratulations, you’re hosting.”

That’s quite a big deal. Matthew’s got to tidy his place up and get it ready. He’s not used to doing this; he’s hardly got any friends, remember, because of his job. He has to go out and buy food and drink and napkins.  

Then everyone turns up. He has to put up with people spilling red wine on his Persian carpet. Some idiot drops oily hummus on his nice sofa. Someone else neglects to flush the toilet.

Verse 10 says, “many tax collectors and sinners were there.” Some are blacklisted like Matthew and the other tax-gatherers. Others are probably people who lead a notorious lifestyle. It’s a pretty motley crowd. The one thing they have in common is that they’re all excluded from the synagogue.

But Jesus breaks all the rules. He goes out of his way to mix with some pretty colourful people; call girls, alcoholics, petty thieves, street rats, lap dancers, pimps, pickpockets, opium addicts, bandits... 

Some of them need to go a bit easier on Matthew’s fine cru Chateauneuf du Pape. Some dodgy looking teenagers in the living room are helping themselves to some of Matthew’s little ornaments.

It’s messy. Things often get messy when Jesus is about. It’s never boring that’s for sure! But Matthew is all in.

But Matthew welcomes everybody with all their chaos and their bother and their noise and he says, “make yourself at home; come and meet Jesus.” And that’s how lives get changed. This is how God works.

But some people are outraged and offended. The establishment don’t get it.

They say to Jesus, “Why are you associating with the riff-raff? You’re supposed to be a man of God! We think it gives the wrong impression.”

And there’s Jesus, completely at ease. Not because he moves to the level of sinners and affirms their godless way of life. But because at last they see, in him, a way out of the mess they’ve made of their lives.

And notice, this is really telling, the people criticising Jesus don’t think that they’re sinners. In v11, it’s “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Sinners is other people. Whenever people go religious, they start to think that others are worse than them. Holier-than-thou…

Interestingly, Jesus doesn’t actually disagree that these messed-up people are sinners. They do have sin in their lives and Jesus doesn’t make excuses for it or play it down or make light of it. 

In fact, he actually concurs with the religious Pharisees. “Yes, these people need a doctor. Definitely. I agree with you, they really have a lot of sin and brokenness and disorder in their lives. But don’t you Pharisees as well?” 

Jesus says, v12, “It is not healthy people who need a doctor, but the sick… I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Jesus didn’t come to run a holy club for the respectable and upstanding. He came to heal broken hearts, mend broken lives, restore broken families and rebuild broken communities.

Jesus went to the religious people, the Pharisees - and he loved them - and then he told them the truth about who they were. 

And they replied, “How dare you!” They hated him, they tried to trap him, they argued with him, they plotted against him, they went on to arrest him, they fixed his trial, and in the end they got him crucified. 

Jesus went to the messed-up people too; the loose women, the drunkards, the tax collectors and petty criminals - and he loved them too - and he told them the truth about who they were as well. 

And they said, “You know what? You’re right, our lives are a wreck. How are we ever going to get out of this mess? We need to change but we just never seem to get out of the hole we’re in. Is there anything that can be done? Can anyone help us? Can you help? You can? Great!” they said.

And Jesus brought transformation every time.

Ending

“Get up!” It’s a command. “Follow me.” It’s a challenge.

As we end, in the same way that Jesus said to the man in the story, “get up,” some of you are going to get up out of your chair this morning and make a response to what Jesus is calling you to do.

And as Jesus said to Matthew, “follow me,” he says it to us too. And most of you here have begun to do that already, but perhaps some have begun to hesitate a bit. Whatever is holding you back, leave it all behind this morning.

Today, Jesus offers a totally brand-new start to everyone who comes to him and humbly asks for it.

Let’s stand to pray and respond…

Sermon preached at King's Church Darlington, 8 October 2023