March 23
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In the minds of the people of Jesus' day, the passages we read in Luke are incredibly unexpected. We continue to hear about Jesus' calling of Levi, who 'held a great banquet for Jesus'. Yet this was a taxcollector, whom the Jewish people hated for cheating them out of money. Jesus sees this all as making perfect sense, 'it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick'. Are we sick? Do we need a doctor?
Then Jesus' disciples go against many religious traditions of the day and his critics don't understand what has happened in Jesus' coming to the world. New wineskins! The disciples are chided for basically taking food off of the vine to eat when they were hungry and Jesus for telling a man to get up when he was crippled and the miracle occurring through his word. They don't realize that Jesus is the very one who originally rested on that 7th day of creation, establishing what it means to rest on the Sabbath. His major point is that he can set the rules because he made the rule to begin with. Jesus has come into the world and everything will change, but we must remember the Lord doesn't change and his plan to redeem the world continues as it always had. 'the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath'.
What is 'Sabbath' anyways? The eternal rest we find in Jesus Christ. We will talk about this in detail one week.
Everytime I read this I wonder what religious traditions I try to put in the way of Jesus' followers doing their work. I did this as a Baptist, then as a Pentacostal, and now as a Methodist. Whatever our religious traditions are and wherever they came from, they simply can't compete with Jesus' ways.
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