IN THE WORDS OF JESUS–Part 143

YES, HE is Talking to YOU! (continued)

Love is the Fulfilling of the Law

With the two parables that we discussed yesterday, we have finished with the wealth of parables and sayings from Matthew Chapter 13. These included several parables that the Master told to the multitudes and several that He spoke to His disciples alone along with His explanations for the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Tares. Included in our discussion was also some insight into the Master’s use of parables as He explained it to His disciples and the statement from Matthew which we should remember whenever we read His words: “All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:34-35). Taken literally this saying is clear; there is a hidden something in every teaching that the Master spoke to the multitudes and, as we have seen, there is something hidden in His explanations and in the parables that He spoke to His disciples as well. Again, if we take the words literally, we find in the Gospel of John that the Master tells His disciples, after teaching them on the Kingdom of God, that: “These things have I spoken unto you in proverbs: but the time cometh, when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall shew you plainly of the Father” (John 16:25). The English words proverb and parable are from the same Greek word and mean the same thing in John’s Gospel. It should be clear to us that Jesus spoke to the multitudes and to His disciples in parable form and that this is why there is such a treasure of understanding in all that He said. We have interpreted many of His sayings in our posts and we frequently find new meanings whenever we revisit a saying.

We have also, over the last few days, discussed the Apostle Paul’s prayer from his Epistle to the Ephesians. This prayer is his prayer for all who read it. He prays that they find the strength from within to take the Kingdom of God from without; that is, that they can heed the call of the Inner Man, the Christ Within, and thereby let the Power of the Spirit and Soul flow through the outer man, the conscious personality, bringing with it the Love and the Wisdom and all of the fruit of the Spirit. Paul prays that we, as the conscious personality, be strengthened by the Spirit, that spiritual thoughts and ideas flow into our daily lives. We should remember that it is still a choice as to whether we heed the call and use that strength to bring the down the Inner Light of Love from the Christ Within. The Master tells us this same in saying that we, as men, must take the Light, must seize it. He says “and from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). Now the word violent here is not to be understood as it is used in our modern language but should be understood as a type of spiritual violence for, in taking the Kingdom, we are but bringing down into our consciousness the Light of the Soul and the precepts of God. The disciples and followers of the Master saw and knew the new dispensation of John and of Jesus and their teachings and this awakened in them spiritual thoughts and ideas causing them, and now us, to cast aside the carnal ways, to focus on the Kingdom and to bring it forcibly to bear on their daily lives. Remember, all of His teaching is in parable. There is little that the Master says, or the writers of the epistles for that matter, that is not concerned with bringing the Power of the Spiritual Realm to bear on our lives in this physical form and on this Earth.

Today we continue with our journey through the parables and sayings of the Master and will look at three sayings by the Master. The first is in response to a question posed to Him regarding fasting and praying and the other two are called parables by Luke but not by Matthew nor Mark. The narrative starts after the Master had chosen Levi, the publican, who we know as Matthew, to follow Him. At Levi’s house there is then a feast for Jesus and the disciples and many that followed; the scribes and the Pharisees, seeing this apparently from without, question the disciples and then the Master is asked, presumably by the disciples of John: “And they said unto him, Why do the disciples of John fast often, and make prayers, and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees; but thine eat and drink? And he said unto them, Can ye make the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days. And he spake also a parable unto them; No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old. And no man putteth new wine into old bottles; else the new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles shall perish. But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved. No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better (Luke 5:33-39).

We will take this in pieces leaving the first for last as it is related in theme to another parable which we will cover next. We start then with the piece of cloth which we will call the Parable of the New Patch. The commentaries on this tell us that the Master is referring to one’s trying to put the new ideas and teachings of the Christ as a patch over the old ways of Judaism as seen in sayings like this one from The John Darby Synopsis of the New Testament⁸: Moreover it is impossible to introduce the new principles and the new power of His mission into the old Pharisaic forms. While this may be true on the outer reading as to trying to patch a broken religion with pieces from a newer one, there is much more here. The Master tells us that He would that all of the Jews were converted and it is said in prediction by the prophets that they would not be. Repeating again a saying on parables from the Gospel of Mark, we should see here the idea, from the words of the Master, of conversion: “And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them” (Mark 4:11-12). In other places this same thought is attributed to the sayings of the Prophet Esaias (John 12:39-40). We should see in this that conversion is possible, that change is possible and is this not what is really involved when one comes to the Kingdom? The laws do not change but one’s approach to them does.

Vincent tells us of the word new, as regards the garment, that: from not and to card or comb wool; hence to dress or full cloth. Therefore Rev. renders more correctly undressed cloth, which would shrink when wet, and tear loose from the old piece⁴. Taking Vincent’s ideas on the word new we will go to our understanding of the nature of this parable. On the outside it is true as Jesus states it and as Vincent addresses it; the new cloth patch that is sewn into the garment will, when wet, shrink and tear away from the garment thus leaving the garment in worse shape than before. One could look at this from the perspective of patching the Jewish beliefs with the teachings of the Master but then where is the rent made worse? Did not the Jew get some value out of the patch that Jesus supplied? The same would be true of Vincent’s other idea regarding the old teaching of John and the new teaching of Jesus. Again, let us remember that this is a parable and while we may think it must be related to something that was in the prior conversation,  it really need not be. This is a statement by the Master that means something deeper than it says and this is how we look at it.

On a personal level we should see the old garment as our carnal selves in the world, our conscious personalities, our minds and our emotional nature. We are torn and tattered by the this life in form; we come from the innocence of youth replete with Love and compassion and joy to the reality of adulthood. Here perhaps we have lost some or all of that innocence, of that Love, compassion and joy creating breaches in our lives; holes if you will. We come then upon the Christ who is calling to us from within and from without and we see and we hear His message. We see that it can restore the holes in our lives and we try to take parts, and only parts, of His message to patch these holes. We sew in a little Love or a little joy or whatever we are in need of but we do nothing for the overall garment; it is still our carnal self in this world. And we continue to live as we had been and we may find that the Love that we sewed in is a bothersome thing; in some instance it gets in the way and we stretch ourselves around this bother. The bit of Love is torn out leaving a bigger hole than existed before. What is the message here? Conversion and renewal and repentance; all things that mean CHANGE; there is no provision for patching. It is simply stated by Paul who tells us clearly: “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). We did say here that it is not necessary that the parable should conform to the preceding dialogue and, in our reading of these many parables, this is so. In this instance however if we go back to the verse prior to the answering of the question by the Master, Jesus does give us the resolution to His parable showing us that a patch will not work by His saying that: “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32). It is the sinner who is living the life of the carnal man, it is the sinner who has those holes in his life and it is the sinner that must CHANGE for as He says in the parable, the patch will not work.

The next part of this is regarding the bottle and the wine which, while similar, is not quite in the same vein as are the thoughts about the garment; we will call this the Parable of the Old Wine Bottle. We should know that the bottle at that time was a wine-skin; a container made from the skin of an animal and sewed closed into a sack or bottle. It is essentially a leather bottle. Wine is a fermentation product and while we are not familiar with the making of wine in the days of Jesus we can say as well that this does not matter. It is enough here to take His words on the matter as He gives them, the new wine will burst the old bottle. The commentaries are the same for this as for the prior parable and these two sayings are often talked about together and, at times, as one. What is the difference? Here, we have no thought of a patch to fill in or compensate for a hole or a breach of any sort; we have a filling and so we approach it as such.

The man in form living a carnal life is the same idea for this parable as for the other. Taking Jesus words as we see above, the Master is dealing with sinners and their call to repentance. The carnal man is filled with his old ways this is what he knows and what he is. His consciousness, his mind and his emotional nature are what they have become over the years of his life; he is of the flesh and attending to the things of the flesh. Now comes the Christ; again the Christ Within or the Christ Himself, and this gets the attention of the man. This is always much the way that we have been speaking about in coming to God and to His Kingdom throughout all our posts; this is the way that it always will work and any differences will be in degree only. Continuing on then we have the carnal man feeling the prompting of the Soul and the Soul gets the attention of his conscious personality through which he lives. Now here the Master is telling us that unless we are transformed, unless we change our ways and renew our minds, that it is senseless to put this new spiritual wine into those same old personalities. The result is likely to be confusion and self-condemnation at every turn; perhaps this type of upset in one’s life can even turn a person to mental or emotional instability. Paul speaks eloquently about this type of confusion in his Epistle to the Romans; let us read this from the New American Standard Version as it affords a better flow and a better understanding than our normal King James Version. We begin in a section called by the translators The Conflict of Two Natures which follows immediately after Paul’s explanation of the relationship between the law and sin. He says: “For we know that the Law is spiritual, but I am of flesh, sold into bondage to sin.  For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate. But if I do the very thing I do not want to do, I agree with the Law, confessing that the Law is good. So now, no longer am I the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh; for the willing is present in me, but the doing of the good is not. For the good that I want, I do not do, but I practice the very evil that I do not want.  But if I am doing the very thing I do not want, I am no longer the one doing it, but sin which dwells in me.  I find then the principle that evil is present in me, the one who wants to do good. For I joyfully concur with the law of God in the inner man, but I see a different law in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin which is in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will set me free from the body of this death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, on the one hand I myself with my mind am serving the law of God, but on the other, with my flesh the law of sin” (Romans 7:14-25).

The picture that Paul paints here is one of confusion and of condemnation and he paints it for his readers understanding of the problems and the issues of living the spiritual life. Did Paul suffer thus? he likely did through some of his journey along the path but he overcame and he is trying to help the Roman believers to do the same. We should see this as the new wine of the spirit working through the old bottle of the flesh. Of his use of mind we should see the higher mind, the spiritual thoughts that flow to us from the Soul and of his use if flesh we should see the carnal nature. The conflict, if not resolved, will burst the old bottle and so the objective is to rely on the Inner Man to do as the Master said which is to bring “sinners to repentance”, to CHANGE.

Note on the Quote of the Day