Matthew 9:16 Commentary and Bible Study

As applied to the disciples of John, it is an illustration that taught them to let go of the old forms of religion taught by John the Baptist, which belonged to the old dispensation. Some of them may have had true faith, but they were still living in the manner of their master, whose life was necessarily consistent with his message – a call to repentance – and who encouraged the people to prepare for the one coming after him. The Lord’s illustrations show why what that is inappropriate and will not work. John had spoken of the one coming after him and the whole purpose of his ministry was to prepare the way for the Messiah. He must decrease and Christ must increase. His disciples ought to have become the disciples of Christ. But here were John’s disciples finding fault with the lifestyle of Christ’s disciples, and putting pressure on them to return to earlier days. That was never going to work, because the old form of things was like an old threadbare garment. There was no point in trying to patch it at all, because it was worn out and needed replacing. The worst thing of all was to try to patch it with unshrunk cloth, that is, to take a disciple of Christ and try to force him to live as one of John’s disciples. The light of the gospel within him, and knowledge that Christ had come into the world, would make any attempt to do this to end in disaster. If a disciple of Christ were forced to observe the fast day of the disciples of John, then he would find a terrible tension between the new life within him and the former way of living that was only appropriate while the world was still waiting for the Messiah to come. The spirit of joy within him would make those old practices seem completely inadequate. Fasting is not to be performed for its own sake, but in response to what we understand about the days in which we live. As many point out, the Old Testament only mandated one day of fasting a year – the day of atonement – and other fasts especially among the Pharisees were the appointments of men. Spurgeon says, ‘Jesus came not to repair Israel’s worn vesture, but to bring new robes.’ Christ had come into the world to do something far more radical than simply mending the old and patching it up. He had come to replace the old with something entirely new. When the unshrunk cloth which is new and much stronger is patched onto the tear in the old garment, predictably it shrinks in the next wash, and tears an even bigger hole in the fragile cloth of the old garment than was there in the first place.But as an answer to the Pharisees we can treat this parable in a different way. In their case the error was far greater, for they had taken the ceremonial law and transformed it into a means of earning salvation, adding many extra rules and regulations of their own. They trusted in the righteousness that it gave them as something that could gain the favour of God. They instinctively disliked the new garment of Christian discipleship because it did away with what they were most proud of – their own performance. They did not want to lose those fasts and those very public acts of self-denial, because they made them look holy in the eyes of the people: that mattered to them more than anything else. They had not heeded the announcement of John that the Messiah had come and was among them. The Jews would have been delighted to have had the miracles of Jesus without his doctrine. They would have been loved to have a prophet who knew his place, and who let the priests keep their place and did not disturb the old order. But that would have had two effects. It would have allowed the old to have been given credibility, and it would have been a misfit anyway. Old Judaism cannot be approved and only a monstrous thing would be produced if it was. Fifty to eighty years ago a preacher might have used this passage to show that society was taking the Christian ethic but rejecting the doctrine. Now that is out of date – society has thrown out the ethic as well. Luke 5:36 adds what is not found in the other synoptics: ‘and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old’ (Luke 5:36). By taking material from a new garment the old is not even patched properly. There is a colour difference between the patch and the old garment, and the material does not look the same. The lifestyle of the Christian does not match the lifestyle of the disciple of John. Both were right in their times, and both were criticised by the Pharisees. Christ says to them, ‘For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil. ³⁴ The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners! ³⁵ But wisdom is justified of all her children’ (Luke 7:33-35).