The disciples of John approached Jesus and said,
"Why do we and the Pharisees fast much,
but your disciples do not fast?"
We can imagine why this would be perplexing to them. Fasting was a time honored spiritual discipline. The fasting of the disciples of John and the Pharisees seemed to indicate a spiritual zeal that the disciplines seemed to lack. With privations such as this it seemed that more was better, that these who fasted much were advanced spiritual athletes while the disciples of Jesus were spiritual slouches. But it was not so simple as the disciples of John imagined. It was as though they only recognized the physical aspect of fasting while Jesus himself gave to it its full and proper spiritual dimension.
Jesus answered them, "Can the wedding guests mourn
as long as the bridegroom is with them?
Fasting in the presence of the bridegroom was the mark of stubborn self-possession that refused to celebrate in his presence. Fasting at such times was a mark of those too busy perfecting themselves to rejoice at the wedding feast. It was in fact very much like the elder brother of the prodigal son who refused to come in and join the feast.
The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast.
Fasting, then, for the Christian, is only properly performed as a response to the proximity of the bridegroom himself. This need not exclude liturgical seasons like Lent we emphasize collectively our distance from the Lord and our need to repent, nor those of celebration where fasting would be to ignore the presence of the bridegroom. What it does seem to devalue is fasting only as a means of self-perfection and self-possession. Such discipline, like bodily exercise "profiteth little" (see First Timothy 4:8), when not spiritually directed. Fasting should therefore be more like a surrender. It should be a setting aside of worldly satisfaction in order to prefer the greater, though apparently absent, satisfaction which we know can be found in God alone.
No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth,
for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.
People do not put new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined.
Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.
The teaching of Jesus was not merely additional data about what was already known in the past spiritual history of the world. It was a new paradigm in which the wisdom of the Old Covenant and the seeds of the word found in world religion took on their true and definitive meaning. The risk for us when encountering this revelation is that we just set Jesus alongside our prior traditions as an equal without letting him transform our perspective entirely. We must recognize his authority when he speaks his litany of "But I say to you" in the Sermon on the Mount. We must attend to him like the disciples on the road to Emmaus who came to understand what they had previously known in a new light when, "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (see Luke 24:27).
We see that the early disciples of Jesus took these lessons to heart from the context of fasting that we see in the Acts of the Apostles, where it is part of lives of Spirit directed worship (see Acts 13:2-3).
Unlike Jacob we don't need to take matters into our own hands to possess the blessing because the bridegroom himself desires to share all that he has with us, has himself invited us to the wedding feast. We don't need to compete, therefore, with those around us who seem, like the disciples of John and the Pharisees, to be advanced spiritual athletes. Instead we should strive to live lives that respond to the presence or apparent absence of the bridegroom, ordering our every priority and desire to drawing near to him.
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