Mark 2:18–22 — Something New

This sermon is from Mark chapter 2 verses 18 through 22 and is entitled "Something New."

Mark 2:18–22

It was delivered to Ecclesia churches on Sunday, June 8, 2025.

All throughout Mark, Jesus has been breaking the expectations of people, sometimes not

living up to them and sometimes surpassing them.

He didn't call the kind of people that you would expect to be qualified for the work

of being his disciples.

He didn't cater to the growing crowds the way that you would expect the leader of a

religious faction to.

He didn't care about his reputation and appearances the way people expected him to.

And so he was known for doing miracles that astounded everyone, even the critics, but

he also touched lepers and associated closely with tax collectors and unsavory types of

people who were known sinners.

People were constantly watching Jesus.

Who he touches, who he talks with, who he eats with, who follows him.

But one thing is clear, Jesus marches to the beat of his own drum, or at least a drum

beat that no one else seems to be able to hear.

There was a girl I knew years ago who was part of the youth group, my wife and I helped

to lead.

And she didn't really know how to carry a conversation very well.

She wasn't very athletic when it came to the standard youth group games.

But one thing she loved to do was sing.

And she would sing louder than everyone else, no matter the setting.

Now, not always in the same key, but loud.

And years later, I would see her still walking down the sidewalk around where she lived with

her headphones on, singing at the top of her lungs.

Like so loud you could hear her through the rolled up car window.

And honestly, it made me laugh every time, but it also made me a little jealous.

Because she lived her life as though she couldn't care less what anyone else thought.

She seemed to know at least who she was.

In this passage today, we have not the Pharisees complaining for once, but actually the people

who are asking questions about why Jesus and his disciples were acting the way that they

did.

The disciples had wanted to know why Jesus wasn't taking advantage of the crowds that

gathered.

And the Pharisees wanted to know why Jesus didn't act more like them.

But the people are kind of split right down the middle asking, how is Jesus simultaneously

such a terrible politician and also so bad at being religious and yet so attractive to

us.

They looked at Jesus and the disciples and realized that he was kind of an enigma and

basically said, what are you exactly?

Jesus is supposedly a holy man of some variety.

So they want to know, why doesn't he fast like the holy men that they were familiar

with?

So let's talk about fasting for a moment.

Fasting was a choice not to eat or drink anything but water usually for a set period of time.

And there's a long history of people doing it in Scripture from Moses to King David to

Esther and even the prophet Daniel.

And the point of fasting was usually to seek God and pray, particularly during times of

distress or difficulty.

The law, the Jewish law, actually only commanded one fast per year.

And that was on the day of Atonement.

You find that in Leviticus chapter 16, verses 29 through 31.

Leviticus 16:29–31

And that's the only one that was commanded as a fast for the whole Jewish community.

But other fasts had developed over time in the Jewish community on certain days when

they remembered certain things happening.

But the Pharisees had taken it to a whole new level.

The Pharisees were a group of religious conservatives who were calling Israel back to holiness and

holy living, setting them apart from the corruption of Rome and pagan practices.

And that sounds okay, right?

It may have started out that way.

But as with any man-made attempt at holiness, it quickly devolved into legalism.

The greater rule following equals greater holiness kind of setup.

And so they fasted not once a year, as commanded, but over 100 times a year, every week on Monday

and on Thursday in addition to the other required fast and standard fast in the Jewish community.

So people saw these Pharisees, these super holy men fasting, and they saw John's disciples

fasting, the baptized, right?

John the Baptist.

And Jesus and his disciples are feasting, scandalously, actually, with sinners over at

Levi's house and in other places, right?

They say, "You're not very good at being holy, you know, like the rules that there

are, you're not following the rules."

So the way that Jesus answers them in three parts shows us that not only is he going to

continue breaking these expectations, but he's offering something better than those expectations.

He's offering something far better and something new compared to what they expected.

So let's start by reading verse 19 again.

This is Jesus' answer to them.

And Jesus said to them, "Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?

As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast."

So Jesus does answer their question, right, about why they're not fasting, but he also

indicates that their question has less to do with fasting and more to do with their lack

of understanding about who he is, this introduction of the bridegroom.

So in those days, a wedding would have been a huge deal.

We're talking a seven-day and night celebration with the entire neighborhood invited to the

celebration.

After a week-long block party with friends and neighbors and family from far away, even

the local rabbi with his religious restrictions on conduct would have been expected to participate

in the celebration.

One thing that never ever would have flown at a wedding was fasting.

Even the Pharisees, who usually fasted twice a week, wouldn't have fasted the week of a

wedding in their community.

It just would have been unheard of.

And so Jesus is saying that fasting is completely out of the question for his disciples.

Why?

Because the bridegroom is with them.

Remember those places that I said in Mark where it shows Jesus making a claim to be

God?

This is the next one of those.

In Isaiah, Israel is referred to as a bride.

And who is the groom?

This is Isaiah 54 verse 5.

Isaiah 54:5

Says, "For your maker is your husband.

The Lord Almighty is his name.

The Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer.

He is called the God of all the earth."

So for those who are making the connection here, Jesus, by calling himself the bridegroom,

is actually calling himself God.

And the presence of God, the presence of Jesus with them calls for celebration and joy, not

for mourning and fasting.

It just doesn't fit.

But Jesus doesn't stop there, does He?

He gives us something else where his disciples probably wished that he would have stopped.

In verse 20, he says, "The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,

and then they will fast in that day."

So this is the first real indication that Jesus gives about where the mission is ultimately

headed, and that he will be taken away from them for a time.

But the core of his answer to them shows that there is joy in the presence of Jesus.

See, ultimately, these people's understanding of the world was that the people who were closest

to God were the people who looked like they were working for it.

The people who kept the right company, who fasted the most, who earned their reputation,

who on the outside looked to be very holy.

The people who had the best system for getting closer to God through their own actions.

Those were the holy people.

But Jesus didn't come to give us a better system, to look better on the outside.

He didn't come with better laws, better rules, more effective religious practices, to get

closer to God, better insights spiritually.

He didn't come to do that.

He came to do something more.

He came to offer relationship with himself.

Instead of a system to get close to God, a practice to get close to God, God came close

to us.

And I know it's tempting for us, just like it was for them, to still want to rely on

a system.

The right devotional, the right reading plan, sticking with those things, spending a certain

amount of time in prayer.

And none of those things are bad things, right?

Being taught, reading scripture, praying, all of those important parts of being a disciple

of Jesus.

But the bottom line is that they do not get you closer to reaching God, because God had

to reach down to us.

You do not earn your way to nearness with God through the right spiritual activities

or the right system, by the good things you do or the bad things you avoid.

Our nearness to God is a result of Jesus stepping near to us.

And knowing that allows us to read and pray and worship and even fast from a place of

gratitude for what Jesus has done, instead of a wrong belief that we can work our way

near to him.

So Jesus is doing something better than we imagined.

He's doing something altogether new.

The bridegroom is here.

And in the next two verses of our passage today, he's going to expand on that by using

examples of a garment and wineskins.

He's going to use these two metaphors to show that a little bit of new can't fix the

old, and the old can in no way contain the new.

So let's continue with verse 21.

It reads, "No one sows a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment.

If he does, the patch tears away from it.

The new from the old, and a worse tear is made."

So for those of us who don't make our own clothes or do laundry on a regular basis,

maybe here's how this works.

When you make fabric on a loom or in a factory, the fibers are stretched out.

And then when you wash and dry it, they relax again and shrink back into their natural state.

So your large cotton shirt might become a snug medium after that first wash if you're

not careful.

At least that's the story I tell myself when my clothes start to fit tight towards the

end of the holidays.

When you get a hole in your clothes, you might try to sew a patch into that.

But if the patch is from new, unwashed fabric, the next time you wash the patched clothes,

the patch is going to shrink.

But the clothes do not.

And what you end up with is a tear that is worse than it was in the first place.

So from that metaphor, the big picture we can understand right away, that's clear, is

that Jesus is not here to just patch up or fix up the existing religious system.

He's not going to do what the Pharisees have done for the last 200 years that they've been

in existence and add additional laws that cover the gaps left in the old ones, according

to them anyway.

So they would have looked at honor the Sabbath and keep it holy, which is one of the Ten

Commandments.

And they would have said, "Well, that leaves a lot of room for interpretation."

And we're uncomfortable with that.

So we're going to provide laws that tell them what they can and can't do in the kitchen

on Sabbath down to how many steps they can take on the Sabbath to make sure that they

keep it holy.

We're going to add specific laws to patch up the "holes" that God left in his laws.

It sounds kind of silly when you put it like that, but legalism is an easy trap to fall

into.

If I just add a few more rules, it will make things better.

Because when it comes to the law of God, that is not always the case, because we start to

put our faith in the strength of our rules instead of in the faithfulness of God to us.

What we're going to find is that Jesus is not here to do that.

And if we go just a little deeper, there's another layer to this.

Why did Jesus pick fabric for this illustration?

And why here?

Well, we need a little Old Testament context.

Jesus already has some of these folks thinking about Isaiah by calling himself the Bridegroom,

referencing Isaiah 54.

Let me read another passage from Isaiah that's just a few chapters later in.

This is Isaiah 61 verse 10.

Isaiah 61:10

"I will greatly rejoice in the Lord.

My soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation.

He has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest

with a beautiful headdress, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels."

Jesus isn't here to fix the system.

He's here to clothe them in a new righteousness altogether.

Hear me on this one.

Jesus didn't come as just a good teacher to show us a better way to live.

He came as the sacrificial lamb who would clothe us with his own righteousness.

This is what Paul is talking about in Galatians 3 when he says, "You have put on Christ."

We have literally put on the righteousness of Christ like a robe.

Followers of Jesus, just like you don't need to earn nearness to God, you are invited into

it.

You don't earn your righteousness.

You are given the righteousness of Jesus.

That doesn't mean we don't pursue righteous living.

We don't pursue obeying Jesus' commands, loving God with all our heart and all of our

mind and all of our strength.

That takes effort to do that.

But even as we do that, and we do it imperfectly, we remain clothed in the perfect righteousness

of Jesus, which is very different from feeling like we have to earn that.

That's a way to live which is joyful and not burdened down.

For those of you who are still considering Jesus, whether to follow him, I just want

to be clear that Jesus is not something that you can simply add a little of to your existing

system of beliefs.

You can't mix a little bit of secularism, a little patriotism, a little new age belief,

some spiritualism here and there, and a little bit of Jesus, and end up with anything resembling

the truth of the gospel.

You also can't maintain a life of gratifying and giving in to the desires of your flesh,

continuing to bow down to the idols of sexuality, gluttony, greed, and say that, "God is love

and so he forgives me," because that's not repentance.

That's not really turning to Jesus, is it?

On the flip side, you can't maintain a legalistic system of belief in which you are somehow

earning our righteousness through rule following and try to add a little sprinkle of grace to

do that, because when you do that, you end up with a grace that's not really the grace

of God.

In fact, it's not grace at all.

The righteousness of Jesus is a perfect garment that makes us whole and holy in a way that

we could never patch together no matter how hard we try to earn it or take it from other

places.

In the same way that we can't patch the old with the new, this new thing that Jesus is

bringing can't be contained by the old places.

The temple, the priesthood, the old covenant, those things are no longer going to contain

what Jesus is going to bring.

Let's reread this last verse again as we look at the end of this passage.

This is verse 22.

"And no one puts new wine into old wineskins.

If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is destroyed, and so are the

skins.

But new wine is for fresh wineskins."

For those of us who aren't making wine in the style of the first century, wineskins

at that time were typically made from goat or sheep's hide.

That hide, that skin, was cleaned and dried and sewn together into a watertight container

that would hold the new wine.

When the wine was made, it would be poured into this container.

As the wine ferments, it produces gases which causes the wineskin to stretch out to accommodate

that wine as it ages, kind of like a balloon.

Everyone knew that when you emptied out that wineskin with the wine, you couldn't fill

it back up with new wine again because it had already been stretched out.

If you tried to reuse the wineskin, it would stretch too far and it would become brittle

and crack, and not only would it destroy the container, but also the wine is spilled out.

Jesus is not giving instructions on winemaking here.

He's using something that everybody in this community knew to show them something that's

less obvious.

The old structure would not contain the new thing that Jesus was doing.

A new dwelling would be required.

For the Jews, the presence of God was understood to dwell in the temple, in the Holy of Holies.

It was actually a matter of great debate between the Greeks who said, "Yeah, Mount Olympus

is actually where the gods live."

The Jews said, "Well, the temple Mount is where God is."

The Samaritans said, "Mount Gerazim is holy and that's where God should be worshiped."

If you go to Israel today, you'll see that some form of this debate still rages on.

When I visited back in 2019, we were not allowed to enter at least one location while we were

there because it was, the man said, "It's very holy and we are afraid that you would spoil

the holiness of it if we let you come in."

That idea is still very much there of these holy places.

Jesus had a conversation in John 4 with a woman who asked this question, a Samaritan

woman.

Jesus hinted at this change that was coming, saying, "The day is coming and is here."

I'll paraphrase that the place that you worship no longer matters.

The Jews had come to believe that their God was contained within the Jewish temple in a

fashion.

But even they should have known that that was never the case.

Even Solomon at the dedication to the first temple said, "This is 1 Kings 827, but God

will indeed dwell on the earth.

Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you.

How much less this house that I have built."

But their experience of God had been confined to the temple mount through the priests for

a long time, and God probably felt very far away to them during this time.

Because the truth is, without Jesus, we are very far away from God.

But there had always been a plan to fix this, since the first bite of the forbidden fruit

in Eden, the plan was in motion to fix the rift between us and God.

The truth is, if the Pharisees and their scribes had paid more attention to people like the

prophet Ezekiel, they would have seen that glimmer of hope.

Ezekiel 3626 says, "And I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within

you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh,

and I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful

to obey my rules."

To the presence of God could not and would not be contained within the temple.

Instead, he was going to dwell within us by repenting and turning to Jesus and following

him through baptism and forward into new life, we become temples now, dwelling places of

the Holy Spirit.

It may seem like this final metaphor has more to do with first century Jews and not as much

for us, but I actually don't think that's true.

This idea of holy places and location-based holiness is actually still around today.

Why else would we have a huge percentage of self-proclaimed Christians, particularly in

the Western world like America, believing that following Jesus is satisfied by going

to a building that we call the church once a week, and that will suffice to identify us

as belonging to Jesus?

Doesn't that sound an awful lot like the first century Jews who traveled to the temple

to make a sacrifice for their sin and then went right back to life as it was?

We're actually fighting an uphill battle, I believe, against this type of belief in

2025 because when I say "the church," almost all of us picture a building with a steeple

and stained glass windows.

And the church is not and never has been a building.

The temple was a building and it's in ruins now, the first one and the second one.

But the church is not a building.

It's a gathering of the people of God, which is the meaning of the word "Ecclesia,"

which is the name of our church, for that reason.

It is a family of believers where you are being discipled in a community and are being cared

for by a servant shepherd that we would call a pastor.

And whether that is happening in a house or a school auditorium or a hundred-year-old

building with stained glass windows and a steeple actually does not matter.

So let me challenge you just a little bit because I think this is applicable for all

of us.

If you are not being discipled, which I define as being regularly and personally taught and

encouraged to know and obey Jesus, I would question whether you are actually living

as a part of the church, which is something that Jesus greatly desires for us that we

are called to over and over in Scripture.

It may be that you are choosing to not engage in that and have been happy to come and sit

and leave and live your own life the other 160-some odd hours of the week.

For some of the people who are a part of our church, it was a matter of discipleship not

being readily available in the gatherings at the churches that they were a part of.

Whatever the case, I want to encourage you to lean in to discipleship with the church,

with this family of people who gather together to encourage one another in the name of Jesus,

our only great high priest.

So the whole point of this passage is that Jesus offers us something that is completely

new.

This way of Jesus is better in every possible way.

He is better than a dry religious system that fails in the end to bring us closer to God,

and instead he is God with us, God who reached down and walked with us and is with us still

through the Holy Spirit.

His righteousness is given to us instead of being earned.

It is better than anything that we could possibly earn, and it's a free gift of God.

And instead of being limited to a place, to a temple and a limited priesthood, instead

he is now with us always and is the only priest that we need.

The church becomes a gathering of fellow temples of the Holy Spirit.

And so the truth is that we don't need just a little bit of Jesus to hold our brokenness

together.

We need Jesus to make us entirely new, and that is exactly what he offers to do.

Ecclesia is a church of house churches gathering weekly in Council Bluffs, Iowa and in homes

throughout the week.

We are a Bible-centered church focused on preaching from Scripture and making disciples

of Jesus.

You can learn more about our statement of faith and contact the pastor by visiting ecclaseachurches.org.