New Covenant

Food and Following (Matthew 9:9-17)

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

It seems like food is significant in every culture.  Whether a culture is known internationally for its food or not, something about sitting down together to eat carries more significance than the mere fuelling of the body or renting restaurant space for a meeting.  In Jesus’ time, it is evident that table fellowship mattered greatly.

In Matthew 9:9, Jesus called Matthew from the tax booth to a new life as a follower of Jesus.  That may seem like a familiar idea to us, but having such despised sinners as followers was a radical act by Jesus.  Who deserves to be his follower?  Who deserves to be his apprentice, learn from him, become like him, relate to him, and be launched into a life of ministry representing him?  Did Matthew deserve it?  Do you or I deserve it?  May we never lose the wonder of the call to be his followers!

Immediately, we read of Jesus reclining at the table with many tax collectors and sinners.  Luke’s account points out that Matthew laid out a “great feast,” although Matthew was too humble to mention that detail.  (Luke 5:29)

The Fellowship Question (Matthew 9:10-13) – The meal sparked a fairly obvious food-related question – who should Jesus eat with?  To the religious evaluators, it was obvious that Jesus should not be eating with tax collectors and sinners. Indeed, they were the ones who’d earned the invite to the special meal.

I was recently with a pastor whose church seeks to reach out to the marginalized and the maligned of society.  He took my family to dinner, and we enjoyed a wonderful meal together at his favourite restaurant.  He told us how, when his church had started, they hired this restaurant and filled it with people who may never have eaten in a restaurant before.  The feast was a gift.  The gift was not just the food; it was a fantastic way to get to know a Jesus who would sit and eat with societal nobodies like Matthew’s friends.

It is interesting how Jesus responded to the question.  He differentiated between those who are healthy and those who are sick.  It is the sick who know they need the help of the physician.  After all, whoever says, “Let me allow my broken ankle to heal, and then I will head for the hospital,” or “Let me wait for this abdominal pain to pass before I go and get checked out?”  It makes no sense to hold back when you know you need help.

Jesus called the religious to soften their hearts toward those who knew their spiritual need.

The Fasting Question (Matthew 9:14-17) – Matthew follows up with another food-related question.  Why do Jesus’ followers eat?  Some of John the Baptist’s disciples wanted to know about fasting.  After all, the Pharisees were promoters of the Old Testament Law and promoted fasting.  Then, they were followers of the final Old Testament prophet and were into fasting, too.  So, indeed, if Jesus were a step forward religiously, he would promote fasting even more.  The Law, the Prophets, and now came Jesus; therefore, his followers should be fasting extra!  But they missed something: Jesus was not just another step forward. He was the goal of it all!

Jesus spoke in wedding terms.  A wedding day is not a normal day.  You never walk into a wedding reception and expect to find people fasting.  It is a day of feasting!  It cannot be a typical day when the bridegroom is present! 

Jesus went on to give two everyday examples to make a point.  Nobody would put a piece of unshrunk cloth onto an old garment because it would self-destruct when it got wet and dried again.  Everyone knew that.  Likewise, nobody would put new wine into old, hard, shrunk, leathery wineskins.  Again, it would self-destruct when the wine fermented and expanded.  Everyone knew that, too.  So, to Jesus’ point – his work was not just another step forward in the Old Testament line of promise.  It was the launch of something profoundly new that could not be contained in the old framework.

We may not be from a Jewish background and tempted to try to squeeze the radically new gift of New Covenant life into the framework of the Old Covenant.  But actually, we are all tempted to try to add the new life Jesus offers into the old way of religious effort that always characterizes humanity.  It is so easy to think that becoming a Christian adds a few more responsibilities onto my to-do list of moral efforts for respectable living.  However, that is not how it works.  It is a radically new life.

Jesus came to transform our lives by his presence.  He calls us to live a radically new life as his followers.  We are called to be with him, enjoy time together, learn from him, and be transformed from inside to out.  We are called to feast in joy because he has come.  We are called to fast in earnest because he is currently away.  Jesus is not asking you to become more religious; he is offering something far more radical than that.

As our thoughts are drawn to the first Easter, remember the radical nature of all that Jesus has done for us.  And then don’t settle for a modified version of religious living.  We get to follow the risen Christ through the year ahead.  Jesus offers a radically new life to really needy folks like you and me.

2012 Blog Review – Part 2

/ Peter Mead / Leave a comment

Podium Medals2On Friday I reviewed the year from several angles.  But there is one left to consider.  Since this was a year of weekly series, what were some of the highlights?  Which series stirred the most responses?  Which series stirred interest with the fewest post, and which went on the longest?  Here’s a quick look back:

They got into the final – Four series stirred enough interest (comments and likes, as well as in-person conversations) to warrant a mention here:

Beyond Guilt – is there a better way to motivate listeners to change than guilt?  Absolutely.  Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Why Do We Preach – the year ending reflection on our own motivation in ministry.  Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, summary.

Truth Through Personality – reflections on implications of Philips Brooks oft-quoted definition of preaching.  Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6.

Overqualified! – how easy to over qualify important issues in our preaching and thereby undermine them.  Grace, Trinity, Go, Means, Heart & Head.

Agonizingly close to a podium finish – Just keeping up the Olympic theme since this has been such a great year for British sport!  These three almost sneaked into the top three:

Faint Not – the discouraged preacher is a title many of us carry regularly.  Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

Biggest Big Ideas – this was my favourite series of the year to write.  The biggest big ideas weaving through the canon. God, Creation, Sin, Grace, Faith, Redemption, Community, Spreading Goodness, Hope, Christ.

Interactive Bible Observation Preaching – this was the shortest series to make the review, with just two posts.  Post 1, post 2.

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The medal places – So here are the top three series of 2012:

Bronze – Preaching New Covenant . . . a core issue for truly Christian preaching.  Introduction, Sin, Heart, Trinity.

Silver – Technology, Bible Software and Preaching, the new reality for many of us.  Online research, Social Networks+, Disconnected, Bible Software,  Downside, Ajith Fernando’s Comment.

Gold – Preaching Story (also the longest, at 18 posts!): Theology, People, Plots, Power, Function, Adults, Reading, Telling, Mistakes, part 2, Thesaurus, Bible, OT, Gospels, Acts, Storying, Super-Genre, Artistry/Accuracy.

It has been a good year to ponder preaching together.  Thank you for visiting the site, for commenting and most of all, for faithfully serving a God worth proclaiming!

 

Preaching, New Covenant and Sin

/ Peter Mead / 6 Comments

Sometimes we need to be contradicted.  For instance, we assume that if we are going to take the issue of sin seriously, then we need to give some significant attention to it.  Perhaps by implementing some self-controlled, self-disciplined approach to sin control in our lives.

On the contrary.

Hang on, am I suggesting that we shouldn’t take sin seriously?  Am I suggesting that we should go and sin freely?  Of course not!  Why do some people automatically assume that a turn from focusing on virtue is to turn in pursuit of vice?  The opposite of moral effort may not be immoral action.

I would suggest that the New Covenant takes sin more seriously than we do or think we do.  God takes sin seriously, which is why He promised the New Covenant.  Jesus Christ takes sin seriously, which is why He inaugurated the New Covenant with his own blood.  The writers of the New Testament took sin seriously, which is why they pushed the New Covenant so strongly.

And we need to take sin more seriously.  We need to stop thinking it is something we can handle by our own effort, our own discipline, our own practices.  This is true for the not-yet-saved, and it is true for the believer.  The foundation of the New Covenant is sin forgiven.

Sometimes it is hard to realize just how much we don’t grasp something we think we’ve known for so long.  Take grace, for instance.  At the core of God’s dealings with us is this issue of grace – His character, His glory, His self-giving.  Yet we turn grace into a commodity and preach grace-plus, or grace-but, or grace-however.  We don’t need to preach some sort of grace-balanced message.  We need to present to people, believers or not, the wonderful glorious extravagant imbalanced grace of a God who gives himself to deal with our sin.

If our listeners think that grace means license to sin, then we haven’t preached grace clearly enough.  Maybe we’ve offered a halfway house kind of grace, a grace that addresses guilt but doesn’t capture the heart.  A grace-as-thing that pays for guilt, but not a grace-as-person that captivates our hearts.

The solution to a license type of response is not to balance grace with guilt, pressure, codes and laws.  The solution is to do a better job of preaching grace.

At the foundation of the New Covenant is this wonderful truth that God has promised to remember sins no more, and that truth is presented like a vivid 3-d billboard to our hearts in the death of His Son on the cross.  It is there, in shocking shame and agony that we see God’s glorious grace made manifest to us.

Tomorrow let’s push this deeper and recognize the heart of the New Covenant.