Tonight I was reading in Mark Chapter 2:21-22 and I read it over and over trying to understand what was being said. After thinking about it I couldn't come up with an answer and so I googled it and found this...
Mark 2:18-20
“The Pharisees and the disciples of John engaged in ascetic practices that were designed to separate them from others who had not made religious piety the hallmark of their lives. As apparent participants in this arena of religiosity, Jesus and his disciples are oddly uninterested in the same kinds of outward show of devoutness, which prompts the question in verse 18. Imagining the context of the issue, the question becomes immediately misplaced and underscores the effect of Jesus’ arrival on earth. Jesus evokes the image of a wedding celebration, an extended period of festivity sometimes lasting a week, and sweeps his hand around the room to widen the narrow view of the questioners at the joyous gathering in Levi’s house of so-called “sinners” who by responding to the invitation had suddenly found themselves in the company of Jesus. Jesus’ willingness to share a meal, a very intimate activity, with these types of people was a proclamation that the careful boundaries that man-made religion had erected between the acceptable and the unacceptable people were demolished, that all people from all backgrounds and stereotype were welcome under the banner of God’s grace and that true holiness is not something to protect from contamination, but a life-giving, transforming power that can turn tax collectors and sinners into disciples.[14] How can one fast in the midst of such joy and celebration? To emphasize his point, Jesus quotes proverbial sayings of everyday life in vv.21-22 that state straightforwardly: The new that Jesus brings is incompatible with the old.”[15]
“The question about fasting forces us to question the purposes of our religious rites and observances. Fasting or any other religious discipline does not elicit God’s grace, forgiveness of sins, or acceptance. Any renunciation of the pleasures of earthly life as an attempt to gain favor with God or to achieve eternal life is to be rejected.”[16]
Notice, however, that Jesus does not denounce the activity of fasting wholesale, rather he is responding to “the ideas associated to fasting that were incompatible with the coming kingdom of God. Fasting was related to the fear of demons, and some thought that they could ward off demons by fasting. Some used fasting as a meritorious act of self-renunciation, which ultimately was intended to impress or sway God in some way. That is, one fasted to try to get God to bestow some good that he might otherwise withhold. Some fasted to atone for sins or to avert further calamity from falling on the nation.”[17]
- Wineskins?
I was glad I looked this up because it holds such a precious truth, that grace is for both the accepted people and the unaccepted people.
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