Scripture Reference: Mark 2:1-3:6
What Does He Think He Is Doing? – Continued
Please read Mark 2:13-22 for the background to this section.
From Last Lesson: Obviously, Jesus is not giving us His top ten household tips here! He is saying you can’t fit Him into your religious box.
He doesn’t match up to your old, rule-bound religion. You need a new set of clothes, a new set of wineskins to put the new wine in. The Pharisees simply failed to see that Jesus’ arrival changed everything. They saw Him as just another teacher who was a bit out of line. Plenty of people today look at Jesus and still, that is all they see. He breaks a few taboos, offers us some positive values, well, add Him to the mix, put Him in there with Gandhi and Mohammed, and perhaps a guru, or maybe just some wise words from your friend down at the pub, because everyone has useful things to say. As Jesus makes crystal clear, that is not His way. His coming changed everything. He is unique.
The natural way that people think is to live by a set of rules. If they have some sense of God, and nearly everyone does, they feel that if they can keep these rules then God will be pleased. This is a comfortable way to think because it means you know what is expected of you. That is what the Pharisees were doing in Jesus’ time. They had their rules, they were all in the book, and they devoted their lives to keeping them. They knew where they stood and it made them feel healthy and righteous. Today there are millions who do much the same. In Islam, it’s a question of performing five key actions. Say the right words, give away some money, pray five times a day, fast one month per year, go on a pilgrimage at least once in your life, do all that and Allah (God) will be pleased with you. It’s a comfort zone. But people in churches do this too. Go to mass, go to communion, be respectable, say the right words, sponsor charities, keep lots of external rules, and you will be OK.
The story of Levi points in exactly the opposite direction. If ever you want proof that God doesn’t choose people because they are good, here it is. Here is an outcast, a collaborator, and Jesus says to him, “Follow me.” A hundred years later, opponents of the Christian faith were still trying to discredit Jesus because He had associated with people like Levi. But Levi the traitor, Matthew, becomes one of His closest followers, one of the Twelve. His name goes down in history as the writer of one of the four Gospels. Jesus came for the sinners, not the self-styled righteous.
Why Is He Breaking the Rules?
Please read Mark 2:23-3:6 for the background to this section.
Humans, as well as dead animals, can become fossilized! A fossil can look so lifelike that you would think it could walk or swim away at any moment, but in reality it is long dead, hardened, totally incapable of moving, or responding, or of any kind of life. It takes hundreds, or even thousands, of years for dead animals to become fossils. But people are very often fossilized when they are still alive! Not their bodies of course; it is their spirits that are fossilized, what the Bible calls a hardened heart. What could be worse than being fossilized while your body is still alive? Yet, without Jesus in our lives, that is what happens to us, that is what we are . . . fossils. These five opposition stories are about people who are fossilized, people Jesus meets who simply will not respond to His love and grace, even when they see Him in the flesh, when they see His miracles.
To Be Continued
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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