Jesus the Bridegroom, New Wineskins, and True Obedience, 2nd Monday (II), January 20, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of SS. Fabian and Sebastian, Martyrs
January 20, 2020
1 Sam 15:16-23, Ps 50, Mk 2:18-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• On Saturday morning, in the scene immediately before today’s Gospel, we confronted the scandal Jesus caused for the Scribes and Pharisees for his mercy toward sinners, particularly Matthew and all of his friends. Jesus ate with them and would become known as a friend of sinners, reminding them to learn that God desires mercy, not sacrifice, and that only those who recognize they’re sick need a physician and his medicine. Today, we have a different type of scandal. The disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees approached Jesus and objected, “Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?” It seemed that Jesus was thought a laxist not just toward sinners individually but also toward the Mosaic Law. It seemed that Jesus not only was encouraging a lack of discipline but that he himself was guilty of it. Jesus used the scene to teach a few very important lessons, lessons that are still ever valid for us today.
• The first is about the principal way we relate to God.  The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were fasting out of religious duty and discipline, seeking to draw God’s attention to the prayers they were making with their body. In the Old Covenant, people fasted for three reasons: first, in penance for their sins; second, in supplication for an intention, praying with their body; third, basically out of routine because it’s in the law without much attention to the why behind the what of what they were doing. Jesus wanted to teach them a whole different source of motivation and give them a much deeper way of relating to God. He asked them whether the groomsmen (“friends of the bridal chamber”) at a wedding can fast while the Bridegroom is with them. This pointed to the fact that Jesus was the long-prophesied Groom of people Israel and they were called to relate to God fundamentally out of joyful love. Fasting is good, he was indicating, but there’s an even higher good at stake, which is recognizing and celebrating the presence of God in their midst. Just as something would be off if at a wedding reception we refused to eat the wedding cake or drink a toast in order to keep a fast — especially if we were the bride! — so, as good as fasting is, it would be inappropriate to fast rather than celebrate in the presence of Jesus. The joy of his presence should trump the good of spiritual ascesis. His presence transforms at its root our discipline, our motivation and our whole life. The Church maintains this distinction during Lenten fasting and penances, for example. From the time of St. Augustine, we have said that the celebratory character of the Lord’s Day is more important than the penitential aspect of the entire season. That’s why we don’t even number the Sundays of Lent among the 40 days and that’s why we don’t break our fasts or penance when we have desserts or wine or other things we’ve given up for Lent on the Lord’s Day.
• The second lesson Jesus gives today is about the purpose of fasting. He said that while the Bridegroom is with us, we shouldn’t fast, but when he is ripped away from our presence, then we fast. The verb that he uses points to how the Bridegroom was ripped away by the armed guards of the chief priests in the Garden of Gethsemane and manhandled by the soldiers of Pontius Pilate. Then we fast, not principally as a penance in reparation, but fast out of a hunger to be reunited with him. This principle remains today. After his Resurrection and before his Ascension, the Bridegroom promised to remain with us until the end of time, as he is really with us in the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle. But the truth is that we’re not fully with him. Our desires aren’t all for his kingdom, his glory, his will. Most of us aren’t striving consciously full-time to be his saintly disciple. That’s why we fast, to grow in that hunger for him. That’s the purpose behind the Eucharistic fast and the Lenten fast before Easter, so that we may hunger more and more for a life changing communion with him every Mass, so that we may live a new life with him because of his Resurrection. It’s also the reason why we’ll be fasting on Wednesday as part of the day of prayer and penance called for by our bishops, so that we may hunger to see him more and more in his face in every younger brother and sister in the womb.
• Perhaps the biggest lesson of all Jesus gave in response to the Pharisee’s and John’s disciples’ objection was to indicate that he had come not just to put a “new patch” on the old garment of Judaism, as if all that was needed was a little fix to Jewish practices and mentality, but that he was coming to renew it totally from the inside. Just like a new patch of unshrunken cloth on an old garment would tear the old garment once the stronger, new patch shrunk after it was washed, so Jesus was communicating that unless they let him replace their clothing entirely with the new baptismal garment he was bringing into the world, they would never be able to assimilate the new with the old. They needed new wineskins to be able to receive — and not be overwhelmed — by the novelty of the new wine. Just as new wine that hasn’t fully fermented would burst the taut old wineskins, so we can’t really receive what Jesus wants to do in us with hardened old skins. We need constantly to be asking of him the grace of new wineskins to receive what he wishes to give us. We need that openness to what he wants to do.
• King Saul, whom we encounter in the first reading, didn’t have the type of loving, trust obedience that Jesus was trying to form in his disciples. Saul had been anointed by Samuel king of Israel and had been sent out to battle the Amalekites, with the instructions to put under a ban and destroy what was conquered, both the Amalekites as well as “oxen and sheep, camels and asses.” The point was to train the Israelites not to seek to profit personally from fighting for the Lord. But Saul and the Israelites disobeyed. They spared “Agag, king of Amalek … and the best of the fat sheep and oxen, and the lambs. They refused to carry out the doom on anything that was worthwhile, dooming only what was worthless and of no account.” So God sent Samuel to Saul to ask, “Why have you disobeyed the Lord? You have pounced on the spoil.” Saul’s response was not to ask for God’s mercy. His response to was proudly to defend himself and then to lie. “I did indeed obey the Lord and fulfill the mission on which the Lord sent me,” Saul said. “From the spoil the men took sheep and oxen, the best of what had been banned, to sacrifice to the Lord their God in Gilgal.” Not only was that not what God had explicitly commanded, but it was a total fabrication. They had kept the sheep and oxen for themselves. He was adding sin to sin. Samuel clarified for him that “obedience is better than sacrifice and submitting than the fat of rams.” He called Saul’s rebellion “a sin like divination” and his presumption like “the crime of idolatry.” He had made his own will a god and by his disobedience he was invoking some other god than the one who had commanded him to put everything under the ban. Often we have a similar unholy stubbornness like Saul. We structure our relationship with the Lord according to our categories rather than God’s, our preferences rather than his imperatives. We can miss the whole point of obedience, like Saul and later the Pharisees once did. Our obedience isn’t to a bunch of rules, or laws, or arbitrary divine dictates. It’s fundamentally to a Ruler, to a Legislator, to a Living Lord, who constantly is asking us to follow him in the present. Obedience, as I mention often, comes from the Latin word ob-audire, which means to listen so attentively as to eavesdrop. With new wineskins, we’re called to listen, to discern, each day and to obey with loving adhesion as things around us change. Samuel concluded his words to Saul by saying, “Because you have rejected the command of the Lord, he, too, has rejected you as ruler.” When we hear this, it sounds like a punishment, but it’s not really a penalty. It’s rather a factual omission that if one rejects the Lord, one cannot receive his help as a ruler. If one doesn’t have the proper wineskins, if one is simply going to do his own will rather than the Lord’s, we can’t receive the wine of his assistance. The new wineskin of our obedience means not doing our “own thing,” not second guessing what God says, not changing his commands to suit our preferences, but uniting ourselves to the way Jesus listens to the the Father and puts into action what he says. This type of obedience is worth more than all other sacrifices, because it is the sacrifice of one’s own will as a beautiful and pleasing offering to God the Father with Jesus, as a fragrant and salvific, “Not my will, but yours, be done.”
• The saints we celebrate are models of this. St. Fabian was a Christian layman who came to Rome to see what would happen after the death of Pope Anteros in 236. The electors were deadlocked. They looked for divine inspiration and saw a white dove flying, which helped them to open themselves up to who the Holy Spirit would want. The dove descended, passed over the heads of various of the leading candidates and then settled on this spectator, Fabian. They took it as a sign that this good man, from a noble family, was the one God wanted, and they chose him, ordained him a deacon, priest and bishop and he served through 250. At the beginning of his pontificate, he had decent relations with the Roman authorities and was even able to arrange with them for the return of the relics of Saints Pontus and Hippolytus. It was peaceful enough to build an organization to care for the poor and he was the one who arranged the sections of the city into diakonia, to care for the poor in an organized way, adapting to what the Lord wanted even though obviously there had been no such structures before him. In the year 250, however, the emperor Decius turned on the Christians and Fabian was the first one martyred. The lesson he teaches us is of the elasticity of obeying the Lord always in changing circumstances, a lesson he taught to help guide the Christians of his time along that same path.
• We see a similar lesson in the life of St. Sebastian. He was a guard very much in the favor of the emperor Diocletian who was able to remain faithful to the Lord while serving in the Roman army. He used his office as the head of the guards in order to support Christians who were being rounded up as martyrs and to console and, on some occasions, convert their pagan parents, friends and family members who had come to try to talk them out of “wasting” their lives in martyrdom. But when word eventually got to Diocletian about what Sebastian was doing for the Christians — and that he himself was a Christian too — Diocletian responded by rage as if Sebastian had betrayed him. And, as the early Christians said, he was martyred twice. The first time he was shot seemingly to death with arrows and they brought him for burial, but there they recognized he wasn’t dead and nursed him back to health. Having recovered, he went back to try to talk sense into Diocletian surprising him on a staircase and preaching to him almost as a man returned from the dead. Diocletian would have none of it and had him beaten to death by clubs.In every circumstance, Sebastian sought to obey what the Lord was asking of him, he sought to receive the new wine of each day, as he purified his baptismal garment in the blood of Christ to which he joined his own blood.
• Today as we celebrate this Mass, we can recall that Jesus seeks to give us the wineskins to receive what he is pouring into us today. We rejoice that the Bridegroom comes to be with us each day, to fill us with himself, and to have our wineskins overflow with his joy and obedience and love for God and others. The upright see, as we prayed in the Psalm, the saving power of God. We ask the Lord to strengthen us to be more and more upright, so that like Saints Fabian and Sylvester, we will see his salvation and help others to stand up to embrace it as well.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Gospel MK 2:18-22

The disciples of John and of the Pharisees were accustomed to fast.
People came to Jesus and objected,
“Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast,
but your disciples do not fast?”
Jesus answered them,
“Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?
As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.
But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast on that day.
No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak.
If he does, its fullness pulls away,
the new from the old, and the tear gets worse.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins,
and both the wine and the skins are ruined.
Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins.”