Gooding, David: 8 - Christ and the Authorities

At some very late hour last night, we began in a somewhat hasty and disorderly fashion to look at the third major section of the Gospel of Luke. This afternoon, we must come back and consider it in somewhat more detail. The third section of the Gospel of Luke, as I would understand it, begins in chapter five, verse one, and proceeds to the end of chapter six. I suggested last evening that these two chapters stand together to give us an account of our Lord's way with sin and sinners. The evidence for such a claim is that throughout these two chapters, you will at the humble, at the humble level of word study, you will see that the words sin and sinners recur very frequently. Then, of course, more outstandingly, it is chapter six in this section that gives us Luke's counterpart to Matthew's Sermon on the Mount. Scholars have argued among themselves as to whether that passage in chapter six, eh, that begins at verse twenty and proceeds to the end of the chapter, is the same sermon that Luke records in his chapters five, six, and seven. People have noticed, of course, immediately the difference in quantity in what Luke here records. Matthew has three chapters given over to our Lord's Sermon on the Mount. Luke has simply thirty verses. So that Luke's, uh, uh, account of our Lord's mo- formal moral teaching is much shorter than Matthew's, and necessarily leaves out a great deal of what Matthew records. We do not need to stop to s- uh, settle that question. Other scholars have suggested that our Lord taught the same truth on many occasions, in different proportions and at different lengths, as do preachers today, repeating the lessons that they have learned and giving them on different occasions, in different amounts, and in slightly different order and words. But in addition to, and so in that connection, some people say that Matthew gives us the account of our Lord's preaching on the mountain. Luke has him giving his, uh, the Lord teaching on a plain somewhere. It is not exactly the same occasion. The next difference we notice is the different place that it is given by Luke in his narrative. Matthew gives us our Lord's moral teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in his chapters five, six, and seven, Before the stories of the leper, for instance, and the healing of the paralytic, before the call of Levi and the criticisms that our Lord endured on account of that call, before the choosing of apostles, before the incident in the cornfield, and before the man with withered hand. And the story of the man with the withered hand does not occur in Matthew until his chapter twelve, whereas the sermon ends in chapter seven. Luke puts his equivalent of the Sermon on, on, on the Mount, or at least his account of our Lord's moral teaching, after all these things, that is, after the story of the leper, the paralytic, the call of Levi, the choosing of the apostles, the incident in the cornfield, and the man with the withered hand. So Luke's order of narrative is very different from Matthew's. Luke is nearer in his order to Mark, but then Luke has, as a sum total of what he has to say, a different thought flow. He starts off this section with the story of Peter and the Lord in the fishing boat. And neither Matthew nor Mark have that story. And Mark, of course, has no formal equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount anyway. So Luke's amount of our Lord's moral teaching, formal top moral teaching, uh, his equivalent of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, or his counterpart thereto, uh, is in a very different context. And since we learn what our Lord was saying, first by paying attention to the details of what actually he said, that then, but then presently by reading it in the context in which the inspired writers have put it, let me now just remind you again of the context in which this our Lord's moral teaching is given. We looked at it last night, let us look at it again. Here is, uh, chapter five in, uh, Luke's Gospel, and it starts off with what I have called in the first, eh, uh, uh, 26 verses there, Christ and the authorities. All I mean by that phrase is that in these three incidents, our Lord is seen in relation to men who were authorities in their different realms. First of all, in Peter's boat, Peter being the expert fisherman and authority on the whereabouts of fishes and how they could be caught. Then secondly, our Lord, as he heals the leper, sends him to the priests, for they were the authorities in Israel on the questions of leprosy, both expert to diagnose the leprosy, though incidentally the disease was not likely to be what we mean by the modern term leprosy, but some other skin disease. But I am so old, you'll see, mm, incredibly old, and that I, uh, I can't get out of my head the language of the Bible in which I started to learn at three or four years old, you see. So you'll pardon me if I still call him a leper. No harm intended to anybody. Eh, the uh, untouchable leper, the priests were experts in diagnosing it, and if and ever it was cured, they were the people who had officially to pronounce it was cured and prescribe the necessary purificatory offerings so that the leper could eventually return home. They were the experts then in, uh, the cases of leprosy, and our Lord is here seen sending the cured leper to the experts for their official examination and their pronouncement that he was in fact cleansed. Then in the third paragraph, the healing of the paralytic, Luke is careful to tell us in what circumstances it happened. There were present, says he, uh, uh, with Christ, Pharisees and teachers of the law from all over Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem. A massive bevy of teachers of the law, authoritative men when it came to exposition of scripture. Priests mostly dealt with ritual matters. Some of them were scribes and experts in the law. They were responsible, or should have been, to teach Holy Scripture, but by our Lord's time, the leading experts in biblical exposition and application were not so much the priests as the teachers of the law, the scribes. And among the Pharisees, there would have been some who were such scribes and teachers of the law. Pharisees were, uh, meticulous practitioners of the law. They were not all teachers of the law, but meticulous practitioners of it, and very, uh, uh, aware and acute to point out any breaches in behavior of, uh, of the law. So they were the experts, three paragraphs to begin with, with Christ among the experts. And after that, uh, the principles of Christ's spiritual discipline. I use that phrase simply to indicate now that what you have is the kind of practices that our Lord allowed himself in dealing with sinners. Would he or would he not keep company with them? What kind of discipline on himself did he exert? And then secondly, what kind of discipline did he impose upon his followers and disciples? Leading teachers of the law and of morality would have their disciples around them, and they would impose certain rules of behavior upon their disciples. The Pharisees imposed such rules on their own disciples. The John the Baptist imposed such spiritual, uh, disciplines on his disciples, and now our Lord is in fact, uh, criticized here for not imposing on his disciples such rigid, uh, and severe disciplines as the Pharisees and John the Baptist would have, uh, imposed upon theirs. Christ then, uh, we think of him now in terms of his principles of spiritual discipline. And that comes to an end with a threefold parable: old and new garments, old and new wineskins, old and new wine. It is to be observed that, according to Luke's exact terminology, our Lord spoke a parable, and the parable turned out to be a threefold one. Now we come to another series of three paragraphs. I have called it again Christ and the Authorities to get across simply the idea that in these three paragraphs, you have our Lord, the first two criticized by some of the leading authorities in the law that we have already mentioned. But here are the stories, Christ in the cornfield. Eh, and his disciples are accused of sinning because they rubbed the corn in their hands on the Sabbath day and ate it, and according to some Pharisees, that was work, and it broke the law of Sabbath. They accused his disciples of this, saying to Christ, why do you, uh, I'm sorry, crying to them, why do you do that which is not lawful to do on the Sabbath day? But of course, in accusing the disciples, they were, by implication, including our, uh, Lord in their criticisms. And then, uh, in the second major story, the story of the man with a withered hand, our Lord deliberately, uh, did the miracle, staged the miracle in front of the scribes and the Pharisees, knowing that they would criticize him for it severely, but doing it to demonstrate that their interpretation of the law was in fact false. And then in the third major paragraph there, you have an exceedingly important historical event. That is, our Lord, after continuing, uh, a- a- all night in prayer to God, came down from the mountain and chose from among his disciples twelve whom he also named apostles. I say that is an exceedingly significant action, uh, in historical terms. These were the men that were to be, with the exception of Judas, of course, the official leaders of the church, the ex- official and authoritative interpreters of Christ, the authoritative holders of the tradition, men whom Luke will describe through the loud mouth of Peter in the first chapter of Acts as men who have accompanied with our Lord right from the start, from the time of the baptism of John, right up to his resurrection, and were in fact eyewitnesses of the resurrected Lord and of his ascension. The significance of the apostles, therefore, for the whole history of the church could not perhaps be exaggerated. It was on this occasion that he chose them and came down from the mountain and stood with them as the enormous crowd that came from all over the place, people from Judea and Jerusalem and from the borders of Tyre and Sidon, that great crowd of people were there before him, and he identified himself with the apostles and the apostles with him. From now on, they were to assume an authority that even the scribes and the Pharisees of the older time did not have. So then, after those three paragraphs, we have our Lord's, uh, uh, teaching here, as Luke gives it, on the, uh, m- uh, uh, on morality. Christ's principles of morality. I have somewhat arbitrarily selected some of its main ideas. Please observe that I am being quite arbitrary and haven't included a lot of the detail of this paragraph. I despaired of getting it on one xerograph, you'll see, on overhead film. It will give us, however, some ideas of some of the leading things that he was saying. The early verses deal with attitudes to poverty, hunger, sorrow, and social ostracism. Blessed are you poor, et cetera, and blessed are you when men shall ostracize you for the son of man's sake. Then attitudes to riches, society, laughter, and social acceptance. In other words, the blessings pronounced on certain attitudes in the first group are now woes pronounced on the opposite of those attitudes, uh, here in the second group. Woe to you who are rich now, who are full, when all men speak well of you, for you have received all the comfort you are going to get. And then attitude to enemies and would-be borrowers, in which the believer must happen that, uh, behave, the disciple of Christ must behave, uh, i- in behavior that is s- appropriate to sons of the Most High. They should conform to the attitude and behavior of their father. And our Lord's moral teaching is now brought to an end by another parable. He, uh, says, uh, or Luke says, you'll see, verse thirty nine of chapter six, he spake also a parable unto them. But the parable turns out to be at least threefold and possibly fourfold. The doubt is, uh, concentrates on verse forty five, if you care to look at it, of chapter six. Here the two, the first parable has been based, first of all, on the eye and eyesight, verses, um, thirty nine, forty, forty one, forty two. Then the next parable is based on fruit trees and fruit, and the idea is that a good tree doesn't bring forth bad fruit, nor again does a bad fr- tree bring forth good fruit. Each tree is known by its fruit because of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush do they gather grapes. Trees produce fruit according to the inner nature of the tree. The question arises whether verse forty five is now an additional parable. The good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good, and the evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth that which is evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh. Or whether that is simply a different metaphor, carrying on the same basic lesson of trees, fruit trees and their fruit, that a good tree brings forth fruit according to its inner nature and quality. A bad tree brings forth fruit according to its inner nature and quality. So a good man out of his treasure, of the treasures of his heart, brings forth good things. An evil man out of the evil treasures of his heart brings forth that which is evil. We needn't settle the question. Our more important, uh, qu- question is to learn the lesson that is being taught and apply it to ourselves. And then finally, the third, uh, or fourth, as you may care, the third or fourth para- uh, part of the parable is based on building. Now, when we look at this, uh, collection, this selection of material with which Luke has, uh, with which Luke has presented us, it is easy to see, isn't it, that, uh, it is very, very carefully arranged. And it may be that it is no more than a convenient way of packaging the material. All good preachers do it anyway. They seek to put across their thoughts packaged in sections with headings, do they not? And all this may be is Luke, uh, putting out his stuff, which he is very carefully, uh, and neatly packaged so that our minds may grasp it the more easily. There may, of course, be more to it than that, mayn't there? You'll see, if you look at the first one, uh, the first big story, uh, uh, on the, of the three in the first part. Here, our Lord in the fishing boat impresses himself on Peter as the Lord of Peter's daily work. Peter was in the fishing boat. He felt he was the expert, so when the Lord suggested letting down the nets to get a, a, a catch of fish, Peter gently, uh, deferentially pointed out that he was the expert, was Peter, and there weren't any fish around anyway, and it would be a fruitless occupation to let down the nets. In the end, mercifully, Peter obeyed the command of the Lord. What an experience it was when the Lord entered the boat of Peter's daily work, joined with him in his daily work of fishing, and then took a direction of that daily work. Lord Pe- uh, Christ then, the Lord of Peter's daily work. But when you look at the, uh, second set of three paragraphs, you'll see the first story there tells you that Christ is not merely the Lord of daily work, the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. Lord of both. And what that implies, we shall presently see. Then, if we come back to the first set, you'll notice the second story is about a leper. And according to the ancient ceremonial rules of the Old Testament, lepers defiled anyone whom they touched or who touched them. It was, as many preachers have pointed out, an act of tremendous compassion that our Lord did not stand aloof from that dear man and just pronounce the word that would make him clean. But with a tremendous human touch of compassion, he stretched forth his hand in our Lord and touched him. All the joy and wonder in that man's experience to have a hand touching him, a human hand, where no hand had touched him perhaps for months and for years. Wasn't so nec- necessary, maybe our Lord could, as he did later to ten lepers, cure them at a distance, but not this time. He stretched forth his hand and touched him, and that little detail in the narrative is exceedingly important. But now you notice the second story on the other side. Our Lord did a miracle, but it wasn't just any old miracle. There was a man in the synagogue who had a withered hand, and our Lord, knowing the opposition, uh, that he was now about to provoke because the experts in the law were there, he told the man to stand out in front of them all. That concentrated their attention on the man and on his poor withered hand. According to the rules that these experts followed, it would have been sinful to heal that man's hand on the Sabbath. But our Lord, defying them, told the man, stretch out your hand. We'll see. We notice the two little details, perhaps only a, a stroke of a brush in Luke's artistry, the two hands, Christ stretching out his hand in the first instance, and the paralyzed man stretching out his crippled hand in the second. And significant, significant also, as we have said in historical things, if you think of those, uh, the third story on both sides of the fence. In the first story, you were reminded by Luke that there were teachers of the law present on that occasion from all over the place, do you see? And, uh, they were the, in, in, uh, in Israel, official expounders of the law. So official were they that in the Gospel of Matthew, our Lord instructs his disciples as follows, what the scribes say to you, you do, for they sit in Moses' seat, but don't do after their manner, for they preach, but they don't practice. But you are not to be anarchists. What the scribes say, you do. That is how our Lord counseled his apostles in the days of his flesh. But notice here the beginnings of what we mentioned earlier, the creation of the apostolate, the twelve apostles, that presently after Pentecost would for the church be the authorities. No longer would those scribes in Judaism be the authorities for the Christian church. It would be the apostles that would be Christ's official interpreters. That therefore seems to me to be some evidence, at least, that Luke is not just packaging his material in a neat way. There is significance and balance, contrast and similarity deliberate to help us grasp the issues that are presented on one side of the fence and then on the other. Uh, no more of that for the moment. That's enough to make the point. Eh, you'll see, uh-huh, not to wear you, weary you with these matters. But another major thing should be noticed as we now get down to more detail. This, these, this section, these two chapters are not just, uh, filled with ideas and words about sin and sinning and sinners. They not only give us our Lord's principles of spiritual discipline and moral teaching. This section is marked by controversy, dispute, and challenge. For it so happens that the holiest man that ever lived on earth, our blessed Lord, was criticized severely in his time by the religious and moral experts. They said, in fact, he was morally lax in the way he consorted with, uh, tax gatherers and prostitutes. Shameful thing for a religious leader, teacher, and supposed prophet to do. They said he encouraged and allowed his disciples to break the holy law of God by breaking the Sabbath. When he forgave a man's sins, they cried out that he was speaking blasphemy. It's a very interesting thing, isn't it, to notice in our gospels. It wasn't a question of tiny little details about the fulfilling of the law. Our Lord was regarded by the experts as not only false and lax, but wicked and blasphemous. Well, it's at least honest of Luke to tell us so, isn't it, what? For our Lord was not preaching to savages that had never learned any moral code. Our Lord was teaching morality in the midst of the nation that was the leading recipient of God's revealed truth about morality. How did it come then that there could be such a chasm of difference between our Lord's teaching and practice and that of the experts of Judaism? We have to keep Theophilus in mind, that's some chapters since we heard of him, but he's in chapter one, the introduction. He is the one to whom the book is dedicated. Luke was writing with him in mind to start with. Whether he were Christian or just interested Gentile, eminent man of some ability and high standing, he surely would be interested in this state of affairs. How did your Jesus come to disagree with the expert moralists in Israel, and how did they disagree with him? Why is that? Luke doesn't hide the fact from Theophilus or from us. Of course, he's going to show us wherein those disagreements lay. Hear what our Lord said about them, and leave us to make up our minds, of course, who was right and who was wrong. In the end, of course, it's going to mean the separation of our Christianity and the Christian church from Judaism, and the Christian church be set up now with authoritative apostles instead of the scribes of Judaism. Why the rupture? So we must give heed, therefore, to this passage. It is exceedingly important when it comes to the morality that Jesus Christ taught and practiced, and its challenge by the authorities of the day. In presenting his case about Christ, Luke has done a delightful thing, hasn't he? With those first three stories of the, uh, uh, Christ among the authorities. The first three major stories of chapter five: Christ in the boat with Peter, Christ and the leper, Christ and the paralyzed man. And the thing they have in common is this, is to show Theophilus and us Christ's way with sin and sinners. What Christ did and could do with actual people. We don't start off with the statement of, of the sermon that he gave on morality. We start this section with three actual incidents, instances of what Christ could do with sin and sinners, with the broken and the bruised and the maimed, you see. And what a lovely picture it is. What could Christ do with these people? And how, in treating them, Christ turned them into advertisements for himself to the general public and then to the experts, saying, here are evidences of what I can do, gentlemen. You criticize me for being sinful and lax and blasphemous, as you say, but half a minute, look at what I can do with men and women. Look at what I've done with them. The evidence of what Christ has done. You know, when Paul and Barnabas were opposed, according to Acts, by people that came from Judea and said the Gentiles couldn't possibly be saved unless they were circumcised and kept the law of Moses. Paul and Barnabas, of course, opposed them, and so, of course, did all the apostles eventually. But on their way up to Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas, coming to meet the different Christian churches, they told the story of what Christ had done for Gentiles. And at the conference itself in Jerusalem, they did the same thing. When the false teachers had been silenced, then Paul and Barnabas told the church of the wonders that God had wrought by taking raw, pagan, defiled Gentiles and turning them into true saints of God. Oh, what an evidence that is, isn't it? Proof of the pudding, so to speak, is in the eating. And therefore, at three levels, we, we need to listen. We thought about it last night, about Peter in the boat. We need not repeat it, but it was in the area, wasn't it, of one's daily work, the expert in his fishing boat. When Christ came into that fishing boat, not content with teaching the people, but joining Peter in his daily work and then directing it, it added a dimension to daily work that, uh, Peter had not hitherto dreamed of. Of course, it made him feel a sinful man. But, uh, I suppose that if our Lord appeared in the course of this conference and stood by one of my esteemed three brethren as they were teaching so profitably to us all, but if the Lord came and stood by them and himself began to teach, he would produce in all of us a sense of our utter inadequacy. It's not that Peter said, I have done a lot of sins. Standing or sitting beside the blessed Son of Man as he directed the fishing, Peter was overwhelmed with the sense that he was a sinful man, coming short of the glory of God in all that he was and he did. But notice that our Lord does not say, I forgive your sins. He simply says to Peter, falling short and inadequate as you are, fear not, you shall become a fisher of men. All the marvelous grace of God that can take the likes of you and me, inadequate and still coming short in that basic sense, sinful, and somehow take us and train us and use us for this superlative task, the spiritual spreading of the gospel and means in his hands of converting other men and women to Christ. Ain't that a marvelous thing? Why, if an unfallen angel was given the task, as many have observed, that would be a supreme privilege for the angel, but that for people that are still falling short and sinful, that Christ can so work with us that he can use us to the salvation of others, that the wonder of it never depart from us. Fear not, I will make you fishers of men. And then he received, as we said last night, a new dimension to fishing. He'd learned in his fishing disciplines of hard work, applicability. You use nets to fish with, but then you must be a good businessman and wash your nets to be efficient. He wasn't running away from hard work when eventually he left his nets. Trained in the exigencies of hard work and business life, he was now going out to work even harder for the Lord in the task of fishing for men. And learned us that there is not a dichotomy, an absolute chasm between daily work and spiritual work, but the two are conjoined, part of the same work of God, through which God eventually not only feeds men with their daily fish, but in the end saves men for eternity. But then the next story is likewise important, Christ and the authorities. There is no criticism of the priests that they couldn't heal lepers. Of course they couldn't heal lepers. And Christ does not come among them as simply a super duper priest that was a bit better at their job than they are. Of course not. This is the Son of God come into the world. This is an altogether new dimension and higher dimension than ever Judaism knew. They couldn't heal lepers, he could. And he healed the leper. And now notice he sent him to the priest. He was not undercutting the priest. He didn't say to the healed leper, now look, old boy, you don't need to go to the priest, you know, all that rigmarole of, uh, ceremonies and splashing about a bit of water and birds letting them go in the air and so, uh, sprinkling with blood and all that paraphernalia, you know. Ah, bother that, don't go to the priests. For the priests would have felt that Christ was undercutting them in their God-given duties. Those men, however how far they might have departed, were doing what God had instructed them to do. They stood for sanctity, they stood for purity in daily life and in approach to God, and Christ had not come to undercut them, not come to say that uncleanness did not matter. I heard one BBC, uh, speaker say at one stage that, uh, when, uh, Mary, when the woman came into Simon's house, our Lord, knowing that she was a prostitute, gave her a wink. He wasn't hard on prostitutes, so he's quite happy about them and their behavior too. And that our Lord, in saying about the adulteress, neither do I condemn you, was saying that really adultery doesn't matter. That is absolute nonsense and wicked nonsense. What our Lord was saying was not that he condoned adultery. The question at stake was, now that she had been found guilty, should the penalty of the law be exacted upon her. That's another thing. He wasn't say adult- he wasn't saying adultery doesn't matter, and he wasn't saying that leprosy didn't matter either, or saying that the sanctity of the temple didn't matter. Come there just as you like. No, indeed not. Our Lord is not part of our modern permissive society that, in the name of Christianity, says homosexual- homosexuals can be bishops in the church, and the church should sanctify, uh, uh, bigamous and homosexual supposed partnerships. Of course not. That is a perversion of the teaching of Christ. But Christ stood with the priests in maintaining sanctity in their day and generation, the sanctity that God required of them in those days to approach his physical house, but he had something bigger to do than what they could do. They couldn't cleanse the leper, he could. And when the leper went and presented himself to the priest, and the priest and said, old chap, tell me, if you wouldn't mind, how did you get cured? And he told them that this Jesus of Nazareth had cured him. What could the priest say? It's difficult, isn't it? How could they be against him? And keep true to their own special, uh, task in Judaism and the rules of their priesthood. It was a perversity, wasn't it? If those priests would eventually turn round and denounce Jesus Christ as a sinner. That was a denial of everything the priests stood for. So he's making him an exhibition to these, uh, priests, you'll see. And now God loves to do the same. And I'm tempted to say all sorts of things, but I, I mustn't. What I've seen happen on mission fields, where unreformed Christianity is more content to see men groveling in their, uh, their vomit, blind, drunk, than admit the facts and truth of the gospel that can save drunkards and purify their lives by bringing them to Christ. Religious men that would prefer the drunkard to a man that's born again. And then there were the teachers of the law, and they said it was blasphemous for anybody to claim to forgive sins, but, um, Christ wasn't saying that they should forgive sins. How could they? They were mere expositors of scripture. This was God incarnate. The Son of Man have power and authority on earth to forgive sins, but he wasn't content to claim it. He gave the man power to get up and walk as the evidence that this forgiveness of sins was genuine. Still, Christ does it a thousand and one times, doesn't he? To those who will say, on the one hand, you cannot know that your sins are forgiven and that you're right with God and certain of God's heaven. Christ will show by the new power he gives to believers that they can get up and walk straight. But the forgiveness he has given them is a real salvation and empowers them now to walk as God intended they should. But with that, now we turn to a discussion of what you might call Christ's evangelistic methods. For he goes by and sees Levi at the receipt of customs, so Luke tells us, and did for him a remarkable thing. When the tax gatherers had come to John Baptist and said, what must we do? He said, you must give up cheating. But he didn't say you must stop being tax collectors. According to John the Baptist, it was perfectly all right in the eyes of God for a man to make his living as a tax collector for the Romans, so long as he didn't engage in fraudulent, uh, uh, extortion from the people. The Pharisees, of course, and many Jews hated tax gatherers, first because they took so much money from them, that's number one, and second because they worked for the hated imperialist Romans, and thirdly because their work involved them with mixing with a lot of Gentiles, and for all that reasons, the Pharisees and people hated them and despised them and exercised a quite a severe discipline on them from the synagogue. Now Christ comes to this man, and see what Christ does with him, as distinct from what John the Baptist said. As he passed by, he called them, and Levi left his toll booth and his tax office and followed the Lord as one of his disciples. He'd not only given up fraudulent extortion, now something more profound had happened. Christ had broken the love of money in the man's heart. You see, it is possible, isn't it, not to engage in fraud, but nevertheless to be a lover of money. The Pharisees, so Luke later tells us, were many of them lovers of money, even if they didn't engage in fraud, but there was some doubt about some of them at that respect as well. But with Levi, the old love of money was broken, and he followed the Lord as one of his disciples and apostles. More than that, he got converted, and it's obvious he got converted, for he immediately seemed to have conceived a desire to bring other men to Christ and made a big banquet in his house. He was still rich. He made a big banquet in his house and invited all sorts of tax gatherers to come along. What do you suppose for? He's had many banquets before, of course, but, uh, he got the men there and got Christ there, so that Christ could do for them what he had done for him. When the Pharisees saw all the Ro- Rolls-Royces, Mercedes-Benz, and BMWs outside the door, and these filthy rich tax collectors at this banquet, and Christ sitting among them, they were appalled. Call that holiness? Mixing with such sinners. Ha. My good German colleague in, in Russia, our good German colleague in Russia, as he began to put Christian messages in papers, put Christian messages in some of the women's magazines in Russia. He showed me one. There was the Christian message on one page, where the editor, of course, had chosen to put it. On the other page was an advertisement of some scantily clad female that would shock even an Englishman. And the Russian believers were appalled that you would have a gospel message as- aside and in a paper like that. You could understand it, perhaps, couldn't you? Is it right to go amongst the tax gatherers and prostitutes to preach the gospel? The Pharisees said it wasn't, and they complained bitterly. And our Lord argued with them, didn't he? He wasn't telling them that they ought to go. Perhaps they would be better to stay away, some of them with their inclinations. They had no salvation to give and had no experience of the saving power of Christ anyway. And Christ wasn't saying that you should send your infant or your teenage daughter into such circumstances. Christian though she might be, she might not have the stamina to survive. What he did say is that if a self, that man or woman is ill, somebody's got to go to them. Be a funny doctor, wouldn't it, but refuse to go to a case of smallpox because the stuff is infectious. Don't send your children there. A doctor must go, else the patient will die. And a doctor, by going to a, a patient with an infectious or unpleasant disease, is not condoning the disease, is he? What is the sense of lecturing against disease in a place where there are no disease, talking to the well about how bad disease is, but never going where the disease are to help them get better. I've not come to call the righteous, says Christ, but sinners to repentance. But that left an open question. Were only tax collectors and prostitutes sinners, or were there a few Pharisees that were also sinners? It's a question of, of degree rather than kind, wasn't it? Then there came the, uh, uh, uh, the, uh, disciples of John, or others who told our Lord about the disciples of John. They were not concerned, you see, merely with the tactics Christ in- in- in- used to reach sinners. They were also critical of the discipline that he apo- imposed on them when they were. John made his disciples fast regularly. The Pharisees made their disciples fast regularly, and pray, why don't you make your disciples fast regularly? They wanted to know of Christ. Wasn't he getting converts and disciples on the cheap? By saying, you can be a disciple of mine and you needn't fast regularly like John the Baptist's disciples and the Pharisees. He was getting them on the cheap, wasn't he? Our Lord had an answer to that too. He said, can the wedding guests, children of the bride chamber i- in Hebrew, can the, uh, wedding guests fast and mourn while the bridegroom is still with them? How incongruous it would be, wouldn't it? On that occasion of joy within the very presence of the bridegroom, to fast at a wedding feast? No, well, what should decide when they fast and when they don't fast? Well, the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away. Then shall they fast. But not while the joy of his presence, the wedding joy of the new wine is filling their hearts. In other words, fasting is not by simple rule and regulation. True fasting proceeds from genuine spiritual need. If we have a sense of the absence of the bridegroom, then might be the time to fast, or on some other specific spiritual situation that calls for fasting, but mere religiosity, fasting like they do in Ramadan for forty days and being more peevish by the time they're finished than when they started, you'll see. What use is it? And thus our Lord answered them, and from the parables that he then gave, the old and the new garment, the old and the new wine skins, and the old and the new, uh, wine. It seems to me he was now commenting on the difference between Judaism with its laws given of God and Christianity, the new thing that God was doing. The old garment of Judaism was very respectable and a very good garment when God gave it. It had grown old and worn, and now it's becoming full of holes anyway. Christianity hadn't come to patch up that old system of rules and regulations, but to introduce something completely new. That is something that Christendom has not always understood. And in the fourth, third and fourth centuries onwards, began to patch onto Christianity a good deal of the garment of Judaism's practices. Yes, you can't put new wine in old skins, because the new wine, being all of a ferment, will burst the skins. They have become too rigid. Christ is not saying that wine, new wine, doesn't need any discipline. Of course, Christian behavior, Christian joy needs discipline. Else it will run away with itself. The new wine, however, will have to have new skins that contain it, that are supple and pliant and suitable for the new joy. For the joy of Christianity is a joy that even the greatest of the prophets scarce knew. It will demand its own new disciplines from the Lord. It is true, said Christ, that having tasted the old wine, people won't immediately desire the new. Yeah, I can understand it. To go up to the great temple in Jerusalem with the pilgrims. The beautiful big temple, you see. Oh, magnificent. Herod built it. Well, forget him because he was, well, well, his money was good anyway, if he wasn't. And, uh, it's good to take money for the church, isn't it? And, uh, it was a beautiful temple. Where was I? And then to see the high priest come out, pooh, pooh, pooh, in his glorious robes. You listen one of these days to Pseudo-Aristias writing to Philocrates, if you get the chance, or don't, as the case may be, but you'll listen to him, and he's giving us a tourist description o- o- of Jerusalem on the occasion of the festival. When the high priest came out, oh, like the sun, people nearly fainted at this marvelous phenomenon of a high priest coming out in his robes. Marvelous. And if you've been used to that, and the Levites holding forth on the temple steps with their trumpets and goodness knows what out, uh, uh, and then were to come to the upper room of Jerusalem with a few Galileans gallant, you might say you preferred, uh, the old wine, really, mightn't you? The new wine is an acquired taste. But when you've drunk well of it and have come to know that our blessed Lord is our high priest, and you've seen him, so to speak, not enter into the back room of a temple on earth, but enter the immediate presence of God in glory. Then the old thing will grow strangely dim and lose its attractiveness as the new wine gets into your blood, and you begin to see the glories of the great salvation that Christ has brought us, exceeding the old clothes and ceremonies of ancient Judaism. And so our hour is gone. Tonight we shall have to spend a few moments on the second part of this third section, and then move on to the next stage in Luke's story. Shall we pray? Our Father, it comes to our hearts that when thy dear Son was here on earth, holiest of all that had ever lived amongst us, he was criticized and denounced for his very holiness. We thank thee for him who endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, enduring the cross, despising the shame, that he might save us and make us really holy before thee. We thank thee for this record of how he changed men and broke their love of sin and made them shining of examples of his power to save. Look upon us, we beseech thee. Thank thee for the deliverance that thou hast produced in our lives thus far. But may he continue his gracious work and urgently continue it, for the days grow short, that he might make us ever the more brilliant and shining examples of what Christ can do with sinners who repent and trust him, that other men and women might, seeing this that he can do, themselves be brought to him and to know his glorious salvation and the new wine of thy salvation, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.