Renewing the Church (6)

Tradition and traditions

The previous article in this series, a corrective to the misunderstanding of many Protestants concerning Jesus’ criticism of the Pharisees and scribes found in Mark 7:1-23, stated that “tradition” simply meant that “which is received and then delivered.” In 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, Paul uses two words which describe the Gospel itself as tradition. The two words are paralambano, “receive,” and paradidomi, “deliver.”

We receive the Gospel and we deliver it to others. What Jesus criticized in Mark 7 was not tradition per se, but the “tradition of the elders” (Mark 7:3) and the “tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). He said, “You have the commandment of God and [yet] hold to the tradition of men” (Mark 7:8). Jesus thus made a distinction between God-given tradition and man-made tradition. The Exodus, the Passover, and the torah are God-given traditions which Israel was the pass on to its children (Dt. 4:9).

In Luke 5:33-39, Jesus is confronted by His opposition with this statement: “The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.” The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery gives the purpose for fasting:

Fasting is the act of abstaining from food for spiritual reasons and primarily connotes an openness to divinity and a posture of humility. It involves prayer, grief, penance, seeking guidance and piety. But fasting was widely abused, so it can also carry the imagery of hypocrisy and religious display (Is 58; Mt 6)…The Hebrew expression for fasting, “afflicting the soul” fits well with the imagery of disfiguring the face, weeping, lying on the ground, putting ashes on the head and putting on sackcloth.

Jesus responds by stating that there is an appropriate season for fasting, but this is not the season: “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” This is not the season for fasting because the bridegroom is in the middle of courting His bride, His disciples, who, over time, will through time expand and grow into the completed bride of Christ. When the bridegroom departs (which He must do), then that will be the appropriate time to fast. That will be the time to repent, to seek guidance, to pray, to seek renewal, to seek the face of God for renewed piety. When one understands that this is what Jesus is teaching, then one can understand the parables that follow.

Wine and wineskins
Confusion arises in the interpretation of the two parables that follow because many interpreters refer to Jesus as the new wine. But if one pays attention to what Jesus says in Luke 5:38-39, “But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”

Jesus is not referring to Himself as the new wine. Jesus is referring to Himself as the old wine that pleases the tongue.

New fasts, new traditions, were being offered by the disciples of John the Baptist and the disciples of the Pharisees. In the Old Testament, there is only one mandatory fast—that for The Day of Atonement. All other fasts were optional. These new fasts are equivalent to the “unshrunk cloth (Matthew 9:16; Mark 2:21),” or the torn “piece from a new garment (Luke 5:36).” These traditions are the “new wine.”

The traditional Protestant way of interpreting these two parables misses the mark in that it says that Jesus is the “new wine.” In this flawed interpretation, Jesus is bursting through the old wineskin trying to contain Him, namely that of Second Temple Judaism. When one interprets this parable in this manner, it creates a non sequitur with Jesus’ comment in Luke 5:39, “And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’” This statement thus does not make sense if one is interpreting this parable in the usual manner.

But if Jesus is saying, “I am the old wine, the best wine. Taste me and savor me. I am not harsh and raw like new wine. I am the Son of the Living God who existed before the foundation of the world. And because of this, even before Abraham, ‘I am.’ Only I can properly interpret the law and this is evident when I declare, “You have heard it said of old, but I say to you…’ I am the true Torah of God, I am the fulfillment of the law, I am its end, I am not the thorny fence that men have placed around the Torah with their man-made traditions of fasting and prayer.”

This is reinforced by Mark’s account when Jesus says in that Gospel, “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, so are the skins” (Mark 2:22). What Jesus is implying is that old wine in new wineskins works, but new wine in old wineskins destroys both the skins and the wine. A proper understanding of this parable results in profound implications in terms of mission.

The mission of the church
All too often, mission in the past consisted of putting new wine in old wineskins. Missionaries were as interested in importing Western culture as they were in importing the gospel.

The wineskin we live in is our pagan culture. Some try to alter the wine so that it is in conformity with its container. Many “liberal” theologians have tried to do this, as well as some in the Emerging Church. We are not to compromise the wine because that would be compromising Jesus Himself and the God-given tradition of the Gospel. People today do not understand the very basics of their desperate need for the Gospel because the moral-compass of a Christian worldview is not in their basic assumptions about life. They are as spiritually clueless as the Greeks who heard Paul preach in Athens (Acts 17:22-34). Using Paul’s sermon as a model for reaching those who are spiritually clueless means that we must begin addressing them at the very beginning, informing them first about who created the world and why, then carefully and lovingly introducing their need and their fulfillment of that need in Christ. In his Athens sermon, Paul used the prevailing culture as a means of introducing the Gospel (“For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown God’”—Acts 17:23); Paul even quoted one of their philosophers and one of their poets, exhibiting his familiarity with the thought and literature of his day.

Without compromising our message, we must present the Gospel in terms and words that our prevailing culture understands. Mission in our backyard requires us to study our culture critically and to use this study as a means of pouring the sweet wine of salvation into the new and raw wineskins that are so empty and waiting to be filled. As old wine permeates a new wineskin and saturates it with its aged goodness, so should the gospel permeate the surroundings and cultures in which it is poured.

Next steps

Does the worship of your local church reflect the culture surrounding the throne? What is your local church doing to transform the greater culture in which it finds itself? Talk to some church leaders about how they understand the relationship between your church, your church’s worship, and the cultural condition of the surrounding community.

For more insight to the mission of the Church, order Chuck Colson’s book, Being the Body, from our online store. Or read the article, “The Rest of the Gospel,” by Regis Nicoll.

 PRINT

 RSS

EMAIL