On Being Real Mark 2:1-3-28
Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason -- January 29, 2006
Chuck Swindoll notes that he found a children’s book that had a message for adults. The main character of the book was a little stuffed rabbit, all shiny and new, who goes through the process of becoming “real”, that is being more than just one more toy on the shelf. As he struggles with feelings of uneasiness, he engages an old, worn-out, welll-used, much-loved horse in conversation. This is that conversation:
The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by –and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up.” He asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” Improving your Serve, p 19, Charles Swindoll.
Our text for today is found in Mark 2:13-28
13Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that gathered around him. 14As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax-collection booth. “Come, be my disciple,” Jesus said to him. So Levi got up and followed him.
15That night Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to be his dinner guests, along with his fellow tax collectors and many other notorious sinners. (There were many people of this kind among the crowds that followed Jesus.) 16But when some of the teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with people like that, they said to his disciples, “Why does he eat with such scum?”
17When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call sinners, not those who think they are already good enough.”
18John’s disciples and the Pharisees sometimes fasted. One day some people came to Jesus and asked, “Why do John’s disciples and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?”
19Jesus replied, “Do wedding guests fast while celebrating with the groom? Of course not. They can’t fast while they are with the groom. 20But someday he will be taken away from them, and then they will fast. 21And who would patch an old garment with unshrunk cloth? For the new patch shrinks and pulls away from the old cloth, leaving an even bigger hole than before. 22And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. The wine would burst the wineskins, spilling the wine and ruining the skins. New wine needs new wineskins.”
23One Sabbath day as Jesus was walking through some grainfields, his disciples began breaking off heads of wheat. 24But the Pharisees said to Jesus, “They shouldn’t be doing that! It’s against the law to work by harvesting grain on the Sabbath.”
25But Jesus replied, “Haven’t you ever read in the Scriptures what King David did when he and his companions were hungry? 26He went into the house of God (during the days when Abiathar was high priest), ate the special bread reserved for the priests alone, and then gave some to his companions. That was breaking the law, too.” 27Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made to benefit people, and not people to benefit the Sabbath. 28And I, the Son of Man, am master even of the Sabbath!”
Later in Mark’s Gospel we will see Jesus saying “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:45).
He makes it quite clear that He came to serve and to give.
It makes sense then for us to say that God desires the same things for us. God is in the process of building in his people the same serving and giving qualities that characterized His Son Jesus.
The disciples of Jesus must have understood this, don’t you think? After all, they spent most of three years with Jesus listening to him teach, and watching the example he set before them. So they must have gotten it right. Right? Wrong!
In Matthew 20:20-21 we find that Mrs. Zebedee, the mother of two of the disciples, James and John, and wife of a Galilean fisherman. She came to Jesus with a request one day:
“Then the mother of the sons of Zebedee came to Him with her sons, bow3ing down, and making a request of Him. And He said to her, “What do you wish?” She said to him, “Command that in your Kingdom these two sons of mine may sit, one on your right and one on your left.” She wants thrones for her sons. Rulers need thrones!
And Just in case you are wondering how the other ten felt about this, verse 24 tells us that they all became indignant. They weren’t going to give up those top spots without a fight. For you see, they were ticked off that John and James might get the glory they wanted.
Jesus went on to say that “whoever wishes to become great among you shall be your servant…”
All of this leads us up to our text for today.
Jesus is walking by the seashore in Capernaum again. The text indicates that he was walking along side the seashore, and indicates that it was something he often did. And as he walks along the seashore, the crowds of people kept on coming to him. The picture here is that of people constantly coming to him, continuously coming to him. He could not now get away from them very easily.
And he kept on teaching them. They kept coming and he kept on teaching them.
As Jesus is passing by along the seashore, he passed by the toll booth for the Great West Road from Damascus to the Mediterranean Sea. There was constant traffic on the road and Matthew was a toll collector. Around here we understand about tolls. If you use the road, you have to pay the toll. In those days they did not have open road tolling. When you came to Levi’s toll booth, you had to stop and pay the toll. This was the custom office for Capernaum.
He collected tolls for Herod Antipas. And as an employee for the hated Romans he was in turn hated and despised by the Jews. A person like Levi would buy the right to collect the tolls for so much money, and then he would attempt to collect enough to pay himself back what he had spent and then make a large profit to boot. They typically overcharged to ensure that they would get what they needed. The people paying the tolls were the victims and they hated the toll takers because of this.
Levi was a Jew who loved money more than the good regards of his countrymen. And as a result, was isolated from most of the Jews.
But here was a man Jesus could use. Jesus passed by this way time and again. And he would have seen Levi in his toll booth. His observation of the man led hi to choose him to be one of his disciples.
“Follow me.” Jesus says. It seems quite abrupt to us as we read the Scriptures, but it comes after much observation on the part of Jesus. Follow me…is akolutheo, a word that comes from a word that means “to walk the same road” and it means “to follow one who precedes, to join him as his attendant, to join one as his disciple, to side with his party”.
Notice that this is a command. It is not an invitation, no, Jesus is not saying “Would you like to follow me?”
The sense of the words “Follow me” is that it renders Levi willing to respond to the command. It is also a present tense verb: meaning “start following me and continue as a habit of life to follow me.”
Levi will now walk the same road that Jesus walked.
~ it will be a road of self-sacrifice
~ it will be a road of separation
~ it will be a road of suffering
~ it will be a road of holiness
We, who follow Jesus, will walk down those same roads with Jesus.
One more thought regarding the “Follow me”…it was actually expressed as “Follow with me”.
What does that say to Levi and to us who receive the same command?
Jesus welcomes Levi to a participation in His companionship and this “with me” companionship was to be a side by side walk down the same road. This command to Follow me is the same blessed fellowship for every believer in Jesus Christ.
And then Jesus went to Levi’s house to eat with him and his friends. Levi threw a great feast for them and may publicans and sinners showed up. These are people that Jesus would not contact in the synagogues, people who in the ordinary course of events would have been unwelcome in and excluded from the worship of the synagogues.
And Levi wants to introduce them to Jesus and Jesus to them. Mark tells us here that there were many tax collectors and sinners and they followed him.
Think about that for a few minutes. If you or I go into a lot of places and are seen there by other Christians, we will be soundly criticized. At the very least our reputations will be tarnished. Why?
Because it is the very same thing that happened to Jesus.
The Scribes of the Pharisees followed Jesus into that gathering and questioned his being there and socializing with and eating with the scum of the earth.
Jesus’ response was “No need have they who are strong, for a doctor, but those who are sick.”
He was there because those people needed salvation. They were the spiritually sick ones and they knew it. There was no hypocrisy among them.
Jesus was real. He was genuine and he genuinely cared for those people. Jesus was not false to those people who ate together at Levi’s place. The only people who thought he was “ugly, and compromised by being there were the scribes of the pharisees who refused to understand him, who refused to accept him for who he is.
Mark goes on to tell us about Jesus response to the question regarding fasting. Jesus answer is that the children of the bridegroom cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them. The time for mourning will come later, but not now. And then he speaks about patching old cloth with an unshrunk patch. No one does that, he says. Nor does anyone put new wine in old wine skins. The idea is that which is old and worn out in both cases. What Jesus is saying is this: one cannot mix the old with the new. No, the new must be accepted as real and valid on its own without mixing in or keeping the old ways. That becomes the focus of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, where Chrisitans were being encouraged to go back to the Law once they had received the Grace of God through Jesus Christ. Paul says there is no going back and certainly no reason to do so.
Remember these words about being real from the beginning of our time together today:
“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Jesus called Levi to be a servant. He called him to follow with him, to walk the same road with him. He called him knowing that it would be a road of self-sacrifice and suffering. He called him to be a real son of Abraham.
Like the old Skin Horse who had most of his hair loved off, Jesus calls us to follow him and to be real. Let’s become real for Jesus and those around us who need to know of His love. And let’s be willing to get our hair loved off, have our eyes drop off and have our joints get loose. That is what will happen if we really follow him, but it will be ok because once you are real you can’t get ugly to the one who loves you, because he really understands.
--Dennis Gleason
