There is a moment at some tables when a new bottle is opened with a certain pride, and everyone tastes it politely and then reaches back for the one they already know. Nobody is being disloyal; the mouth simply prefers what it recognises. Today the Lord ends a serious discussion about religion with exactly that observation, and he does not raise his voice while making it.
But they said to him, "Why do the disciples of John fast frequently, and make supplications, and those of the Pharisees act similarly, while yours eat and drink?" And he said to them, "How can you cause the sons of the groom to fast, while the groom is still with them? But the days will come when the groom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast, in those days." Then he also made a comparison for them: "For no one sews a patch from a new garment onto an old garment. Otherwise, he both disrupts the new one, and the patch from the new one does not join together with the old one. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will break the wineskins, and it will be poured out, and the wineskins will be lost. Instead, they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved. And no one who is drinking the old, soon wants the new. For he says, 'The old is better.'" (Lk 5:33-39)
The question that starts everything is a question about frequency. How often do they fast, how often do they pray, and why do yours eat and drink? It is a religion that can be counted, and counting is comforting, because it tells you where you stand and, more quietly, where others stand below you. The complaint is not stupid: the disciples of John really did fast, and by that measure the men following Jesus looked slack.
Jesus does not answer on that ground at all. He does not defend his disciples, does not produce a rival tally, does not explain that they fast in other ways. He changes what kind of question is being asked: there is a wedding going on, and the bridegroom is here. You cannot make wedding guests grieve while the celebration is under way. Their eating and drinking is not laxity. It is timing.
And then, immediately, he refuses to make that a permanent exemption. Days will come when the bridegroom is taken away, and then they will fast. He does not abolish fasting. He moves it. Fasting stops being a performance that proves seriousness and becomes something far more human: the body's way of saying that someone is missing.
This changes the inside of the practice without changing much on the outside. The same empty plate can mean two entirely different things. It can be a score submitted for inspection, or it can be a form of waiting, the way an empty chair keeps a place for someone expected back. Jesus does not ask his friends to fast less. He asks that when they do, it be about a person.
Then come the two small pictures, the patch and the wineskins, and the point of both is loss. Cut a piece from a new coat to mend an old one and you ruin the new coat and disfigure the old one; nobody gains. Pour wine that is still working into a skin already stretched to its limit, and the skin splits and the wine runs into the ground. What worries him is not that people love old things. It is that both are lost.
The wineskin is the image that stays. A skin is not a bottle; it is animal hide, and it lives with what it holds. A new one is oiled and pliable and can give as the wine ferments; an old one has already taken its final shape and hardened there. It is not bad. It is finished. What it can no longer do is stretch. Most of us know where our own hide has hardened: a settled judgement about a brother, a schedule we defend more fiercely than we would admit, a version of ourselves we decided on years ago and have not revised since.
And then the last line, which many hear as a rebuke and which is nothing of the sort. No one who has been drinking the old wine wants the new, for he says, the old is better. Jesus is not condemning that man. He is describing him, accurately and without heat. He knows that newness, even his own, arrives with a sharpness the palate has to learn, and that we will almost always prefer what has gone smooth. It is remarkable that he says this out loud at the end, as if to tell us in advance: I have seen this in you, and I am still here.
Paul knows the same territory from the inside. Let a man consider us servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God, he writes, and what is asked of a steward is that he be found faithful. Then comes the line that ought to loosen something in us: he does not even judge himself, because it is the Lord who judges, who will bring to light the hidden things of darkness and make manifest the intentions of hearts. Our own taste is largely invisible to us. We rarely know whether we cling to something because it is good or only because it is ours. That is not a reason to stop looking; it is a reason to stop conducting the audit alone and in the dark. The psalm says the same thing as a posture: trust in the Lord and do good, commit your way to him, and he will act. Not certify your way. Commit it.
This is where the Child of Bethlehem quietly belongs in the story. When God finally poured out the new wine, he did it in the least alarming form imaginable, an infant in a feeding trough, small enough to be carried and poor enough to be approached. Even so, he needed new skins: a young woman who said yes without knowing the shape of it, a carpenter who changed his plans twice in a night, shepherds who left the flock. None of them were given a new set of ideas. They were given something to hold, and they had to become able to hold it. Poverty and littleness are not decorations of that spirituality. They are what keeps the hide soft.
So the invitation for today is small and quite precise. Somewhere in our life our real reason is simply that the old is good, and we have dressed that reason in better clothes. It might be a task we will not hand on, a person we have stopped expecting anything new from, a prayer we shortened years ago. Name one. Do not force it open; admit that it is there, and offer it. And if we fast at all this week, let it be for the reason he gave, because someone is missing and we would like him back.
The bridegroom, after all, has not stopped coming. The wine still tastes of a wedding, and it is still being poured for people who were not sure they wanted it.
Scripture text: Catholic Public Domain Version (CPDV), public domain.
Prayer of the Day
Father, you pour out a wine that is always new, and you know how slowly our taste changes. Keep us supple in your hands; soften what has hardened in us without our noticing, and let nothing of what you give be lost through our unwillingness to stretch. When we fast, let it be love and not accounting; when we feast, let it be gratitude and not forgetfulness. Do not leave our hidden intentions in the dark, but bring them gently into your light, and give us the trust of the poor, who hold what they are given with open hands. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
For Meditation
- Where in our life is the real reason simply that the old is good, and we have given it a nobler name?
- What would it mean for us to fast because someone is missing, rather than to prove that we are serious?
- What has hardened in us this year, and who could help us become supple again?
