The Question about Fasting
18 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, and people came and said to him, “Why do John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” 19 Jesus said to them, “The wedding attendants cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. 20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.
21 “No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22 Similarly, no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins, but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins” Mark 2:18-22.
When I was in High School it was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I was a time of huge Vietnam war protests and rock ’n roll concerts. Every concert was a mini “Woodstock” concert! Everyone wore old blue jeans with patches carefully and deliberately sewed into one hole or choice spot after the next. My mother was an accomplished seamstress who ever sewed her own beautiful wedding dress in 1943. She taught me to find old through-away garments to use as patches on my jeans. And she showed me how to sew them on so that they would never come off.
Jesus talks about about mending clothes, and He says what my mother used to tell me: Don’t use a brand new piece of cloth because it won’t do to patch a hole in your old blue jeans. As it shrinks with time and weather and washings, it will pull away from the hole and rip a hole worse than before. The basic point Jesus is making is that new and old don’t mix. People shouldn’t be surprised that putting them together has unfortunate results.
So Jesu is saying that He is bringing a time of restoration, of new life, of the new start for which Israel had longed. Jesus was bringing into being the reality for which the Temple was built: to bring God’s sovereign and saving presence into the midst of his people. This was a time for looking forwards to the great things God was beginning to do, not backwards to the times when Israel had been punished for her failures and infidelities.
We Christians look back to the time of Jesus as the one-off moment when God did the great new thing that had long been promised. Everything is different as a result of what Jesus did. But that doesn’t stop us, sadly, from trying to combine the new things the gospel offers — like a new pice of cloth on an old pair of blue jeans — with the old things from the world all around us – like an old pair of blue jeans. We Christians still insist on the old and often unnecessary traditions from the church of former years. When God is doing new things, we should join the party, not grumble because the new patch of cloth is threatening to burst our poor old jeans.
A good deal of day-to-day Christian wisdom consists in sorting out the new from the old. So in today’s prayer ask God for His grace to enable you to step away from old habits of living and step into a new way of living your life. Stay in prayer! Stay in the Word of God! Stay in a forgiving and loving way of living. Let go of all that is old a tired in your habits of living, and step into the fresh new way of living a life of grace.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy win me a sinner.
From the Bible:
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” 2 Corinthians 5:17.
“We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” Romans 6:4.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” John 3:16.
“Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” John 3:3.
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