Friday after Ash Wednesday, February 19, 2021

Matthew 9:14-15

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.”

Eating is a central activity in many religious cultures.  In this context, this necessary human activity is raised by ritual to a form of religious worship.  For instance, St. Paul strenuously urged his Gentile converts not to eat meat sacrificed to idols because this was a sign of communing with them: “But the things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils and not to God. And I would not that you should be made partakers with devils. You cannot drink the chalice of the Lord and the chalice of devils: you cannot be partakers of the table of the Lord and of the table of devils” (1 Corinthians 10:20–21).  So, too, the practice of fasting became a form of divine worship.  We find this practiced on various occasions in the Old Testament as a way of repenting of sins.  The Pharisees, beginning in the century or two before the Birth of the Lord, made fasting a regular practice so that fasting and certain customs pertaining to it became associated in the public mind with them.  It is not clear why the Pharisees fasted, however.  It may have had to do with their ideas of expanding the ritual purity required for service in the Temple to ordinary life.  Later, John the Baptist and his disciples fasted as a way of preparing for the feast of the coming messianic kingdom.

Jesus and his Apostles often went hungry, but the Lord did not compel them to fast in the way the Pharisees and the disciples of John the Baptist did.  Partly, this had to do with the intense labor they did in traveling and ministering to the crowds, as well as the fact that their meals were sporadic in any event.  Mostly, though, the Lord did not have his followers fast because there was no reason for them to do so: “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?”  John’s disciples continued to fast after their master was arrested and the Lord’s public life began.  They carried on a practice that had lost its purpose.  And the Lord’s teaching regarding the need for internal purity and the spiritual meaninglessness of physical purity destroyed the purpose of fasting by the Pharisees.

“The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.”  The Lord speaks here of the time after his Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension into heaven.  Since his Ascension, we believers in the Lord have lived in a world in which the Bridegroom has been “taken away”.  Although present sacramentally in the Holy Eucharist and effectually present through his grace, he intercedes for us before the Father in heaven.  In our present state, it is proper to fast as a sign of our longing for him, and also as a preparation for the Wedding Feast we hope to enjoy with him in heaven.  We certainly do not want to spoil our appetites for this food by filling up on the inferior food of this present life.  

We also mourn over our sinfulness, for fasting is an ancient custom for the grief-stricken.  We ought to grieve over our falls to temptation, which brought our Lord to suffer on the Cross for us.  Indeed, we should mourn for this “as one mourns for an only son” (Zechariah 12, 10) because of what our sins cost our Savior, and what they may cost us, if we do not reform entirely.