Something called intermittent fasting seems to be a thing.  There may be something to it.  Humans have been finding value in fasting, especially spiritual value, for a very long time.  Here in our time, we also enjoy unprecedented access to food, for good and for ill.  Biblical fasting isn’t primarily about any supposed physical health benefits.  Biblical fasting is entirely concerned with spiritual benefits.  In the Bible, a fast happens typically when there has been a national disaster, or when the people are about to undertake something momentous, or when a man or woman senses the call to wrestle with God.  Fasting always goes in company with prayer.  At its best, fasting is an embodied prayer: “God, we’re empty without You!”

From this side of the veil, fasting is regarded as an act of sincere faith, self-abasement, humility, a desire to set aside the things of this world to perceive the things of God.  In the world of the Bible, fasting is a way faithful people have of seeking to draw nearer to God.  Those who fast deny themselves; only, let them also take up their cross, and follow.

From God’s side, our fasting is rarely if ever pleasing.  People fast that God would be merciful.  God is always merciful.  People fast when they have been disobedient.  Beloved, the cure for disobedience is obedience.  The main objection to fasting, from God’s side of the veil, is that old distinction between outward performance and inward transformation.  Fasting is always temporary.  Oh, actions speak louder than words, yes, yes.  But temporary actions, loud as they may be, don’t have the same effect as habitual action, and I guess I don’t need to tell you that our habits are a big part of our problem.  Oh!  God wants us to get into the habit of holiness: life God’s way.  We like a God who is in the habit of letting us live our way: if we can’t have such a god, we’ll make one.

“Now John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting” (2:18).  I don’t doubt their fasting was very sincere: they were denying themselves, but were they taking up their cross?  The question would have made no sense to them, at the time.  What was this cross?  Who was taking it where?  Why?

Over the years, I have tried fasting in different ways for different durations.  I was glad to give things up, even things I enjoyed, and I don’t recall really missing those things or thinking about them obsessively all the while I was fasting.  I will say, though, that the fasting always came to an end.  Discipleship doesn’t, or shouldn’t, anyway.

“Some people came and asked Jesus, ‘How is it that John’s disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees are fasting, but yours are not?’” (2:18).  Hey, Jesus, all the really holy people fast.  Holy people fast; everybody knows that.  Your followers don’t fast.  How are they holy?  You don’t require them to fast.  How are you holy?  You’ve got to show you’re holy.  Everybody knew that.  When you show you’re holy, you signal you’re an ally of the Holy One, you’re signaling to whom you belong.  All that was obvious.  Beloved, if a main motivator is to show others, or ourselves, or God, how holy we are, I’m afraid we’ve misunderstood a few basic things.  How did Jesus show he was holy?  Was he living to show others how holy he was, or was he instead living his faith?  There is a difference, and it’s important.

Why aren’t your followers fasting, like all the holy people do?  “Jesus answered, ‘How can the guests of the bridegroom fast while he is with them?  They cannot, so long as they have him with them’” (2:19).  I haven’t been to many weddings, but I can say that none have been sad.  In those ancient times, a wedding was a celebration spread out over days.  In a time and place where most people didn’t have much, much extra, a wedding was a time for everyone to bring out their best and share it, rejoicing.  The festivities completed, people resumed their workaday lives, which were demanding enough, and groom and bride also then had to set aside their festive clothing and set about the ongoing, daily work of building a home and a life together.  I like to think the glad memories of the wedding feast were a permanent resource and blessing to help take the hard edge off the trials and difficulties that needs must come.

Jesus tells those wondering about the peculiarity of his way that so long as he is with his guests, the celebration continues.  “[S]o long as they have him with them,” the celebration continues.  Is Jesus with us, brothers, sisters?  Oh, he isn’t here in the body, and yet his body is here.  No, he is not here physically—no physical body can at the same time be in two entirely separate places—but his love, his grace, his mercy and peace, his power and his Word—his spiritual body—this is with us, surely?  Remember what the risen Christ says to his eleven?  “[S]urely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Mt 28:20).  How?  Physically, he left them, ascended.  If what he said is true, then—and it is true—he is with us, always, in some other way.

What can Jesus mean when he adds, “But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and on that day they will fast” (2:20)?  From the moment they left the table of the Last Supper until after Jesus was laid in the tomb, I very much doubt any of the apostles ate.  And by that point, none of them were thinking much about eating.  No, without planning it or thinking about it, all the apostles fasted, that day.

What of us, then?  Fasting remains a spiritual discipline available to believers.  Fasting does not please or impress God.  It doesn’t win favor from God.  All spiritual disciplines are ways people have developed for attempting to prepare the way between God and themselves, to try to make the sin-roughened way smooth.  Spiritual disciplines aren’t there to win God’s favor.  If they help at all, the only help they could provide is to help us turn our eyes upon Jesus.

Jesus does speak about fasting: he says when you fast don’t call attention to it.  Christ neither tells nor even asks us to fast.  He asks us to trust and obey.  He does not encourage making additional rules for ourselves: He invites us to obey the law of love.  But if we don’t follow the rules, how will we ever be right with God?  You see, if I just did a better job of following the rules, I’ll win God’s favor.  That seems to have been the way of thinking common in the days of Jesus.  If by my own efforts I could win God’s favor, there would be no need for Jesus, or at least I would have no need for Jesus: he might be okay for other people, of course; you know—the ones who really need him.

Jesus came to fulfill the law, not to demand even more urgently that we perform the law.  Through Isaiah, God says, “See, I am doing a new thing!  Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?  I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (Is 43:19).  Jesus says a couple things, here, about the troubled relation between old—the way of the law—and new—the Jesus way: “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment.  Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse” (2:21).

Why talk of a tear?  What tear?  Beloved, if the old way were capable of fully atoning for sin and giving assurance of salvation, why send Jesus at all?  The old way had a gaping hole because it required perfect obedience and perfect obedience was just what no mortal could offer, even with the most zealous heart.  What hope was there, then?  The same abiding hope as had always been: hope in God.

How do you know it’s finally time to give up your old, favorite sweater?  Simply stitching the new onto the existing old in hopes of saving the old garment could not help.  Jesus was a new way, truly the only way.  “And no one pours new wine into old wineskins.  Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined.  No, they pour new wine into new wineskins” (2:22).  Have you ever had a bottle that leaked, and you didn’t know it?  Or like a takeout container—oil and sauce all over the car, or your clothes, or the fridge?  What a mess!

A new covenant.  God tore through the barrier separating us, sending Christ—our new wine.  He pours out this wine—his own lifeblood, abundantly, freely, graciously, for us.  By his wine, we are made new.  Beloved, you and I, we can’t rely on these old wineskins of ours—our kindness, or patience, or charity, our love: you know, all about us that makes us good people.  Oh, I’m so glad I’m a good person!  A good person.  I’m not a good person.  I want to be.  In Christ, through the Spirit, God is remaking me into one.  All our reliance and our only hope is not in us but in Christ, who invites us here, who offers, here, to be with us, live in us and be the cleansing, atoning life in us that will bring us to life eternal, bring us into God’s own life, always.  Now, then, is not the time to fast.  Now is the time to feast.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.