While Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is arguably one of the world’s most famous works of art, if you’ve ever seen it (whether in-person at the Louvre in Paris or in photos online) you’ll know that it hangs on a plain, tan wall in a large, mostly-empty room. The original rationale for such simplicity of presentation was to help patrons avoid “museum fatigue” caused by over-stimulation. But a 2017 study vindicated the decision as it found that “appreciating beauty takes conscious thought—and therefore, distracting a person can prevent them from fully taking in the work of art before them.” Simply stated: Beauty is best appreciated when undistracted.

The same is true of following Jesus. The Christian life is a beautiful thing, but when we’re distracted—by sin, tradition, culture, or preferences—its enjoyment and effectiveness can be diminished. How can we avoid that? How can we make sure we’re following Jesus unfettered by the unnecessary?

Manuscript

While Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is arguably one of the world’s most famous works of art, if you’ve ever seen it (whether in-person at the Louvre in Paris or in photos) you’ll know that it’s hanging on a drab tan wall in a large, mostly-empty room.

The original rationale for such simplicity of presentation was to help patrons avoid “museum fatigue” caused by over-stimulation. But a 2017 study vindicated the decision as it found that “appreciating beauty takes conscious thought—and therefore, distracting a person can prevent them from fully taking in the work of art before them.”

Simply stated: Beauty is best appreciated when undistracted. 

Today we’re going to find the same is true of following Jesus. It’s a beautiful thing, the Christian life. But, when we’re distracted—by sin, guilt, tradition, cultural hangups, or whatever—it can diminish its enjoyment and effectiveness.

Our passage today in Matthew 9 is structured around two questions levelled against Jesus by his critics—one while feasting, the other about fasting. Both questions illustrate and warn against the danger and damage that distraction can bring those who long to follow Jesus.

A Question While Feasting

The first scene begins in verse 9 and, as I mentioned, there we find a question while feasting. 

As Jesus went on from there, He saw a man called Matthew, sitting in the tax collector’s booth; and He said to him, “Follow Me!” And he got up and followed Him.

Matthew 9:9

Matthew, the author of this gospel account, includes his own call to discipleship. Notice the immediacy and totality of his response. He stood up from his collector’s booth, left it behind, followed Jesus.

Then it happened that as Jesus was reclining at the table in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and were dining with Jesus and His disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to His disciples, “Why is your Teacher eating with the tax collectors and sinners?”

Matthew 9:10–11

As if calling a tax collector to follow wasn’t enough, Matthew immediately records a scene in which Jesus is dining with other tax collectors. Maybe Matthew, thrilled by his new life, wanted his old crew to experience it also. Maybe he wanted them to meet Jesus as he had and so he had thrown a dinner party. 

Whatever the case, it’s an intimate, joyous setting. Hospitality and meal-sharing were signs of fellowship and here Jesus and his disciples are reclined at a table, laughing and chatting no doubt, with two groups Jews considered of ill-repute: Tax collectors and sinners.

Tax collectors, like Matthew and his friends, were ethnically Jewish people who worked for Rome, their national oppressors. And sinners was a label stamped on anyone who didn’t meet the man-made standards of institutionalized Judaism. This is a group of misfits, outsiders, unclean. Yet, Jesus isn’t only ministering to them, preaching to them, healing them, but he’s dining with them.

The Pharisees catch wind of this social faux pas and can’t resist the opportunity to expose Jesus as a false messiah, something they’ve been longing to do with growing intensity. Not going to Jesus directly but speaking to his disciples they ask: “How could a ‘Rabbi’ be doing this?” There’s condescension and accusation baked into the cake of that question. Translation: He shouldn’t be, at least not if he’s legit.

This is the start of Matthew’s recording of a growing antagonism toward Jesus within the ranks of Israel’s religious leadership.

But when Jesus heard this, He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,’ for I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Matthew 9:12–13

Jesus returns fire. Speaking to people who were assumed to be the experts in the Hebrew Scriptures—if by no one else, certainly by themselves—Jesus tells them to go back to Bible school. “You’ve missed it,” he says. “You don’t understand the simplest things about the God you say you serve and represent.”

Specifically, Jesus points them back to Hosea 6:6, a passage that showcases God’s love and mercy in the face of a rebellious and sinful Israel. God is compassionate to sinners. Always has been. And he wants his people to reflect his character. If the Pharisees understood this, they wouldn’t be criticizing Jesus for ministering to sinners since God desires compassion rather than religious externalities, that is “sacrifices.”

This short scene illustrates how the leaders of Israel had become distracted. They were so concerned with protecting their reputations, their traditions, and their religiosity that they had lost sight of the beautiful character of the God they claimed to serve. And, consequently, they weren’t able to recognize the Messiah who had finally come after all these years, acting consistent with the Father’s character.

They confused the means and the ends. God had given Israel the Law to set them apart as a people, to protect them, and foster a relationship between sinners and himself. It was the means by which God’s people could interact with God, the end goal.

However, over time, that Law grew to be an end in and of itself. No longer was it the means by which Israel got to God but, in many ways, the law became god to them. No longer was keeping the law an expression of the faith that saved them and an act of the worship God deserved, but it became the means by which they were saved and a demonstration of their own godliness. The means had become the end for the nation and they had become distracted by it, so much so that they couldn’t even recognize the character of God.

We would do wise to be careful to avoid the same error. God has given the church specific ends: We’re to worship God, build one another up, and tell other people about Jesus. And he has also given us many means by which we can accomplish those ends. Giving to the church, corporate prayer, Bible study, hospitality, singing together, sitting under the preached Word. 

We never want to confuse the means for the ends, however. I give to the church as an act of worship and an expression of my faith in a God who provides, not because the act of giving is meritorious. That’s a confusion of the means and the ends. It’s tantamount to celebrating the straw for quenching your thirst when all it did was transport the water from the cup to your mouth.

The Pharisees in this passage, representing Israel’s religious leadership, were so concerned about their traditions that they couldn’t appreciate the beauty of God’s compassion. They were distracted.

A Question About Fasting

As I mentioned at the outset, this passage is built around two questions levelled at Jesus. The first, as we’ve seen, was a question while feasting. The second, starting in verse 14, is a question about fasting.

Then the disciples of John came to Him, asking, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but Your disciples do not fast?”

Matthew 9:14

Unlike the Pharisees, John the Baptist’s disciples approach Jesus directly but, in their question, they do associate themselves with the religious leaders of Israel. The question is about the practice of fasting, something they and the Pharisees did often but they’ve noticed Jesus’s disciple don’t.

Fasting is the abstaining from food and, in the OT, was always done to express grief, contrition, humility, and extreme neediness. The practice is never commanded in the NT, but I’m sure most of us have fasted whether we realized it or not. If you’ve ever received terrible news, lost a loved one, or were caught in egregious sin, often a loss of appetite accompanies that experience. Why? Because being overcome with the inescapable pain of the reality before us, we don’t eat but, instead, if we’re Christians, we should be calling out to God for help, mercy, forgiveness, or whatever else. 

Fasting in the OT was associated with such troubling times. And that’s how Jesus understanding it here  as well.

And Jesus said to them, “The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they?

Matthew 9:15a

Jesus assumes that fasting is a portrayal of sorrow not a symbol of spirituality. The Pharisees and John’s disciples had, again, confused the means and the ends, and treated fasting as a sign of devotion and spiritual maturity. A religious act to check off the box rather than a heartfelt expression of true inner turmoil.

Jesus answers their question by simply pointing out that now’s not the time for mourning. The promised King is in your midst. The OT uses the bride-bridegroom picture to represent the relationship between God and his people, Jesus is saying, “I’m here with you now. How could there possibly be fasting at such a moment of celebration?”

Jesus continues, however: “But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast” (9:15b). The verb translated taken away is one of force and passivity. In other words, while now’s not the time for grief, that time is ahead when the bridegroom, Jesus, is taken away by force. Here we have the first allusion to Christ’s pending death. That will be a time for mourning. That will be a time for fasting. But not now.

And to illustrate how John’s disciples had misunderstood the point of fasting, Jesus adds two parabolic illustrations.

“But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.” 

Matthew 9:16–17

If you attach a new, un-shrunken piece of fabric to an old garment, it will eventually pull away from the worn-out, inflexible cloth and makes things worse. Similarly, new wine expands as it ferments and needs new, flexible wineskins to accommodate the growth. To put new wine into old, stiff wineskins would be to waste both because the skin would break and the wine would spill.

Remember the two encounters Jesus had in our text. First, the Pharisees were so zealous to protecting their traditions they forgot about God’s compassion and didn’t recognize it in the Messiah. Second, John’s disciples were so dedicated to fasting they forgot its purpose and couldn’t recognize the time of celebration before them: The Bridegroom was here!

In both cases the Law as it had come to be understood by Israel in the first century, butting up against what Jesus came to do and who Jesus claimed to be. The old was in conflict with the new.

And by illustration, Jesus is saying, you can’t combine these two things. The old is too brittle and worn out. It served its purpose in its time, but now something new and fresh has come. To combine them wound’t preserve them, it would ruin both. No, the new comes to replace the old. And this applies to the kingdom that Jesus was offering, but it also applies to the church age in which you and I are now living. 

Remember, the kingdom will be postponed in a few chapters in Matthew and, certainly, it would have been, and will be “new wine.” But the coming of the Holy Spirit and the inauguration of the church age is also “new wine,” and it cannot be poured into the old wineskin of the Law. It cannot be stitched onto the old garment of tradition.

You and I need to be very clear about what Jesus is teaching here. The Mosaic Law is foundational, educational, but replaceable. In fact, it was given as a temporary covenant with Israel. Christ came not to destroy it, but to fulfill it. It’s still inspired by God and useful for our edification (2 Tim 3:16–17), but we must be careful pulling what is old into the new lest we become distracted from the beauty of the new covenant we have in Christ by his blood.

Follow Christ, Not Convention

We are invited, as the NT people of God, to follow Christ not convention; to follow Christ, not tradition, not the Law. In fact, these two options are laid out in our text today. 

Look back to verse 9. There we find Jesus calling to a sinner, Matthew, and inviting him to follow. Matthew’s response: Immediate and total. The aftermath: Reclining, dining, and fellowship. Feasting not fasting.

In contrast we see the Pharisees and John’s disciples. They don’t follow or feast. Why? Because they were burdened with tradition and religiosity, distracted from the invitation and blinded to beautiful new era Jesus was introducing.

We want to be like Matthew, don’t we? We want to follow Christ not convention. We want to take Jesus up on his offer to follow him in the direction of compassion and joy eternal. We want to throw off the yoke of unnecessary tradition, avoid confusing the means and ends, and instead, live, work, serve, and follow in the freedom Christ provides.

What conventions are keeping you from following Jesus? Traditions that you’ve built up in your mind, or grown up with in your life, that are distracting you from what’s beautiful. And, like fasting, these can be good things misunderstood or good things done for the wrong reasons. Church attendance, Bible reading, prayer, giving to the church, fellowship. Are these means of worshiping God, ministering to the people of God, or evangelizing the lost becoming ends in and of themselves? 

What traditions, or religious activities might be keeping you from enjoying the freedom you have in Christ to follow him with joy? Identify what it is and then, like Matthew, get up, follow him, leave it behind.

This week when you feast (dinner time), add to your pre-meal prayer, “God, help me follow Christ and not convention. Lord, keep us undistracted from tradition and set our eyes on our never-changing compassionate Saviour.”

---

---