Immerse: Messiah - Flipbook - Page 274
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IMMERSE
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MESSIAH
2:13–3:2
Then Jesus went out to the lakeshore again and taught the crowds that
were coming to him. As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at his tax collector’s booth. “Follow me and be my disciple,” Jesus said
to him. So Levi got up and followed him.
Later, Levi invited Jesus and his disciples to his home as dinner guests,
along with many tax collectors and other disreputable sinners. (There
were many people of this kind among Jesus’ followers.) But when the
teachers of religious law who were Pharisees saw him eating with tax collectors and other sinners, they asked his disciples, “Why does he eat with
such scum?”
When Jesus heard this, he told them, “Healthy people don’t need a doctor—sick people do. I have come to call not those who think they are
righteous, but those who know they are sinners.”
Once when John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, some people
came to Jesus and asked, “Why don’t your disciples fast like John’s disciples and the Pharisees do?”
Jesus replied, “Do wedding guests fast while celebrating with the groom?
Of course not. They can’t fast while the groom is with them. But someday
the groom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast.
“Besides, who would patch old clothing with new cloth? For the new
patch would shrink and rip away from the old cloth, leaving an even bigger
tear than before.
“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. For the wine would
burst the wineskins, and the wine and the skins would both be lost. New
wine calls for new wineskins.”
One Sabbath day as Jesus was walking through some grainfields, his disciples began breaking off heads of grain to eat. But the Pharisees said to
Jesus, “Look, why are they breaking the law by harvesting grain on the
Sabbath?”
Jesus said to them, “Haven’t you ever read in the Scriptures what David
did when he and his companions were hungry? He went into the house of
God (during the days when Abiathar was high priest) and broke the law
by eating the sacred loaves of bread that only the priests are allowed to eat.
He also gave some to his companions.”
Then Jesus said to them, “The Sabbath was made to meet the needs of
people, and not people to meet the requirements of the Sabbath. So the
Son of Man is Lord, even over the Sabbath!”
Jesus went into the synagogue again and noticed a man with a deformed
hand. Since it was the Sabbath, Jesus’ enemies watched him closely. If he
