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…
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