Mark 2:18-22

Jesus Questioned About Fasting

18Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. Some people came and asked Jesus, "How is it that John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?"

19Jesus answered, "How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? They cannot, so long as they have him with them. 20But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast.

21"No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. 22And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins."



BACKGROUND READING:


Isaiah 58




Matthew 9:14-17




Luke 5:33-39



Dig Deeper

Observing fasts was a deeply cherished part of Jewish society. A Jew who didn’t observe the law, the Sabbath, and certain social expectations like fasting was considered to be a traitor to Jewish identity. They were striking a blow at the very heart of what it meant to be the people of God. This was of particular concern for the Pharisees. They were of the belief that it was a lack of observing God’s law that caused the delay of YHWH returning to Israel and instituting the ‘age to come’. They believed that if all of Israel would observe all of the law for one day, then God would return.


If some hotshot was going around teaching that this long-awaited kingdom of God was at hand, then they wanted to make sure that he was holding people to the law. What they found to their horror, however, was that he seemed to be playing fast-and-loose with the various ways of observing the law. This is why Jesus was asked about his lack of observing the normal two-a-week fasts observed by John’s disciples and the Pharisees.


In answering, Jesus accomplishes two things. First, he compares his own ministry to a wedding party in which he is the groom. Second, he explains why his followers were not keeping the fast days that most devout Jews would have observed.


There was no mistake in Jesus’ comparison of his ministry to a wedding celebration. Weddings say something good about the world. They signify a new beginning. It should be of no surprise, then, that many Jews’ by Jesus’ time used a picture of a great wedding to describe the ‘age to come’. God’s wonderful, new, restored creation could best be described in terms of a great wedding feast.


Jesus is doing something else here, though. It was also common to describe Israel as God’s bride. They were sometimes wayward and unfaithful, but God would win her back to his side one day. That would be the day of the great wedding. By comparing himself to a bridegroom, Jesus is wafting out some new but rather clear teachings into the air. Israel needs to rethink how the groom is going to return and what exactly that wedding will look like. Jesus was redefining what that great time of restoration would look like. The time Israel had been longing for had come if they could only see it.


This sets us up to make more sense of two quick word pictures that Jesus paints. The first involves an everyday idea like patching up a rip in an old article of clothing. Jesus, as he so often did, used a simple example from everyday life. You can’t take a new piece of cloth to patch up a tear in an old garment. When the new patch shrinks (as it will surely do) it will make a worse rip than the one you started with. Jesus isn’t suggesting that you need an old patch to go with the old garment, his simple point was that old and new don’t mix. Putting them together has disastrous results.


He continues this thought in describing the wineskins. Putting new wine in old skins will get you nothing but burst skins. The old way of thinking simply cannot contain this new concept of God’s kingdom that Jesus is teaching.


God has indeed returned for the great day of restoration but it is in a very different way than anyone had expected. The wedding was at hand, but not at all in the way that they had thought. The bridegroom was nothing like what they were expecting. Jesus was telling his listeners that they were going to need to listen carefully to him, and to completely change their thinking in order to contain this new concept of the kingdom. It simply would not fit in any way, shape, or form, into their old ways of thinking.



Devotional Thought

We can be just as guilty of trying to combine our old ways of thinking with God’s new way of being human as a part of his kingdom. In what areas do you most struggle with thinking about the world the way the rest of the world does, rather than seeing things through the eyes of the kingdom of God? How can you transform your thinking in those areas?