Daily Mass Gospel Reflection - Feasting On Good News

Word on Fire Ministry ^ | 9.2.22 | Bishop Robert Barron

[MurphsLaw]

TWENTY-SECOND WEEK IN ORDINARY TIME

LUKE 5:33–39

Friends, in today’s Gospel, people ask Jesus why he doesn’t encourage fasting among his followers.
Jesus’ answer is wonderful: “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”
(That’s a typically Jewish style, by the way, answering a question with another question.)

This great image of the wedding feast comes up frequently in the New Testament,
most obviously in the wedding feast at Cana narrative.
And it is echoed in the tradition.
Jesus is the wedding of heaven and earth, the marriage of divinity and humanity;
he is the bridegroom and the Church is the bride.
In him, the most intimate union is achieved between God and the world.

Could you imagine people fasting at a wedding banquet?
Could you imagine going into an elegant room with your fellow guests and being served bread and water?
It would be ridiculous!
The mark of the Christian dispensation is joy. Exuberance. Delight.
God and the world have come together.
What could be better news?

[MurphsLaw]

+++The scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus,
“The disciples of John the Baptist fast often
and offer prayers,
and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same;
but yours eat and drink.”
Jesus answered them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast
while the bridegroom is with them?
But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken
away from them,
then they will fast in those days.”
And he also told them a parable.
“No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one.
Otherwise, he will tear the new
and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins,
and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined.
Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.
And no one who has been drinking old wine desires new,
for he says, ‘The old is good.’”+++