New Wine and the Sabbath

Marcion brings forward the tax collector the Lord chose as proof that the man was chosen — by someone hostile to the law — precisely because he was a stranger to the law and an outsider to Judaism. He has forgotten Peter, who was a man of the law and was not only chosen by the Lord but also had it said of him that the knowledge he possessed had been given him by the Father. And apparently he had never read anywhere that Christ was foretold as the light, the hope and the expectation of the nations! In fact Christ spoke of the Jews rather favorably when he said, “The healthy do not need a doctor; the sick do.” For by “the sick” he meant the pagans and tax collectors he was choosing, and so he pronounced the Jews “healthy” — the people he said had no need of a doctor. If that is how it stands, then he came down on a mistaken errand when he came to destroy the law as though to cure a disease, since those who were living under it were “healthy” and “in no need of a doctor.” [a]

And how does it come about that he put forward the comparison of a doctor at all, if he did not make it good? For just as nobody calls in a doctor for the healthy, so nobody calls one in for strangers — and a man is a stranger, so far as Marcion’s god is concerned, since he already has a maker and a preserver of his own, and in that maker’s Christ a particularly good doctor. This much the comparison settles in advance: the doctor is normally supplied by the one the sick belong to.

And where does John come from? Christ appears out of nowhere, and John just as suddenly. Everything in Marcion’s system happens that way. In the Creator’s arrangement they all have their own place and their full course. What else I have to say about John will come in another passage. The points now before us have to be answered, and this is what I will make good: that John suits Christ and Christ suits John, each answering to the other — John as the Creator’s prophet, just as Christ is the Creator’s Christ — so that the heretic may blush at having frustrated John the Baptist’s mission, and frustrated himself in doing it.

For if John had had no ministry at all — “the voice,” as Isaiah calls him, “of one crying in the wilderness,” the man who prepared the Lord’s roads by announcing repentance and urging it — and if he had not baptized others and Christ himself along with them, nobody could have set Christ’s disciples, eating and drinking, alongside John’s, who were forever fasting and praying. For if there existed any difference between Christ and John and their respective followers, no exact comparison would be possible, and there would not be a single point on which anyone could be challenged. Nobody would be surprised, nobody would be perplexed, if rival announcements of a different god turned up and differed from each other about rules of conduct as well, having already differed about the authority behind them.

So Christ belonged to John and John to Christ, and both belonged to the Creator; both came out of the law and the prophets, as preachers and teachers. Otherwise Christ would have thrown out John’s discipline as the rival god’s, and would have defended his own disciples as quite right to walk a different road, being consecrated to another and opposite god. As it is, he gave a modest reason why “the bridegroom’s companions cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them,” and promised that “they would fast afterward, when the bridegroom was taken away from them.” He did not defend the disciples — he excused them, as though the complaint against them had not been made without some reason. Nor did he reject John’s discipline; he allowed it, referring it to John’s own time while marking it out for his own time later. Otherwise he would have meant to reject it, and to defend those who opposed it, if he had not himself already belonged to it while it was in force.

I hold, too, that it is my Christ who is meant by the bridegroom. Of him the psalm says, “He is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber; his going out is from the end of heaven, and his return is back to the end of it again.” Through the mouth of Isaiah he also says exultingly of the Father, “Let my soul rejoice in the Lord, for he has clothed me with the garment of salvation and with the tunic of gladness, as a bridegroom; he has put a headdress round my head, as a bride.” In the same way he assigns the church to himself, and of her the same Spirit says to him, “You shall clothe yourself with them all, as with a bride’s ornament.” Christ invites this bride home to himself through Solomon as well, out of the calling of the nations, for you read, “Come with me from Lebanon, my bride.” He mentions Lebanon — the mountain, of course — with a nice touch, since among the Greeks the name stands for frankincense; for it was out of idol-worship that he betrothed the church to himself.

Now deny your own raving madness, Marcion, if you can. Look — you are attacking even your own god’s law. He does not join people in marriage, and where a marriage already exists he does not allow it. He baptizes nobody but an unmarried man or a eunuch; he holds baptism back until death or divorce. Why, then, do you make his Christ a bridegroom? That title belongs to the one who joined man and woman together, not to the one who separated them.

You have gone wrong, too, about that saying of Christ in which he seems to draw a line between things new and things old. You are puffed up about the old wineskins and muddled in the head with the new wine, and so you have stitched the patch of your newfangled heresy onto the old — that is, the earlier — Gospel. I should like to know in what respect the Creator is at odds with himself. When he gave this command through Jeremiah, “Break new ground for yourselves,” was he not turning away from the old state of things? And when he announces through Isaiah that “the old things have passed away; look, all the things I am making are new,” is he not pointing to a new state of things? We laid it down long ago that the ending of the former state of things was promised by the Creator and actually brought about by Christ, under the authority of one and the same God, to whom both the old things and the new belong.

For new wine is not put into old wineskins except by a man who has old wineskins; and nobody sews a new patch onto an old coat unless he has the old coat to hand. Only the man who has the materials to do a thing, if it were to be done, is the man who refrains from doing it when it is not to be done. And so, since his aim in the comparison was to show that he was separating the newness of the good news from the oldness of the law, he proved at the same time that the old thing he was separating his own new thing from ought not to have been branded a separation of things foreign to each other. For nobody ever joins what is his own to what is foreign to it, so as to be able afterward to separate them from the foreign things. A separation is possible only by way of the joining through which it is made. Accordingly, the things he separated he also proved to have been one once — and one they would have remained, if he had not separated them.

Still, we grant this much: there is a separation — by reform, by enlargement, by advance — just as the fruit is separated from the seed, though the fruit comes from the seed. In the same way the good news is separated from the law while it develops out of the law: a different thing from it, but not a foreign one; distinct, but not contrary. Nor do we find in Christ even a new manner of speaking. Whether he sets out comparisons or takes questions apart, it comes out of the seventy-seventh psalm: “I will open my mouth in a parable” — that is, in a comparison — “I will utter dark problems” — that is, I will set out questions. If you wanted to prove that a man belonged to another race, you would surely fetch your proof from the idiom of his speech.

About the Sabbath, too, I have this to say first: the question could never have come up if Christ had not gone about proclaiming the Lord of the Sabbath. Nor would there be any argument about why he was doing away with the Sabbath, if he had a right to do away with it. And he would have that right if he belonged to the rival god; nobody would be astonished at his doing what it was proper for him to do. So people’s astonishment came from their view that it was improper for him to proclaim the Creator as God and then attack the Creator’s Sabbath. [r]

Now let us settle these several points first, so that we do not have to take them up again at every turn to meet each argument our opponent rests on some new practice of Christ’s. Let this stand as agreed: the dispute about the newness of each practice arose only because Christ had so far advanced nothing about any new god, so that a discussion of one was inadmissible. And it cannot be thrown back at us that the sheer newness of each separate practice was itself Christ’s clear enough demonstration of another god — because it was plain that newness was not in itself a thing to be wondered at in Christ, since the Creator had foretold it. It would only have been right, of course, for a different god to be expounded first and his discipline brought in afterward, since it is the god that would give the discipline its authority and not the discipline the god. Unless, to be sure, what happened is this: that Marcion got his thoroughly perverse opinions not from a master, but got his master out of his opinion!

Every other point about the Sabbath I settle in this way. If Christ interfered with the Sabbath, he was simply acting on the Creator’s own example. At the siege of the city of Jericho the carrying of the ark of the covenant around the walls for eight days running — and therefore on a Sabbath too — actually annulled the Sabbath, and did it at the Creator’s command. So it must be, at least, in the opinion of those who think this of Christ in this passage of Luke, in their ignorance that neither Christ nor the Creator violated the Sabbath, as I shall show shortly. And yet the Sabbath really was shaken then, by Joshua, so that the charge now brought could be laid against Christ as well. But suppose that, not being the Jews’ Christ, he did display hatred for the Jews’ most solemn day: even then, in that very hatred of the Sabbath, he was openly following the Creator, whose Christ he is. For the Creator cries out through the mouth of Isaiah, “Your new moons and your Sabbaths my soul hates.” Whatever sense those words were spoken in, we know that in a subject of this kind a blunt challenge has to be met with a blunt defense.

Now I will move the discussion to the very matter in which Christ’s teaching seemed to annul the Sabbath. The disciples were hungry. On that Sabbath day they picked some heads of grain and rubbed them in their hands, and by preparing their food that way they violated the holy day. Christ excuses them, and so became their accomplice in breaking the Sabbath. The Pharisees bring the charge against him. Marcion catches at the issue of the dispute — the letter of what is written against the intent behind it — if I may borrow my Lord’s own truth to make sport of his tricks. For a plausible line is drawn both from the Creator’s Scripture and from Christ’s purpose: the example of David, when he went into the temple on the Sabbath and provided food by boldly breaking into the bread set out before God.

Even David remembered that this privilege — I mean the exemption from fasting — had belonged to the Sabbath from the very beginning, from the time the Sabbath day itself was instituted. For although the Creator had forbidden that manna be gathered for two days at once, he permitted it on one occasion only, the day before the Sabbath, so that the food laid in the day before might keep the following Sabbath’s feast free of fasting. The Lord had good reason, then, for following the same principle in “annulling” the Sabbath — since that is the word people will use — and good reason for expressing the Creator’s own disposition when he granted the privilege of not fasting on the Sabbath day. In fact he would have put an end to the Sabbath then and there, and to the Creator himself, if he had ordered his disciples to fast on the Sabbath, against the standing of the Scripture and against the Creator’s will.

But he did not stand up and defend his disciples; he excused them. He put human need in the way, as though heading off the blame. He upheld the honor of the Sabbath as a day that is to be free of gloom rather than free of work. He put David and his companions on a level with his own disciples, in the fault and in the excuse for it alike. He is pleased that the Creator granted the indulgence. He is good himself on the Creator’s model. Is he, then, a stranger to the Creator?

Then the Pharisees watch to see whether he will heal on the Sabbath day, so that they can accuse him — as a violator of the Sabbath, surely, not as the propounder of a new god; for perhaps I could be content to press this one point on every occasion, that another Christ is nowhere proclaimed. The Pharisees, though, were in complete error about the law of the Sabbath. They failed to observe that its terms were conditional: when it commanded rest from work, it made certain distinctions between kinds of work. For when it says of the Sabbath day, “On it you shall do no work of your own,” the word your restricts the prohibition to human work — the work each man performs in his own employment or business — and not to divine work. And the work of healing or of preserving is not proper to man but to God.

So again the law says, “You shall do no manner of work on it,” except what is to be done for any life — that is to say, in the matter of setting a life free; because what is God’s work may be done by human hands for the saving of a life. And what the man Christ was going to do would be done by God, since he was God as well. So, wanting to let them into this meaning of the law by the restoration of the withered hand, he asks, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good, or not? to save a life, or to destroy it?” His purpose was that, while allowing the amount of work he was about to perform for a life, he might remind them what works the law of the Sabbath forbade — human works — and what it enjoined — divine works, which may be done for the benefit of any life. He was called Lord of the Sabbath because he upheld the Sabbath as his own institution.

Even if he had annulled the Sabbath, he would have had every right to, as its Lord, and still more as the one who instituted it. But, Lord of it though he was, he did not utterly destroy it — so that from then on it might be plain that the Sabbath was not broken by the Creator even at the time when the ark was carried around Jericho. For that really was God’s work: he commanded it himself, and he had ordered it for the sake of the lives of his servants when they were exposed to the perils of war.

Now, although in one place he has expressed an aversion to Sabbaths by calling them your Sabbaths — reckoning them men’s Sabbaths and not his own, because they were kept without any fear of God by a people full of wrongdoing, who loved God “with the lip and not the heart” — he has yet put his own Sabbaths, the ones kept as he prescribed, in a different position altogether. Through the same prophet, in a later passage, he declared them “true, and delightful, and not to be violated.”

So Christ did not rescind the Sabbath at all. He kept its law. In the first case he did a work that benefited the lives of his disciples, indulging them with the relief of food when they were hungry; in this one he cured the withered hand. In each he was saying by the facts themselves, “I did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it” — though Marcion has gagged his mouth over that one word. For even in the case before us he fulfilled the law while interpreting its condition. And he brings the different kinds of work into a clear light, doing what the law excepts from the sacredness of the Sabbath, and giving the Sabbath day itself — consecrated from the beginning by the Father’s blessing — an added holiness by his own act of kindness. For he furnished this day with divine safeguards, a course his adversary would have taken for some other days instead, so as to avoid honoring the Creator’s Sabbath and restoring to the Sabbath the works that properly belong to it.

Since in just the same way the prophet Elisha on this day restored the Shunammite woman’s dead son to life, you see, Pharisee — and you too, Marcion — that it was the proper employment of the Creator’s Sabbaths long ago to do good, to save a life, not to destroy it; and that Christ introduced nothing new which did not follow the Creator’s own pattern, his gentleness, his mercy, and his prediction as well. For in this very case he makes good the prophetic announcement of one specific healing: “the weak hands are made strong,” as were “the feeble knees” too, in the man with the paralysis.