Wayfarers and beholders

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Mark 2: 18-22) sees Jesus in one of His first exchanges with people. Later on, these questions are deceitful and meant to entrap Him. But this inquiry comes from no particular group and seems to be an honest observation on one particular difference they had noted among Jesus’ disciples: why do they not fast like the disciples of John and the Pharisees? Jesus replies to them with a metaphor, a kind of parable in miniature, in which He is the bridegroom and the disciples His companions. He then evokes two further metaphors - one about repairing fabric and the other about filling wineskins - each no doubt grounded in the culture of the time, but the meaning of which would have been by no means apparent to His listeners. This is a good example of the pedagogy of the Lord; when once we have arrived at the stage where we can ask questions, we should not expect direct answers but rather invitations to come further up and further in. Did we think that fasting was needed? Perhaps it was but we need to consider other factors. Did we think that things would be like they were in the past? Perhaps they should be but there are new matters to be considered. This gospel scene is not so much about the indiscipline of disciples who are not fasting, but rather about the newness that Jesus’ ministry is about to initiate on earth.

Let us begin with this newness. God fulfilled His covenant to the Jews and in doing so sent to earth His Only Beloved Son: Behold I make all things new. (Rev. 21: 5). This too was a matter of the divine pedagogy that aimed to draw one of the fallen peoples of the earth towards the mysteries that the fullness of revelation would eventually disclose, and from them to reveal those mysteries to the entire human race. This was the plan. And the fullness of this revelation is why Jesus’ coming required the weaving of a new fabric, the seamless robe of the Church, in which all sinners could find a place. The fullness of this revelation is the new wine that cannot be decanted into the old wineskins of the Jewish ritual laws, but rather requires the new wineskins provided by the Holy Spirit. All of this is evoked in these two metaphors which, as I say, could only have planted questions rather then provided a solution to the original puzzle of why the disciples were not fasting.

But if the outer structures and gestures of religion were about to change, symbolised by the fabric and the wineskins, the biggest change is indicated by Jesus’ first metaphor of His being the bridegroom. It is easy to imagine that some in the crowd scratched their heads and wondered if he was about to announce his betrothal to some lucky Jewish maid. The more learned among them might have wondered if there was some spiritual significance to what he was saying, for this image of “the bridegroom” is redolent of the Song of Songs, one of the more mysterious books of wisdom in the Old Testament that evoked the relationship with God and his people, and as we now know the betrothal of Christ with the Church, through the metaphors of marriage and sexual desire. Jews were not allowed to study the text until the age of 30, when, one supposes, they were deemed morally continent enough to listen to its teachings.

For those with ears to hear, however, this metaphor of the bridegroom said everything that needed to be said abour how Jesus saw His mission now. At other times in other gospels, He evokes His passionate love and determination in other ways: I come to cast fire upon the earth, and what would I but that it be kindled? (Luke 12: 49). Here, however, the metaphor is not merely abstract, but grounded in the two poles of Christian life: our current distance from God and the confession of God’s passionate love for us that draws us back to Him. And these two poles are themselves approached and marked by the need to fast and the need to be festive.

The fullness of Jesus' revelation later on will help us to understand an intrinsic paradox of our life on this earth. In some ways, we remain wayfarers on the journey whose dangers are not yet passed and whose risks are not yet fully behind us. These are the moments when we realise that we have not yet arrived definitively in the arms of our beloved Saviour. This is why we fast: to do penance for our sins, to chastise our flesh into subjection, and - if for one other reason which we seldom think of - because the bridegroom has gone away. Whatever the motives for human joy and indeed for spiritual joy, the bridegroom has gone away and is not yet returned.

But if we are wayfarers, the revelation of Jesus shows us the extent to which the Father's plan is to temper the difficulties of our condition by placing us already in the presence of the One to whom all our journey directs us. And His presence amongst us is multiple: in the most Holy Sacrament of the altar, the source and summit of the Church’s life; in the words of Sacred Scripture, committed to us through the gift of the Church (for, as St Augustine says in his letter to Manichaeus, I would not believe the gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me to do so); in our hearts through grace where the Blessed Trinity dwells; in our neighbour in all their distress and in whom we find His image and likeness; and, why not, as St Francis found, in the world of nature created by His hand.

Has then the bridegroom truly gone away? Indeed He has, but only to allow the mission of the third person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to shape and mature what the Son had planted, to sanctify it and make it holy, and bring it to the fullness of life and love, as once He did in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

 The bridegroom has gone away, and we must fast. But if we only look around us, like the separated lovers we are, we will find the presence of the Divine Spouse everywhere.