Saturday in the Thirteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 4, 2020

Matthew 9:14-17

The disciples of John approached Jesus and said, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast much, but your disciples do not fast?” Jesus answered them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. 

“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.”

Todays’s reading from the Gospel of St. Matthew consists of two unrelated teachings.  Oftentimes, Matthew seems to write down little sayings of Jesus as he remembers them, and mostly they are linked by a common subject, but not always.  This is how you and I would write if we were to sit down and make a biography of a person we knew fairly well.  One saying or anecdote would lead to another, and then some saying or event would pop into our memory that had nothing to do with what came before.  In the case of an ancient writer, he would simply mark it down as it came to him, whereas a modern one would edit it in at a place that seemed more appropriate.  

The first part of the reading concerns a question that arose frequently during the public life of our Lord: that of his religious identity.  While the question itself is asked about the Lord’s disciples, it is really about the Lord.  The actual question runs thus: You are not of the company of John the Baptist, but you are also not a Pharisee, so who are you?  Here, the disciples of John are asking, but the Pharisees and the Sadducees ask this too.  Each group sees his the Lord’s teaching as similar to theirs, but each notices important differences as well.  

“Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?”  Jesus answers their question with a question, using John’s own words to speak about himself.  In John 3, 29, John the Baptist declares to his followers, “He that has the bride is the bridegroom: but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and listens for him, rejoices with joy because of the bridegroom’s voice. This my joy therefore is fulfilled.”  John likens himself to the bridegroom’s friend, whose responsibility it was on the wedding day to open the door of the bridegroom’s house so that the bridegroom may lead his bride into it.  This would seem to be a teaching John’s disciples were very familiar with.  To follow the thinking, the Bridegroom had arrived and so had the time for feasting.  No one feasted in the time prior to the bridegroom’s arrival because then everyone was preparing for it.  “The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.”  That is, they will cease to feast.  Jesus does not explain further, but the Bridegroom’s guests will cease from feasting in order to prepare for this second and final arrival, when he comes to take his friends with him into the eternal feast of heaven.

The second teaching here, in which the Lord speaks of old and and new cloth and wineskins, is about free will and grace.  In the example of patching the cloak, we see that grace is not magic: new cloth does not somehow confer newness on old cloth so that the whole is transformed.  Either an old cloak is patched with old cloth, or the old cloak is abandoned for a new one.  In the second example, we see the necessity of this change: a person must desire grace in order to be transformed for receiving it.  He must become a ‘new wineskin’.  This means, first of all, repenting of one’s sins.  We might remember here St. Paul’s words: “Put off the ‘old’ man, according to your former way of life, who is corrupted in the deceit of unlawful lust, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind: and put on the ‘new’ man, who is created, in the likeness of God, in justice and holiness of truth” (Ephesians 4, 22-24).  A man who is weakened by his sins, cannot contain grace, and a single “patch” on him — a random good deed or occasional thought of repentance — will not do.