Why Nobody Was Fasting

Somebody notices that the people following Jesus are not fasting, and it bothers them enough that they come and ask him about it.

It was a fair thing to notice. Fasting was serious business, and going without food was how you told God, and told yourself, that something was missing and you wanted it put right. It was waiting, said with the body. John's followers kept it up. So did the Pharisees. Verse 18 names two very different groups keeping it, which is some measure of how ordinary the practice was.

And the people around Jesus are eating. Not fasting, not making any sign of waiting for anything, sitting down to ordinary meals while the serious people around them went without.

His answer neither defends fasting nor argues against it. He moves the question onto ground nobody had thought to put it on.

How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while He is with them?

He has just called himself the bridegroom. It goes past in a sentence about mealtimes, with no pause and no explanation, and in the older books that picture belongs to God. Isaiah says God will rejoice over his people the way a bridegroom rejoices over his bride (Isaiah 62:5). Hosea has God promising to betroth his people to himself forever, in righteousness and justice, in loving devotion and compassion (Hosea 2:19-20). Jesus takes the picture and stands in the middle of it.

Fasting has not stopped mattering. The occasion for it has gone, for now, because you do not stand at a wedding grieving over something absent while it is in the room with you. Then, in the next breath, he says this.

But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast.

It arrives calmly, in the second chapter of the book, in a conversation about meals. He does not say the bridegroom leaves. He says taken.

The last part is two small pictures of one mistake. Nobody sews a piece of unshrunk cloth onto an old coat, because the new patch pulls as it shrinks and leaves a worse tear than the one it was covering. Nobody pours new wine into old skins, because wine that is still working expands, and leather that has already done all its stretching splits.

Both pictures are about making something new sit quietly inside something old. The old thing is not the villain here. A used wineskin held wine once and held it well. It has just finished stretching, and what is arriving now will not fit inside what was already there.