Friday in the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time, September 6, 2024

Luke 5, 33-39

The scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus, “The disciples of John the Baptist fast often and offer prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same; but yours eat and drink.” Jesus answered them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.” And he also told them a parable. “No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak. Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined. Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins. And no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’ ”

“The disciples of John the Baptist fast often and offer prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same; but yours eat and drink.”  At the heart of the challenge that the scribes and Pharisees pose is the matter of identity.  Who is Jesus?  A follower of John the Baptist, as perhaps evidenced by his baptism by John and John’s testimony concerning him, or a follower of the Pharisees — a very different thing from belonging to John, who considered the Pharisees “vipers” (cf. Matthew 3, 7). “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”

The Lord’s answer to the challenge comes in the form of a question, indeed, of a parable.  The Lord speaks to them of a “bridegroom”.  John the Baptist, who made it known far and wide that he was sent for the purpose of preparing the way for the Messiah, referred to the Messiah as the “bridegroom”: “He that has the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices with joy because of the bridegroom’s voice” (John 3, 29).  Previously, the Prophets had spoken of God as the Bridegroom for the unfaithful Israel, so when the Lord applied this term to himself, he would have angered the Pharisees and at the same time compelled them to look at the evidence for his doing so.  Neither John the Baptist nor the Lord allowed the Pharisees or anyone else to define them.  When the leadership from Jerusalem demanded that John identify himself, he replied, using Isaiah’s words: “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’ ” (John 1, 23).  And when the demons cried out that Jesus is the Son of God, he silenced them.  

“But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.”  These words would have baffled them even if they had understood what he spoke to them of himself as a bridegroom.  The Lord uses the figure of the bridegroom “taken away” in order to speak of his Passion and Death for the salvation of the world.  But this teaching would prove so beyond the grasp even of his disciples that he spent much time after his Resurrection explaining it to them.  Here, he begins to speak about who he is, what he has been sent to do, and how different he was as their Savior from their limited expectations.

Following this, he offers them this parable: “No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.”  He speaks of cloaks and wineskins, ordinary items.  He uses them, though, to speak of the new age of grace which has come upon the world with his entrance into it.  The “old cloak” is the Old Law, and the new cloak is one who has been transformed by faith in Christ and baptism.  The believer transformed in Christ can belong only to the New Law, and one who clings to the Old Law cannot belong to the Lord Jesus.  Similarly in the case of the wineskins.  We can also understand by the “old cloak” any belief system or worldly attachment.  One who is baptized is not simply initiated into a new society, but is in fact transformed into a new person — a new kind of person.  St. Paul refers to this new kind as “the new man”: “Put off . . . the old man, who is corrupted according to the desire of error and be renewed in spirit of your mind, and put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth” (Ephesians 4, 22-24).  St. Paul, in speaking of the incompatibility of the new man and his old attachments, says: “And what concord has Christ with Belial? Or what part has the faithful with the unbeliever? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols?” (2 Corinthians 6:15–16).

If we belong to Jesus, we cannot belong to anyone or anything else.