Let’s turn to Luke chapter 5. We’ll be starting in verse 29, overlapping a little bit where we left off last week. It’s found on page 861 in the pew Bibles. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we ask You for Your grace and Your help and Your mercy. We pray for grace to speak and grace to hear, that You would open Your Word to us by Your Spirit. Help us to see Jesus. Speak Lord, for Your servants listen. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Luke chapter 5, verse 29:
“And Levi made him a great feast in his house, and there was a large company of tax collectors and others reclining at table with them. And the Pharisees and their scribes grumbled at his disciples, saying, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.’
And they said to him, ‘The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.’ He also told them a parable: ‘No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’’
On a Sabbath, while he was going through the grainfields, his disciples plucked and ate some heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands. But some of the Pharisees said, ‘Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?’ And Jesus answered them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he entered the house of God and took and ate the bread of the Presence, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and also gave it to those with him?’ And he said to them, ‘The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.’
On another Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was withered. And the scribes and the Pharisees watched him, to see whether he would heal on the Sabbath, so that they might find a reason to accuse him. But he knew their thoughts, and he said to the man with the withered hand, ‘Come and stand here.’ And he rose and stood there. And Jesus said to them, ‘I ask you, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?’ And after looking around at them all he said to him, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ And he did so, and his hand was restored. But they were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.”
The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the Word of our God endures forever.
I know we’re not supposed to like the Pharisees. They’re the bad guys. But the more I think about them, the more I study about the Pharisees, the more I think I am one. Maybe it’s an occupational hazard. In fact, I think it’s a danger for anyone who is in a position of leadership in ministry. It’s a danger for anyone who works on the staff of a church. Really, for that matter, for anyone who takes the church seriously and who wants to be a committed Christian. We can easily slip into Phariseeism. It’s not that we can actually become Pharisees, you understand, because there are no more Pharisees anymore. The Pharisees were a group of religious elite in Jesus’ day. They were in first century Palestine, so they’ve come and gone from history. And the truth is, we really do not know all that much about the Pharisees.
But one writer says that the nuns’ line about Maria from The Sound of Music could be applied to the Pharisees when they said, “How do you solve a problem like Maria? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?” Well you could say the same thing about the Pharisees in some ways. That same writer says that historians have portrayed the Pharisees as a religious sect, a political party, a philosophical order, a bureaucratic or scholarly class, or maybe some combination of any or all of those things. But what sort of group they were and what role they played in Jewish life in these days has largely escaped scholarly consensus for all these years. And actually, the only writing that we have from an actual Pharisee that still survives today is from the apostle Paul. And he was writing as a former Pharisee. But you can tell something about them just by the fact that Paul was a Pharisee and Paul was a tentmaker. The Pharisees were engaged in all aspects of life. They had all different sorts of professions like tentmakers, like business owners; they were spread throughout society in these days.
And Luke introduces us to the Pharisees back in chapter 5 verse 17. But you’ll notice in those verses that the only background information he gives to us about the Pharisees is that they were together, they were paired with the teachers of the Law. And he also says that they came from all over the region. They came from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. So it’s obvious they were scattered around. It’s obvious by the fact that he doesn’t introduce them more than that, that they were well known to the people at that time. They were well known to the readers of this gospel. And you know what else Luke tells us about the Pharisees? He tells us some of what they believed. He tells us that they believed in the forgiveness of sins. And you remember when Jesus healed the paralytic, He said first to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven you,” and they said, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” They understood from their study of the Old Testament, of the Law, that God is a God of forgiveness. He brings about forgiveness that He may be feared. And later even in this chapter that we just studied, the passage that we are looking at tonight, we find that the Pharisees were committed to fast and to pray and to keep the Sabbath. They were serious about obedience. They were serious about doing what the Law required.
I think we could say that there were some redeeming features about the Pharisees. Some of their other beliefs were that they believed in angels, they believed in a final judgment and the resurrection, they believed in some sense of God’s control over all things, of His providence. They lived upright lives. In fact, Jesus can say in Matthew chapter 5, that unless your righteousness exceeds that of the Pharisees and the scribes, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. They were respected. They were an influential group in this time. And their chief purpose, their main purpose was to preserve the Jewish way of life and to promote purity among the Jewish people. And they wanted to do that in the midst of the Roman occupation, in the midst of a pagan culture. Now don’t tell me that you can’t sympathize in some ways with the Pharisees. They sought to live a holy life in a secular world. One writer said that, “The Pharisees regarded themselves as the holy remnant, and that by means of strict observance of Torah and oral law, they attempted to represent the pure community, the true people of God, preparing themselves for the coming of the Messiah.”
So where do they go wrong? What happened to the Pharisees? Well just by looking at this passage that we have read tonight, I think we can say that quite simply, they missed the point. They lost the reason for their existence, for the existence of God’s Law and for God’s Word. And there are two concerns at the forefront of their minds in this passage. It’s fasting and keeping the Sabbath. And fasting, for the Jews, was associated with sorrow and with grief. And if you were to look at a list of the days that the Jews kept as regular fast days, they were days that commemorated and marked the disasters in their history. They fasted to commemorate the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar. They fasted to remember the breaching of the walls in the time of the exile. They fasted to remember the destruction of the temple in 586 BC. These were the epic tragedies; these were the national disasters for the Jewish people. That’s why when they fasted they disfigured their faces. Yes, it brought attention to themselves, but it was a time of grief. They disfigured their faces. They wore sackcloth and ashes.
And yet even as they remembered those terrible events, there’s some sense in which they were looking forward to something better; that fasting was actually anticipating something better. And the prophets had promised something better. They promised not a fast, but a feast. “On this mountain,” said the prophet, Isaiah, “On this mountain, the Lord of hosts will make for all people a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, and He will swallow up, on this mountain, He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all eyes.” That’s what they were looking forward to – no more death, but life. No more tears, but celebration. Listen to what Zechariah said. “Thus says the Lord of hosts: The fast of the fourth month and the fast of the fifth and the fast of the seventh and the fast of the tenth shall be to the house of Judah seasons of joy and gladness and cheerful feasts.” See, in the big picture of fasting, fasting gives way to feasting. Feasting is the goal. Feasting is the ultimate goal. And that’s probably at least part of the reason why the Pharisees made such a big deal about fasting. They were acknowledging that the current state of affairs for them was not okay. That Rome was a national disaster for the Jewish people. And they were waiting for God to act, for God to come and restore His favor to them. So that’s fasting.
Now the Sabbath served a similar purpose. What is the Sabbath all about? The Sabbath is about rest. It’s about rest from our labors. It’s about rest from conflict. It’s about rest from the effects of sin and death. Everything that is contained in that Hebrew word, “shalom” – peace, peace with God, peace with others, peace with ourselves, peace with our surroundings – all of that is anticipated in the weekly pattern of six days of work and one day of rest. We need Sabbath rest. The writer of the book of Hebrews talks about the rest that is to come, the ultimate rest, by quoting Psalm 95. And he says that, “Those who harden their hearts will not enter God’s rest.” And then he says, “So then, since there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, let us strive to enter that rest.” That ultimate rest is what we are longing for, it’s what we are desiring with the deepest desires of our heart. So the Sabbath is a big deal and it’s been said by one Jewish writer that, “The Sabbath may be Judaism’s most distinctive and characteristic practice.” And he also says that it is “one of the most pervasive and long lasting gifts to Western civilization.”
And so here we have these two prominent and carefully observed practices for the Pharisees – fasting and the Sabbath. These things were there to whet their appetites, to whet their appetites for what’s to come, to whet their appetites for greater blessing from God. They were to train their hearts and to build up their hope for what God was going to do. That He would come and make all things right; He would come and make all things new. But fasting didn’t do that, and the Sabbath didn’t do that for the Pharisees. In fact, when the fullness of time came and God sent forth His Son in the person of Jesus Christ, they missed it. When Jesus came to bring about the blessings that were anticipated both by feasting and Sabbath, they couldn’t see it. In fact, they found those things as opportunities to accuse Jesus and to criticize Him and to rebuke Him and to judge Him. But when Jesus and His disciples are criticized for not fasting, what does Jesus say to the Pharisees. Look at verse 34, “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?” A little bit further down when Jesus’ disciples are accused of breaking the Sabbath and plucking and eating some heads of grain, Jesus reminds them of what David had done when he and his men were hungry and they ate the bread of the presence that was ordinarily to be reserved for the priests. And He said to them, verse 5 of chapter 6, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
What’s Jesus doing there when He says that He is the bridegroom and He is the Lord of the Sabbath? He is saying simply that He is the point of all of their religious devotion. That He is the bridegroom of the great wedding feast. Could we even say it like this, that, “Jesus is the life of the party,” if we say it in an escatalogical, redemptive, historical sort of way? Jesus is the life of the party. That’s the point He’s making here. A photographer told me one time that when she was starting out, her boss was showing her some examples of wedding albums and how to put them together and how to organize the pictures. And she said that her boss said to her, “There’s this one album in this wedding that every picture of the food at the reception, in every picture of the food, the preacher is in the picture” He said, “I could not get a picture of the food at the reception without getting a picture of the preacher!” And he opened up the album and showed it to her and she said, “That’s my dad!” He was really enjoying the feast! But wouldn’t it have been a shame, wouldn’t it have been unimaginable really, to have all of the ceremony and the decorations and the music and then to invite the guests to a reception and to make them starve and to not provide them with food? Those things don’t go together, do they? They don’t go together at all.
And that’s the same thing Jesus is saying with the garment and the wine. The garment needs to have the right kind of patch to go with it. They have to fit. And the same thing with the wine. The wine has to be the right kind of wine for the right kind of wineskins. The action has to match the circumstances. And so what Jesus is saying is that when He arrives, it’s not time for sadness and fasting and being mournful. It’s time to rejoice. It’s time to celebrate. It’s time to feast. And likewise, Jesus’ ministry represents everything that will be true of eternal rest. His disciples that are with Him, they have their hunger relieved. They are finding that their basic needs are met. And when Jesus healed the man with the withered hand, what’s He doing? He’s bringing about a restoration for that man. He’s bringing about a restoration that is a glimpse and a foreshadowing of the ultimate restoration in which God will make all things new. He’s doing what is implied in his question in chapter 6 verse 9. You notice that he says there, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” What’s the Sabbath for? The Sabbath is for doing good, not harm. And the Sabbath is for saving life, not destroying it.
And Jesus can do these things, He can demonstrate the true nature of Sabbath rest because He is the Lord of the Sabbath. And that’s what He had come to do. He had come to live and to be obedient to the Law and to submit Himself to the Sabbath and to live according to what God had commanded Him and to suffer and to die and to be raised from the dead and to gain victory over death in order to bring about that eternal rest. “Come to Me,” Jesus said. “Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” That’s what Jesus came to do. And yet how to the Pharisees respond to Him? Verse 11 – “They were filled with fury and they discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.” They couldn’t accept Him. They couldn’t accept Jesus for who He claimed to be. They couldn’t accept Jesus for who He demonstrated Himself to be. They failed to recognize the heart and the fulfillment of all that they claimed to be about. They claimed to be about God’s Word and they missed it. They missed the fulfillment of God’s promises and they set themselves against Jesus. They rejected Him.
What happened? How did they go wrong like this? It was something like this. That in their zeal to keep the Law, in their zeal to fast and to keep the Sabbath, they elevated those things to top priority and then they established a whole system of extra rules to protect those things that they elevated to top priority. It was sort of like the unwritten rules that you hear about in baseball sometimes. Baseball is surrounded by these unwritten rules that you don’t flip your bat after a homerun. You don’t bunt to break up a no-hitter. Maybe you saw this past week that there was a player who hit a homerun in a junior college game in Texas and as he was rounding third base the pitcher made a full sprint to him and tackled him right on the field. I think that was breaking some of the unwritten rules of baseball!
Well just like baseball and their unwritten rules, there were unwritten rules, oral law, that the Pharisees held. And they put those things in place to protect and to promote things like fasting and Sabbath and tithe and diet. And those things, by protecting those things, they protected and promoted their position and their way of life. And so the Pharisees came to be defined by these things. They came to be defined by their religious observance rather than by what those things represented. Rather than being defined by joy and rest, they were defined by their commitment to these ordinances. And it’s because they lost sight of the point, they lost sight of the purpose of their devotion, they weren’t able to see Jesus. They weren’t able to see it when Jesus brought about the reality of God’s blessings right there in front of their eyes. In fact, they actually viewed Jesus as a threat to their way of life. They viewed Jesus as a threat to themselves and they wanted Him to go away.
I saw a cartoon recently and it had three panels, three blocks. It was about Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector from Luke chapter 18. In the first illustration it showed this Pharisee and he was pointing at the tax collector and he said, “That tax collector is so vile and sinful. Thank God I am nothing like him.” And in the second picture, it’s a man reading his Bible and he’s thinking to himself, “Wow, that Pharisee is so full of himself. Thank God I’m nothing like…” And the third image he realizes how much he’s like a Pharisee even in the way he reads about the Pharisees.
It’s all too easy for us to adopt the ways of the Pharisees, isn’t it? We have to watch out for it. We have to watch out that our worship doesn’t become about the organ or the robe or about the length of the sermon. It has to be about the One who we come to worship. It has to be about Jesus from start to finish. And ministry in the church, so often it can become about maintaining a program or propagating our role in a certain part of ministry. We become concerned about things like numbers or putting on an event or being needed or being important. Ask yourself that question. In what places in your involvement in the church, in the ministry of the church where you are involved, has the thing itself taken over the purpose for which it exists? And how can we reorient our focus back to Jesus and to serve and to sacrifice and to be selfless and to do everything we do for the honor of Jesus our Savior?
And likewise, our discipleship can go off course and we can become about keeping certain standards of lifestyle – about not drinking or cussing or sleeping around – and that defines us. That means we are a Christian. Or it can become about being pro-life or having conservative values or racial reconciliation even. Those are good things, and yet when they are elevated to the top priority, we can often miss what we should all be about – that our defining feature, our identity marker above all else is not any of those things; it’s that we believe in Jesus. We trust in Him and we love Him and we want to worship Him in everything that we do. When we lose sight of Christ, we are actually no better than the Pharisees. We have to keep Jesus at the center of everything we do; at the center of everything about who we are. Because it’s Jesus who brings true joy. It’s Jesus who brings rest. It’s Jesus who gives life to all those who trust in Him because He has come and He has established God’s kingdom by His life, His death, and His resurrection. And He will come again one day to make all these things true and real forever, perfected in His presence.
Keep our eyes on Him. Turn your eyes to Jesus. If our faith is built on anything else, it will crumble and fall. And if we find out that we have done that, we must turn in repentance. If you find yourself that you have been involved in the church – maybe you’ve been a part of the church for your whole life and you’re engaged in all the different ways to be engaged, and yet you have not turned and trusted in Jesus Christ, it will not stand. The Pharisees are an example to us, a negative example. But don’t miss Jesus. Don’t miss what He comes to bring and establish for us. And rest yourselves in Him.
I had a pastor tell me recently that he was going through a ministry transition and that he was also going through a transition in many ways in his family. His children were more or less grown at this point, they were empty nesters, and he was reflecting back on his ministry; he was reflecting on his family, on raising kids. And he said, “You know, one thing I wish that I had done better, done more of, and instead of focusing on what to do and what we need to be doing, I wish we had focused more on why we do it and I wish we had talked about Jesus more in our family.” And that’s a good word. It’s a good word for all of us I believe. Jesus is the heart of our devotion. He is the One that we follow. Here is our big principle for discipleship tonight. It sounds simplistic and basic. The basic principles of discipleship – One, is that Jesus calls sinners. Two, we are called to follow Jesus. That as we follow Jesus, we must follow Jesus and not make it about anything else.
Let’s pray.
Father, we praise You for Your goodness, for Your mercy, and for Your grace. We pray that You would turn our eyes upon Jesus. That You would help us to see Him in all of His beauty and grace and glory. Help us to live our lives devoted and committed to Him. And that as we live for Him, You will work through us and in us to serve You with joy and to live a life of obedience and faith. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.