Review

Let’s not forget that we undertook this study of Mark with the intention of glancing back at the Letter to the Hebrews from time to time to see how its theology might illumine our reading of the Gospel.  Last week’s discussion provides a good example:  Hebrews takes an in-depth look at the religion of the old Levitical law and demonstrates how it has been completely fulfilled and swallowed up in the actual presence of God in Jesus Christ.  Mark 2:13-17 does something quite similar:  it gives us a picture of Levi, the disgraced and disillusioned heir and namesake of the Levitical priests, abandoning everything to follow the Incarnate God-Man. 

In this week’s passage Mark continues along the same trajectory, giving us some further insight into the differences between the Old and the New.     

Emptiness

18 Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting.  So they came to Jesus and said, “Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples don’t fast?”[i]  

Notice that this question comes to Jesus from two widely disparate groups:  John’s disciples and the Pharisees.  John is a wild, unconventional prophet.  The Pharisees are the staid, stodgy, established custodians of the religious status quo.  Yet the two groups have something in common:  both practice the spiritual discipline of fasting.  And both wonder why Jesus and His disciples don’t follow their example.  What’s the controversy all about?

We can’t answer this without first settling a preliminary question:  what is fasting?  Why does anybody do it?

Fasting in the Old Testament has a predominantly negative significance.  For example, the Day of Atonement was a day of fasting:  a time to mourn over and make up for past sins (Leviticus 16:29, 31).  Other fast days (see, for example, Esther 9:31; Zechariah 8:19) had a similar focus and purpose.  Fasting is about sorrow and regret and repentance – themes that have an obvious connection with the preaching of John. 

At a deeper level, fasting is a way of expressing unfulfilled longings.  The person who fasts embraces physical emptiness as a way of acknowledging spiritual emptiness.  He confesses that something is lacking and engages in an intense effort to seek and find it.  He aches and groans within himself, reaching for that One Necessary Thing which alone can fill up the yawning abyss within.  He wants something that he desperately needs without necessarily knowing what it is.  The Pharisees fasted twice a week, possibly as a way of hastening the coming of the Messiah and the Last Days. 

Fasting, then, is about emptiness and yearning.

Consummation

19 Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they?  As long as they have the bridegroom with them they do not fast. 

Weddings have nothing to do with emptiness and yearning.  The wedding feast is a celebration of present joy.  Once the wedding day arrives, the period of longing and yearning has come to an end.  The point of satisfaction has been gained.  This is the time of fulfillment.  This is the moment of consummation. 

Jesus uses this imagery to clarify the significance of His presence among us.  He taps into ancient Hebrew ideas about the “marriage” between Yahweh and His people and the coming of the Messiah as the long-awaited bridegroom.  In so doing, He underscores the uniqueness of His Person.  Jesus is God, and in Him God is with us.  Nothing like this has ever happened before.  It’s new, uncontainable, and real. 

Here’s the point:  as long as Jesus the Bridegroom is present in our midst, it’s party time.  This is not an occasion for fasting.  There is no room here whatsoever for unfulfilled longings – for wishing and hoping and groping after something better, something more.  “The kingdom of God is at hand.”
                       

In-Between

20 But the days are coming when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and at that time they will fast.  

But that’s not the end of the story.  For a time is coming, Jesus says, when the party will come to a screeching halt.  The bridegroom will be violently snatched out of the revelers’ midst and they will suddenly find themselves in a very different situation.  When that happens, they will fast indeed.  On that day there will be a marked shift in the tone of their day-to-day experience.  This is the time in which we are now living.

“At that time they will fast.”  How are we to understand this?  Is Jesus here laying a “religious rule” on His disciples?  Instead of setting them free, is He linking arms with the Pharisees and saddling His followers with yet another burdensome obligation?  Is He telling us that, if we really want to be holy, we’re going to have to eat fish on Friday and give up chocolate for Lent?

I don’t think so.  I believe He’s speaking on a much deeper level.  He’s talking about the fundamental nature of the Christian life in the In-Between Time.  He’s drawing our attention to the emptiness and deficiency that sometimes characterize our lives in that uncomfortable place between the “Already and the Not Yet.”  The “fasting” He has in mind is the ambiguity of knowing both joy and unfulfilled longing within the context of a single experience.  This is the “Normal Christian Life” as Paul describes it in Romans 8:23; a life in which “we also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our bodies.” 

Wineskins

21 No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear becomes worse.  22 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins will be destroyed.  Instead new wine is poured into new wineskins.

Much has been written and preached on these two images – the unshrunk patch of cloth and the wineskins.  They are two different ways of describing the relationship between the Old and the New.  I don’t want to belabor the subject here.  Suffice it to say that the Reality of the Kingdom (and this brings us back to the book of Hebrews) is too unpredictable, too effervescent, too vibrant to be held within the confines of the dry and ossified forms of traditional religiosity.  As we said at the beginning of this entry, the Old has been both fulfilled and swallowed up in the New – which is just another way of saying that the Old cannot contain the New.  It’s the difference between the chick and the egg, the butterfly and the chrysalis.  New wine requires new wineskins, says Jesus.  Why?  Because it is bursting with Life.    

Final Thoughts:  “To Every Thing …”

“To every thing there is a season,” says the writer of Ecclesiastes, “and a time to every purpose under heaven (Ecclesiastes 3:1).  Appropriateness is the central idea.  When Jesus is on the scene, all is triumph and victory and peace.  But when His face is hidden from us, it is entirely fitting to acknowledge our own emptiness and need.  The ordinary Christian life is like a wavering line that oscillates between these two poles.

So if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands; but if not, don’t fret too much about it.  That’s the way things go in this unpredictable space between the Ages.  

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[i] This week’s Scripture quotations are taken from the NET Bible.