So . . . they that are in old Adam are old creatures; and are in their old things, old ways, old worships, and old religions, and have the old garments, and the old bottles, that hold the old wine, and cannot endure the new; and have the old, rusty, moth-eaten treasure. And they that are in Christ, the heavenly and spiritual second Adam, who maketh all things new, are new creatures, and spiritual men, and are heavenly-minded, and are new bottles, that hold the new wine and the new heavenly treasure, and have the new clothing, the fine linen, the righteousness of Christ, and are the new and living way, over all the dead ways.—George Fox
Although the warning Jesus gives his disciples to “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees” will not appear in this book for another six chapters (Mark 8:15), it is in this chapter, chapter 2, that we are given several examples of this false form of spiritual edification, along with Jesus’s opposition to and correction of the error.1 In this essay, I will be examining the chapter’s conflicts one-by-one to show how Jesus challenges the misuse of the tradition by which the religious authorities hinder the very thing the tradition was intended to foster, i.e. the spiritual rising to life in Christ. At the end of the essay, I will touch upon the appearance of this same problem in modern-day Quakerism.
Hearing the call (13-14)
The first scene in this chapter positions Jesus at the seaside: a vast, undifferentiated landscape where he teaches a vast, undifferentiated multitude. One verse later, the scene has shifted: Jesus is walking along, and he sees and calls an individual. It is a tax collector, one recognized by all as separate from society. “Follow me,” Jesus says to Levi, the son of Alphaeus, and the man, named and individuated, “arose and followed him” (14). The lesson to be taken from the first two verses in this passage is Christ teaches the multitude, but it is the individual whom he calls to follow him, i.e. to find and take up his way of being. Each person—we are being told—must locate and follow the truth within his own heart, regardless of the personal or social ramifications that surely will follow. He or she must honor the integrity of his God-given soul and reject the stance that he is justified by unsubstantiated, traditional ideas or by fitting into his social group. Those who do so will fail to hear the Light, Jesus Christ’s transcendent call within to follow him.
Needing the physician (15-17)
In verses 15 through 17, the setting has moved to the house of the called one, where “many publicans and sinners” who “followed” Jesus dine with him and his disciples. Here near the start of his ministry, Jesus’s conflict with institutional religion shows itself: the religious authorities imply that eating with publicans and sinners is a violation. Jesus disregards not Mosaic Law but the “tradition of the elders” (7:3): religious precepts long held necessary for righteous life.2 Jesus responds to the Pharisees’ challenge:
They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (17).
In but a few words, Jesus not only sets out his healing mission (introducing the metaphors of health for salvation and sickness for sin) but rebukes those who proudly, erroneously refuse to see their own soul’s sickness (their unrighteousness), and thus exempt themselves from recognizing their need of the physician. Only the humble self-aware who feel their alienation from God (i.e. sin) will welcome the physician’s care and thus be restored to health and wholeness.
Isaac Penington spoke of “the physician [who] is come inwardly and spiritually”3 when he wrote the following:
the broken and humble-hearted ones (who have felt the inward power of life to change their natures, and to preserve them in that which God hath begotten in them), the grace prevaileth to save in every dispensation.4
For seventeenth-century Friends, the willingness to recognize the truth of one’s inward condition was the crucial requirement through which the soul was prepared for salvation.
Again, Penington describes Jesus Christ and his work:
[H]e inwardly heals and restoreth his people, faithfully seeking after the sick, the distressed, the broken, the wounded; pouring oil into their wounds, and healing them. But there are some who are so sound and whole in their notional apprehensions and practices, that they have no need of the physician, and them the physician passeth by, as unworthy of him, and whom he intendeth shall have no share with him. “Ephraim is joined to idols” (he is well, he hath enough, he hath no need of me) “let him alone,” saith the Lord.5
The Bridegroom (18-22)
In this passage, the authorities reproach Jesus for lack of holiness by calling attention to his disciples’ failure to fast, as do their own disciples and those of John the Baptist (18). Implied is their assumption that fasting, or asceticism, evinces holiness. Rather than downplaying his disciples lack of ascetic practice, Jesus capitalizes on it: By referring to himself as “the bridegroom” (19), he alludes to the wedding ceremony where feasting, not fasting, is in order. Jesus’s use of the bridegroom metaphor would rile the authorities further in that it would suggest to them that Jesus was making himself equal to God. For in their Scriptures, “bridegroom” was used metaphorically to signal God’s relationship to the soul: “[A]s the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee” (Isa 62:5b).
In speaking immediately after of “a piece of new cloth on an old garment” (21), Jesus appears to continue his reference to Isaiah, where in 61:10, the prophet refers both to the marriage ceremony and to “the garments of salvation” (italics mine):
I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels.
As do the religious authorities, Jesus knows the tradition. He uses his knowledge, however, more deftly than they because he understands the true intent and purpose of the tradition and thus goes beyond their mere retention of its words and history.
Priorities (23–28)
The final episode in this chapter features many of the same circumstances that have already been reviewed in this essay: the Pharisees challenge Jesus for his disciples’ failure to honor the tradition (24), and Jesus retorts by showing not only knowledge of the tradition but his superior, irrefutable understanding of its intent and function (27). The tradition’s intent has always been to prepare souls for unity with God, which unity is a person’s health and salvation. The tradition was never to be an end in itself: a stand-alone prescription for righteousness that the religious authorities have made of it. The last verse in this chapter presents the maxim that shows the precedence given to the salvation of man—to become “the Son of man”—over traditional practices, such as the sabbath, that were put in place as a means to that end: “the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath” (28).
For religious communities to make secondary principles and virtues their guidelines for righteousness is a human tendency that extends throughout history, and so Jesus’s exposure and correction, as shown in Mark 2, is needed in every age. In our own Quaker communities, such erroneous principles take the form of what Lewis Benson called “cults”: “the cult of love and good will,” “the cult of the Power of Non-violence,” and “the Cult of the Beloved Community” being a few examples that Benson identifies.6 These take precedence over the call to truth and righteousness that must be promoted, as the Discipline of Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative) states.7 Before truth and righteousness can be promoted, however, they must be sought, known, and followed—as Levi followed Jesus in this passage (14). Devotion to secondary principles that supplant the pursuit of truth and righteousness—such as notional ideals of peace, love, and community—is shown to be idolatry when challenged by the writings of Scripture or seventeenth-century Friends writings. Those who idolize the virtue of love ironically exhibit the greatest enmity when challenged and, like the Pharisees, will often conspire against those who honor truth. Laid bare, the foundation of their faith is found to be not the God of Truth but the aspiration to replace Him with their own notional ideals.
Yes, peace, love, and community are fine qualities and valued among Christians and Quakers, but they must be authentically received, a consequence of coming into the knowledge of God; they cannot be attained through man’s aspiration, which can only be a facsimile that is rooted in pride, to “be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).
To know and honestly admit to one’s state is the essential thing: has one known that Spirit of Christ or has one not known that Spirit? This is an essential act of discernment that requires a truthfulness that too many in Quaker communities would prefer not to venture into, and so they don’t. The prophet helps others to see when that essential self-reflection has not yet been undertaken, as Jesus shows the Pharisees and scribes in this passage. In any age, those who undertake the same work can expect the same resistance and personal attacks that Christ’s prophets have always endured.
The Christians formerly (in the first day of the breaking forth of God’s power) had Christ in them, the living Word; they opened their hearts to him, received him in, felt him there, found him made of God to them their wisdom, their righteousness, their sanctification, their redemption. They had the thing that those words signify and speak of, and knew the meaning of the words by feeling of the thing. But Christians now, in the apostasy, have got several apprehensions from the words, without feeling the thing the words speak of; and there lies their religion. And now the heir is come, holding forth the thing they have all been talking of, all sects upon the earth are mad against him, and would fain kill him. They would not have the living substance . . . but they would have their dead apprehensions from the words live, and their dead forms and practices owned; and the heir of life must come in their way . . . or they will not own him.8
1 Epigraph. Fox, Works 8:157. The King James Version is used throughout this essay.
2 “The Greek word . . . translates “a giving over,” either by word of mouth or in writing; then that which is given over, i.e. tradition, the teaching that is handed down from one to another. The word does not occur in the Hebrew Old Testament (except . . . [when] used in another sense . . . ) but is found 13 times in the New Testament . . . . It means, in Jewish theology, the oral teachings of the elders (distinguished ancestors from Moses on) which were reverenced by the late Jews equally with the written teachings of the Old Testament, and were regarded by them as equally authoritative on matters of belief and conduct. . . . [These include] some oral laws of Moses (as they supposed) given by the great lawgiver in addition to the written laws. (The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol.5, ed. James Orr and company (Grand Rapids, Mich. Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1939), p. 3004.
3 Penington, Works 3:278.
4 Penington, Works 2:349.
5 Penington, Works 3:278.
6 Wallace, None, 56–58. Benson writes: “They are all notions and collectively they absorb and deflect the interest, energy, and devotion that should be conserved and redirected if we are to fulfill the purpose for which God called us to be a people.” None Were So Clear, ed. T.H.S. Wallace. Camp Hill, PA: New Foundation, 1996, (56–58).
7 “Make it your aim to promote the cause of truth and righteousness, and to spread the Kingdom of God at home and abroad. Be ready to take your part fearlessly in declaring His message and in witnessing to His power” (Ohio Yearly Meeting [Conserviative] Advise 13.) https://ohioyearlymeeting.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Advices.pdf Accessed 1/20/25.
8 Penington, Works 8:157.
Study for “The Quaker,” 1975 Andrew Wyeth
Abiding Quaker 