Everything Changes with Jesus

There is a time for fasting and all that goes with it “when the groom is taken away.” This is the first allusion to Jesus’ death in Mark’s Gospel. Joy is exchanged for sorrow, and celebration turns to mourning. This is an abrupt and surprising image. In a normal wedding the guests eventually leave. Jesus interjects the alien thought of the groom being forcibly removed from the wedding celebration.

Already there are storm clouds over Jesus’ ministry, initiated by the consternation of the scribes and Pharisees over Jesus’ presumption to forgive sins in 2:10 and His consorting with sinners in 2:13-17. Jesus is aware of the future consequences of His confrontations with the authorities (see 3:6). Like Isaiah’s “Servant of the Lord,” Jesus, too, will be “cut off from the land of the living” (Isa 53:8).

The kingdom of God has made a personal appearance in Jesus, but the final victory is far from realized. In order to overcome sin and death, the bridegroom first must become their victim. The reference to the bridegroom being taken from the disciples, and their subsequent fasting, was surely an exhortation to perseverance for Mark’s congregation in Rome, itself the victim of Nero’s depraved persecution. Mark is telling the church56 at Rome, “There will be days when Jesus will seem far from you, just as the Father was far from Jesus in His passion” (see 14:36; 15:34).

The bridegroom, our Lord Jesus, would be snatched away to suffer alone on a cross to atone for our sins, to die the death we should have died, to pay the price for sin we should have paid. He died in my place. He bore my wrath. He took on my judgment. God killed His Son so He would not have to kill me. There is an appropriate time to fast and mourn. It is when I consider the infinite price paid for my sin by my Savior.

Mark 2:21-22

The imagery now shifts to two concise parables. The connection is to Jesus and what His first coming means. Jesus came to save sinners, not the selfrighteous (v. 17). Jesus came to bring gladness, not sadness (v. 19). The pertinent question isn’t why Jesus’ disciples didn’t fast, but why the Pharisees didn’t feast and celebrate the presence of the Messiah! Here Jesus informs us that He came to make things new and not perpetuate the old. With the coming of the Messiah, Judaism must give way to Christianity—and rightly so, for in Jesus the Hebrew faith finds its fulfillment and completion.

In the first parable, attempting to unite the gospel of Jesus and the old religion of Judaism—exemplified by the Pharisees’ ritualistic fasting—is as foolish as trying to patch an old, worn-out garment with a new, unshrunk piece of cloth. When the new piece becomes wet, it will shrink, tear away, and make an even larger hole. With the coming of Jesus, everything is new. The old was not bad, but it is no longer usable. It has been replaced by something better. To continue to try to prop it up and give it a new face is useless. It is futile.

When the real thing has arrived, we do not continue to worship the shadow (Heb 10:1). To do so is to create a false religion—one that cannot save but can only damn.

In the ancient world the skins of goats were stripped off as nearly whole as possible. They were then filled with new wine. Their natural elasticity57 and flexibility, as well as their strength, would allow the skin to stretch and securely contain the new wine as it fermented and expanded. However, if you put new wine in old wineskins that had become brittle and weak, when fermentation took place, the expansion would burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins would be lost.

This parable and the one about the patch both illustrate the radical new era in Jesus’ coming. Jesus is the new cloth and the new wine. He is not an attachment, addition, or appendage to the status quo. He cannot be integrated into or contained by preexisting structures—even Judaism, the Torah, and the synagogue.

The question is not whether the Pharisees will add Jesus’ teachings to their list of traditions and rituals—like sewing a new patch on an old garment—but whether they will forsake the shadow of the old covenant and embrace the reality of the new covenant. Nor is it a question whether disciples will incorporate Jesus in their old way of life—like refilling an old container—but whether they will become entirely new receptacles for the expanding fermentation of Jesus and the gospel in their lives.

With Jesus and His life, ministry, atoning death, and glorious resurrection, everything changes. It changes for the better and it changes for good. There can be no compromise between Judaism and Christianity, between worksbased religion and salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, or between my old life and my new life.

Warren Wiersbe said,

Jesus lived, died, and rose again on our behalf, and that changes everything!