QUESTION #13 Can the children of the bridechamber mourn so long as the Bridegroom is with them?

 QUESTIONS JESUS ASKED BIBLE STUDY 

    Read Matthew 9:9-17 KJV: 

 

       Can the children of the bridechamber mourn so long as the Bridegroom is with them? (Matthew 9:15)

 

I WILL HAVE MERCY NOT SACRIFICE

Reference: Matthew 9:9-17; Mark 2:13-22; Luke 5:27-39

 

Matthew has responded to the call of Jesus and hosts a joyous celebration and meal which includes Jesus, tax collectors, and sinners. When the Pharisees question Jesus’ behavior in eating with sinners and failing to fast as they do, Jesus simply points out that it was the sick that need a physician, he has not come to call the righteous to repentance, but sinners. He said, “I will have mercy not sacrifice, go and learn what this means”.

 

Jesus was quoting Hosea 6:6. God was saying to His people in Hosea, and Jesus was saying to the Pharisees in this message that it is more important to love God and have a relationship with Him and that in turn makes you a merciful person (loving, kind, selfless) and that going through the empty motions of spiritually impotent religious behavior doesn’t automatically make you a child of God.

 

Here, Jesus is saying that sacrificing of animals and other religious traditions weren’t of any value if the heart isn’t right with God and apparently the Pharisees were very good at going through religious appearances, but had no understanding of what God really wanted from them. If the Pharisees were in a place of having the right relationship with God, they would have recognized Jesus for who He was and would have been merciful to sinners and not puffed up with pride thinking they were above everyone else.

 

When the disciples of John the Baptist ask Jesus why His disciples do not fast as the Pharisees and they do, Jesus states that it is not appropriate for the “children of the Bridegroom” to fast while the Groom is still with them.

 

Jesus was making a tremendous claim for Himself here. In the Old Testament God had pictured Himself as the Husband of His people Israel (Isaiah 62:4-5; Jeremiah 2:2; 3:20; Ezekiel 16:8, Hosea 2:19-20). Now His Son, the Messiah, the long hoped-for one, has come and he claims to be the Bridegroom – that is, the husband of His people, who will be the true Israel (John 3:29). This is the kind of partially veiled claim Jesus made about His identity as God. If you had ears to hear, you could hear it. God the one that betrothed Israel to Himself in covenant love, has come.

 

Fasting was a means to enable one to draw close to God. God was incarnate, and was in their very presence. Just as there will be no fasting in the age to come because we will be face to face with Him, it would have been unnecessary for the disciples to fast when God was their daily companion. Jesus then states that someday the groom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast.

 

Jesus then spoke a parable unto them. The patch of new cloth and the new wine represent the new reality that has come with Jesus – the kingdom of God is here. The Bridegroom has come. The Messiah is in our midst. Jesus’ point here is that what he brings cannot be made to fit in the old order and old forms of religion with which the Jews were familiar. To do that would be destructive to both the old and the new. What Jesus brings is new, fresh, and transformational. It will rip apart anything that tries to force it into another way of doing, perceiving and experiencing. 

 

The metaphors were drawn from the existing culture in the time of Jesus. Wineskins would stretch with new wine being put in as it continued to ferment, and then they would harden. If new wine was put into a hardened wineskin, the continued fermentation risked bursting the skin. Similarly, new cloth would be expected to shrink considerably, so using it to patch already-shrunken cloth would be asking for problems. The point, of course, is that Jesus has a new message, “The Gospel,” and if you try to fit it into the old Jewish religion, law, system of animal sacrifices, and so on, it isn’t going to fit. 

 

Notes: