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This passage is not about fasting, and it is not about sewing, and it is not about home brewing. It is all about Jesus. Just glance up to Matthew 9.12. We looked at this last week. Jesus tells us that he is the great doctor. He came to help those who know they need help. Which is actually all of us, even if we don’t yet realise it. And Jesus says, as he said to Matthew the tax-collector in Matthew 9.9, "come follow me". And this evening we hear Jesus say, (Matthew 9.15):

Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.

It is all about Jesus. Twice there Jesus calls himself the bridegroom. Jesus swaps the white medics coat and stethoscope for another image of who he is – the image of a wedding with Jesus as the groom. We’ll come back to what that means in a minute. But grasp what that means and it may just blow away the picture of the Jesus that you thought you knew. Now the first thing to notice from this passage is the religion that is just like all the others. Have a look at Matthew 9.14. Let me read it again:

Then the disciples of John came to him [that is Jesus], saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?”

John’s disciples and the Pharisees were different groups of Jews and they took religion seriously. They came to Jesus with a question about fasting – which is giving up food, not for health or other reasons, but as a religious act. It seems that Matthew, who had just started following Jesus, didn’t do that. Nor did others who had accepted Jesus’ invitation to follow him, and this confused them, maybe even angered them. That’s because they divided the world into two groups: the goodies and the baddies. And the goodies were those who did all the right religious things: like going to the temple regularly or fasting, which is the focus here. What they say isn’t much of surprise. We expect religious leaders to say "do the right thing. Fast. Then you’ll be accepted by God and be one of the good guys". And that perhaps is why so many oppose organised religion – it produces arrogant do-gooders who leave everyone else feeling inadequate and guilty. And that is why many believe religion does more harm than good. The author, Stephen King says religion is:

a very dangerous tool that’s been misused by a lot of people.[Rolling Stone Magazine, October 2014]

Here is one account from someone who describes the impact of religion had on them:

After twenty-seven years of trying to live a perfect life, I failed…I was ashamed of myself all day long. My mind battling with itself with no relief…I always believed everything that I was taught but I thought that I was not approved by God. I thought that basically I, too, would die at Armageddon. I’ve spent literally years injuring myself…to punish myself so that God doesn’t have to punish me. It’s taken me years to feel deserving of anything good.

Imagine new disciple Matthew – hit with yet another thing he needs to do to stay on the right side of God. “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” In fact, the question raised by those described as John’s disciples may be what you expect Jesus to say. After all, isn’t he the founder of one of the largest of the organised religions? Wasn’t he someone who promoted religious activity? So you might expect Jesus to applaud and hang out with the decent religious people who get that right and to condemns and rejects those who don’t, but he doesn’t. Jesus doesn’t call people into a life that’s basically all about keeping religious rules. He calls them to follow him.

If we stop long enough to think about it, it’s obvious that we are not perfect. We know we mess up. In relationships we hurt others – from that cutting comment that makes your mum cry when all she did was try and get you up for school, or work to the devastation caused by betrayal and cheating on a partner. We make wrong choices. We become addicted to a whole range of things or people. We take what we want, and ignore the cost to others, or to the planet. Whatever the image we project to the world deep down we know that we are not perfect. But the truth of the matter is that we have not even begun to grasp just how imperfect we are. The situation is worse than we thought. We need help. That is what Jesus has been saying just before this question is asked of him. Jesus also divides people into two groups: but not the goodies and the baddies. Instead, it’s into those who accept they need help and those who don’t. Those who recognise they need a doctor and those who don’t.

Maybe you are just like the disciples of John here - who are just like every religious person. Do you assume that in order for God to approve of you (really approve of you) you need to qualify? Maybe it’s not fasting you think about first. Maybe it is stopping a bad habit, or becoming a better person and giving back to your community, or whatever it may be. Those are not bad things. Nor is fasting. Jesus will go on to say that there is a time when fasting is appropriate. Fasting is not a bad thing. But Jesus doesn’t call us into a life that’s basically about keeping religious rules. He calls us to follow him and he calls us to recognise that we need help. It’s not a case of ‘have I done enough?’ but knowing that I can never do enough.

Jesus teaches us that the one thing that qualifies us is knowing that we don’t, and the one thing that disqualifies us is thinking that we do. In other words, all we need is to know our need. The only thing to offer to God is to say: ‘I have nothing to offer.’ So first in this passage we see exposed the religion that is just like all the others. That leads us onto he second thing to notice – which is the Love that is like no other. Jesus did not come to start a new religion. He came to show us a love like no other. It is a gift, not something we qualify for by being good enough and we can do nothing to lose it. There is nothing like the love of Jesus! Look at Matthew 9.15. In reply to the question about fasting:

And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.

Do you see what he’s saying? He turns upside the expectation that the good life, the way God approves of will be like mourning. In this little parable, the disciples are compared to guests at a wedding. So think: loads of wonderful food and drink, plenty of dancing and very loud music! The life of a disciple of Jesus is like being at a party. Life with Jesus is full of life and joy. How different that is to life lived by terribly serious people who don’t seem able to enjoy life. And a far cry from religious swots dominated by an obsession with the problem of sin, and their own neurotic attempts to try and deal with guilt. And what is more they have missed the point completely. They were obsessing about whether or not the disciples of Jesus were fasting as a sign of being sad about how bad they were instead of focussing on who it was they were speaking to. This is Jesus – who came to deal with that problem once and for all. Now was not the time for fasting, now was the time to celebrate.

And this brings us back to the way Jesus describes himself here. He says think of me as a bridegroom (a husband at his wedding). That is a reference to the Old Testament part of the Bible that uses marriage as a picture of the relationship between God and his people. God is the husband, and his people are the bride. Put aside the cartoon way a husband is often portrayed as a weak, bumbling idiot or perhaps your own experience of a husband who is far from perfect. Instead here is a picture that God uses to help us understand what it means to follow him. And we see that God is faithful and loving and good, the perfect husband, committing himself to be faithful, even though his people are not faithful, and don't have it in themselves to be faithful. The husband who will always be there for his wife and whose love is everlasting. We saw that in the reading we had earlier from Isaiah 62.4-5:

You shall no more be termed [or called] Forsaken…for the Lord delights in you…as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

So what Jesus is saying is: 'I am God the perfect Husband. If you follow me, I will stick with and will never give up on you, even though you will fail me every day of your lives this side of heaven. But they have missed the point completely and don’t realise who Jesus is or what he came to offer them. Fasting was a way to show you took seriously the wrong things you had done and to show you were sorry. That isn’t wrong in itself, but for those who follow Jesus that isn’t the biggest reality in their lives. God's unfailing love, based on the forgiveness of our sins, is the even bigger reality, and that calls for joy and gladness especially while he is with them. Look back at Matthew 9.15. Jesus says:

…The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them…

What does that mean? Jesus is looking ahead to what will happen to him. On a little hill outside Jerusalem, where criminals were strung up naked on crosses to die an excruciating death, Jesus, gave himself up to be killed and he died. And doing that both showed his love for us and meet our deepest need – which is for forgiveness. And on that cross, the one person who ever truly qualified allowed himself to be disqualified, so that you and I, naturally disqualified, can qualify — as a free gift. When Jesus calls us to follow him we not only need to recognise our deep need, but we also need to stop trying to meet it ourselves. Following him means laying down our subtle efforts at appeasing God and others by our own resources. Jesus did not come to start a new religion. He did not come to offer the best religion of all. He came to end all religion. Jesus did not come to tell us to be nice and follow enough of the rules to appease God and others. Jesus came to die. He paid the price for the wrong we have done. Everything is taken care of. So all the bad we do can never lose God’s love, yet all the good we do can never gain God’s love. This is love like no other. And being loved like that changes you forever. Listen to Julie, a member of our church who has been involved in Celebrate Recovery:

Celebrate recovery helped me gain a much deeper understanding of the concept of grace. Grasping that grace is the fact that I undeservedly am accepted and deeply loved and forgiven by God because of what Christ has done on the cross has transformed the way in which I interact in relationships both personally but also professionally.Over the past 16 years, I've seen lots of things such as God bring healing, restoring relationships, people finding freedom from alcohol, anxiety, etc. But I think the three main fruits I've seen is that firstly, people develop a very deep sense of God personally loving them. Secondly, they accept that our world isn't perfect and they're not perfect either and thirdly the forging of deep, beautiful and long-lasting relationships which have come about because of the environment in CR that enables people to authentically share what is going on in their lives, to hear from the stories of others and in that process God connects people deeply together. And I have been richly blessed by that.

She knows the love of Jesus that is like no other. Do you? The third and final thing we see in this passage is that Jesus is doing a new thing. Look at what Jesus says in Matthew 9.16-17:

No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.

There are two pictures here. One from the world of sewing and one from the world of brewing. In both cases we have something old and something new. And in both cases the new thing is not compatible with the old one. What does this mean? Jesus is saying that following him means taking on board a different logic - a whole new way of thinking. The old way is the way of religion and the new way is what Jesus is doing. Righteousness, God's favour, can't be earned. It is a gift from God. The whole framework of religion is that I offer something to a god (perhaps a sacrifice or good behaviour) and the god rewards me by giving me something I want. This is also the dominant logic of almost all aspects of our contemporary non-religious society. Performance is followed by reward. I earn my salary at work. I merit my place on the sports team. Good performance is followed by reward. But following Jesus means almost exactly the reverse. What we receive from God is a free gift – it is not earned or deserved. It is unmerited grace and I respond not with a merit earning performance but with gratitude.

Judaism is no more ‘legalistic’ than any other religion, for the religious instinct to earn rather than receive God’s favour is a human, not a Jewish, problem. Jesus turns all our religious instincts on their head. Jesus is not trying to show us that his religion is the right one; it is meant to show us that religion itself is not the answer. The problem with the question that was asked about fasting was not actually about fasting. Jesus tells them that following him means leaving behind the get-what-you-work-for understanding of the way you think God relates to people. Instead we need to grasp that Jesus comes to bring a wild, lavish, all out of proportion, get-far-more-than-you-asked-for-as-long-as-you-don’t-try-to-pay-for-it understanding of the way God relates to his people. That doesn’t mean Jesus is saying you can do what you like and it doesn’t matter how we live. It does. But it’s not the right question to ask when it comes to asking if God accepts and forgives us.

Imagine during freshers fair (if such a thing still exists) you head over to one of the sports tables to sign up and you ask them what blood type do you need to have in order to qualify for the football team. There is no right answer because the very question betrays a misunderstanding of what it takes in order to be on the team. Blood type is important, but irrelevant to gaining access to the football team. And in the same way, living according to God’s way is important. A follower of Jesus who does not obey him is simply not a follower of Jesus. But it is irrelevant to joining the team. Forgiveness is not earned. It is given to as a gift to those who realise they need it, that they cannot earn or deserve it and that only Jesus can provide it. The disciples were slow to grasp that. So are we.

So two things to end with. First, if you’re already following Jesus remember that growing as a Christian is not by graduating on from the gospel of God’s free grace, but by deeper reflection on the love of Jesus that is like no other. The gospel is not the runway to the Christian life — getting us off the ground at conversion and landing us in heaven at death, but irrelevant in between. The gospel is the engine — getting us off the ground, landing us, and keeping us in the air all along. Christian growth is a process and will often feel like two steps forward and three steps back. Often as we get going as a follower of Jesus, we become more and more aware of the ways we are not perfect. But we do not move on by going back to trying harder to be good. We grow by deeper and deeper reflection on the very love of Jesus that rescued us in the first place. Our own efforts will never transform our hearts. Only God’s undeserved love can truly melt and transform the heart. God’s Spirit, through his word will keep driving it home all the more deeply – so come on Sundays, join a small group at church, read the Bible yourself. Do all you can not to forget the love shown us through Jesus. And let’s take special care how we speak to one another. How can we encourage each other to live by grace and not by the old logic of religion. What is our equivalent of ‘why don’t you fast?’ that is in danger of encouraging a fellow believer to depend on their own efforts rather than on Jesus love that is like no other? How can we help one another to ‘choose Jesus’, as Pete put it earlier in the service.

Secondly, you may not yet have begun following Jesus. To do so, all you need to do is speak to him. Tell him you now realise you’re not perfect and need his help. Recognize that you don’t deserve it, look to Jesus, and you are in. I’d love to chat more with you about that – so come and speak to me if you like. Or pickup a 'Why Jesus?' booklet. Come along next week to the special services we’re putting on or join a course called Hope Explored that will give you a chance to think this through a bit more. Let me end with a prayer. But first a moment of personal reflection and prayer:

I will follow you, I will walk by faith;
You have brought me near by your unrelenting grace.
I will set my mind on the things above;
You have won my heart with your
everlasting love.