Luke 5:27-39
“No Point Starving at a Feast”
By: Ken Sauer, Pastor of East Ridge United Methodist Church, Chattanooga, TN
Tax-collectors are never popular, but in Jesus’ day it was much worse.
They were extortionists.
And more than that: they were working for the Romans, or for Herod, and their contact with Gentiles put them under political suspicion.
Let’s think for a moment what life would have been like for Levi day after day and year after year.
Suppose it was you.
You would sit in your hot little booth, waiting for travelers to pay the toll as they passed from one province to the next.
They wouldn’t enjoy it and neither would you.
Then think what it would be like having young Jesus, with a spring in His step and God’s Kingdom in His heart coming past you one day and simply asking you to follow Him.
Yes. It would feel just like a healing miracle!!!
Actually, verse 28 hints at something even more: it would be like a resurrection!!!
“Levi got up, left everything and followed him.”
So, how could Levi and His friends not celebrate?
They were in the middle of God’s new work, an outpouring of mercy and salvation which was upstaging anything that had come before it!!!
The first thing Levi did…and he would later be known as Matthew…was to invite Jesus to a feast!!!
He could well afford it, and he also invited his fellow tax-collectors and their outcast friends to meet Jesus as well!
Matthew’s first instinct was to share the wonder he had found.
John Wesley once said, “No [person] ever went to heaven alone; he must either find friends or make them.”
As the hymn proclaims, “That’s how it is with God’s love, once you’ve experienced it, you want to pass it on.”
So here we find ourselves, partying with a bunch of hated tax-collectors and outcastes.
And Jesus broke into that world, just as Jesus broke into the leper’s sealed off universe with a single touch!!!
Has Jesus broken into your world with a single touch?
If so, have you invited your friends to share in the excitement?
Jesus and the sinners were having a party, a huge feast with a huge crowd!
“But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, ‘Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”
“Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’”
This is what we might call today, a Mission Statement: Jesus is like a doctor Who can’t do His work unless He associates with the sick.
No longer are people going to be placed into categories.
The new age has broken in, and this new age is a time of forgiveness!
That’s what God has always promised.
This is the New Covenant that the Prophets talked about, and forgiveness here is walking down the street, and when people repent—forgiveness is theirs!!!
Never mind if it upsets the tidy classifications of old.
This is a party!
And like all of Jesus’ parties it looks like a bus stop!!!
There are folks there from every kind of background, age and nationality!
It’s a miniature messianic banquet, and all are invited!!!
Back in the 1960’s Bob Dylan sang, “The times they are a’changing,” and when Jesus says the times are changing; they really are!!!
And that’s how Jesus answered the questions and criticisms that were leveled at Him, not surprisingly, when His movement didn’t look like what people expected a Kingdom-movement to look like.
Our Scripture passage is full of questions to which Jesus’ answer is, essentially, “Because everything’s different now.”
For instance, the question about fasting.
Fasting in Judaism was a sign of waiting, of bewailing the present time when God’s Kingdom still had not arrived!
It was a way of looking back to the disasters that Israel had suffered through, and humbling oneself in repentance to pray for God’s mercy.
But what if God’s mercy was now alive and active, healing, celebrating, creating a new world and inviting all to enjoy it?
This is like a wedding feast.
And the last thing you do at a wedding feast is abstain from food and drink!
It’s a celebration of life itself!
And yes. There is a dark note as well: One day the Bridegroom will be taken away, and then it will be time to fast again.
But it won’t be for long.
Luke’s Gospel ends with two Easter meals, one in Emmaus and one in the Upper Room!
The Bridegroom returns, and His risen life means that God’s new age has been truly launched for eternity!!!
It’s awesome that Jesus likens the Christian life to a wedding feast!!!
Joy is definitely a characteristic of walking with Jesus.
I remember, when I had my born again experience.
I was talking to a friend and telling him, “I never realized how unhappy I had been until I gave my life to Jesus!”
Now, I’m trying to infer that once you give your life to Jesus—everything is just perfect!
That’s not true one bit.
What is true is that everything becomes new!
It has been said that “far too many people think of Christianity as something which compels them to do all the things they do not want to do and hinders them from doing all the things they do want to do.”
But this couldn’t be further from the truth either!
Jesus is not a legalist.
Christianity is not about following a bunch of rules.
Christianity is about Grace, love and forgiveness!
It’s about fresh and new beginnings.
It’s about life springing up out of death!!!
You can’t combine funerals and weddings; you can’t be gloomy while you’re celebrating a marriage feast!!!
Imagine going to a wedding reception where everyone sat around and looked at the food but never touched a single crumb.
What kind of celebration would that be?
The day of new life, of Resurrection—overrides the command to fast.
Jesus’ own presence is, in a sense, a perpetual Sunday!!!
As long as Jesus is around, it’s always time for a party!!!
This doesn’t mean that we no longer believe in the spiritual discipline of fasting.
We just look at it through a new and different lens, as we do with everything once the Holy Spirit takes up residence in our soul.
It is no longer a time of mourning; it’s time of refection…
…a time of discernment…
…a time of looking forward to what God is about to do next!
The teachers of the law said to Jesus, “John’s disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking.’”
And Jesus tells them this parable: “No one tears a patch from a new garment and sews it on an old one. If he does, he will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old.
And no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined.
No, the new wine must be poured into new wineskins.
And no one after drinking the old wine wants the new, for he says, ‘The old is better.’”
Bottles, in Jesus’ day, were made of skin.
When new wine was put into them it fermented and expanded.
If the wineskin was new, there was a certain elasticity in the skin and it molded with the pressure.
But if it was old, the skin was dry and hard and it would burst.
“Don’t” says Jesus, “let your mind become like an old wine skin.”
The trouble with the Pharisees was that the whole outlook of Jesus was so startlingly new that they couldn’t adjust to it!
Everything is new as a result of Jesus!!!
Try and fit Jesus into the way of thinking and behavior patterns of the Pharisees, and all you’ll get is an explosion!!!
It just doesn’t work.
Everything is different as a result of what Jesus has done!!!
Sadly, this doesn’t stop us from trying to combine the new things of the Gospel with the old things from the world around us.
The world tells us that you must earn your salvation.
Jesus offers it for free!!!
The world tells us that criminals and those who are groping around in the dark are a lost cause!
Jesus tells us to regard persons as those who are ill and in need of love and help---for the Great Medicine of Salvation by grace through faith in Christ is able to change anybody and everybody!!!
We are all sinners in need of Jesus!!!
We are all in the same boat.
No one is any better than anyone else.
The famous Methodist Preacher, George Whitfield said, “There, but for the grace of God, go I,” as he watched a criminal walk to the gallows.
Any of us could, given certain circumstances, dispositions and/or mental health problems be wearing that orange jumpsuit; sitting in that electric chair.
Think of what Paul wrote in Romans Chapter 5, “You see, at just the right time, when, we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly…God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
This is the center of the Christian Good News!!!
When evil reached its height God came and took its full weight upon God’s self opening the Way for a new world all together!!!
Talk about exciting!!!
Don’t allow the pattern of this world squeeze you into its mold, dictate to you how you should think and tell you how you can and can’t behave!
Instead, be transformed!!!
Let Jesus set the pace.
The new age has already begun in Jesus, and belonging to this new creation means learning to live God’s Way!!!
God is doing new things all the time!!!
Can we get our minds around this?
Will we allow ourselves to be changed and renewed each and every day?
Will we be adventurous in our faith—allowing the Holy Spirit to lead us into new truth; new thought?
God is doing new things!
Will we join the party or will we grumble because the new wine is threatening to burst our poor old wineskins?
How could Levi and his friends NOT celebrate?
How could we NOT celebrate?
We are in the middle of God’s new work, an outpouring of mercy!!!
The times are indeed changing!
God’s new world is being born, we’re a part of it and everything is different.
