Why don’t your disciples fast?

And now the religious people come with what sounds like a pious question, but is really an accusation:

“Why don’t your disciples fast?”

In first-century Judaism, fasting was serious. The Pharisees fasted twice a week – Mondays and Thursdays. John’s disciples fasted. It was a sign of devotion, of mourning for the exile, of longing for the Messiah.

Their question is ours too: Why does your religion look so… joyful? So free? Where is the discipline?

Jesus doesn’t dismiss fasting. He reframes it entirely. The problem is not that they fast, but why and when.

2. The Bridegroom Is Here

Jesus answers with an image they all understood: a wedding.

“Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”

In Jewish thought, a wedding was the one time fasting was strictly forbidden. Even the rabbis said: all in attendance on the bridegroom are released from all religious duties. Joy overrides obligation.

Jesus is making an astonishing claim. He is saying: I am the Bridegroom. The long waiting is over.

The Old Testament ends with God promising to come as a bridegroom for his people. Isaiah says, “as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you.” And now, in a house of a tax collector in Galilee, that wedding has begun.You don’t fast at a wedding. You eat. You drink. You celebrate.

This is the heart of the Gospel that we constantly forget. Christianity is not first a system of self-improvement, of trying harder. It is first a presence. God has come to sit at table with us.

There will be a time to fast, Jesus says: “when the bridegroom is taken away.” He is looking ahead to the Cross, to the time between Ascension and return, to our own time – when we do fast, not to impress God, but because we feel the absence. We fast because we long for the wedding to be complete. Fasting in the Christian life is not punishment; it is homesickness.

So ask yourself: Is my faith mostly fasting without the feast? Do I live as if the Bridegroom never came?

 New Wine Needs New Skins

Then Jesus tells two small parables, and both say the same thing.

You don’t cut up a new cloak to patch an old one. You’ll ruin both.

You don’t pour new, still-fermenting wine into old, brittle, already-stretched wineskins. The new wine is alive, it expands, it needs elasticity. The old skins will burst, and you will lose both wine and skins.

What is Jesus saying?

You cannot simply add Jesus as a patch to your old life. You cannot say: “I will keep my old system of earning, of comparing, of self-righteousness, and just sew a little Jesus onto it.”

Many of us try. We keep the old garment of religion as performance – “John’s disciples fast, the Pharisees fast” – and we want to add Jesus as a little extra blessing, a little extra morality, a little extra comfort.

It doesn’t work. The new will tear the old. Jesus didn’t come to improve the old covenant of the law; he came to fulfill it and to pour something entirely new.

The new wine is the Holy Spirit. It is grace that is free, forgiveness for tax collectors and sinners, a joy that doesn’t depend on our performance. That wine cannot be contained in the wineskin of pride, of legalism, of “I fast more than you.”

God must give us a new heart. As Ezekiel promised: a heart of flesh, not stone. Fresh skins. The Last, Honest Verse

And then Jesus ends with a line we almost wish he hadn’t said, because it’s so true:

“And no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.'”

The old is comfortable. The old is familiar. We have acquired a taste for our religion of control, for our complaining, for our measured, manageable spirituality

New wine is unsettling. Grace is unsettling. A God who feasts with sinners is unsettling.

The question Luke leaves us with this morning is very simple: Are you willing to taste the new?

We are not called to be old wineskins trying to hold a little bit of Jesus. We are called to be made new, so that the joy of the Bridegroom’s presence can expand in us without bursting us.

So today, we don’t leave here saying “I must fast more.” We leave saying: The Bridegroom is here. The feast has begun. Let him make me new.