A Reflection for Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Find today’s readings here.
In today’s reading, a parable from the Gospel of Matthew, John’s disciples ask Jesus why his followers do not fast. Christ responds in his typical fashion by asking a question back to the inquisitors (“Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?”) and then presents a series of images: a worn cloak mended with “unshrunken cloth,” unfermented wine that destroys used wineskins. Jesus then tells John’s followers to “pour new wine into new wineskins,” so both may be salvaged.
To begin: why parables? Catholics hearing this Gospel passage from the pews today may well think, “That’s great. Yet another odd tale to interpret.” After all, Jesus’s response to the disciples’ question does not come as a direct answer but as three metaphors with distinct cultural meanings for Matthew’s primary audience of late first-century Jewish Christians. C.H. Dodd, the Protestant scholar of the New Testament, notes that parables were commonly employed by the Jewish teachers of Christ’s time and would have been received as ambiguous allegories only by non-Jewish listeners. In The Parables of the Kingdom, Dodd offers perhaps the best-known and most concise overview of this particular mode of storytelling.
“At its simplest the parable is a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”
For Dodd, the sometimes frustrating ambiguity of biblical parables is a feature, not a bug, that promotes critical thinking and engagement with the text instead of spoon-feeding direct answers to the curious. In today’s narrative, Jesus notes that there is no need to fast, which is associated with mourning, as the bridegroom—that is, Christ himself—is still living. The Scripture scholar Craig S. Keener clarifies that Jesus does not condemn the practice of fasting, but states that now is not the time (cf. Ecc. 3).
Christ’s counter-question about fasting during a wedding feast is, according to Dodd, “unreasonable” because wedding celebrations during Jesus’s era lasted a full week. Who would fast for seven consecutive days? It would be equally unreasonable to patch an old cloak with new cloth, causing the cloak to rip, or to pour fresh wine into old wineskins, causing them to erupt.
Jesus instead calls the disciples to newness, akin to his public ministry that “brings something entirely new, which cannot be accommodated to the traditional system,” writes Dodd. References to new things brought about by the coming of the Lord are abundant in both the Old and New Testaments (cf. Is. 65:17; Eph. 2:15; Heb. 8:13). For example, in Isaiah 43, the prophet foretells Jesus saying, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!” (18-9).
What would it mean for us, as Christians, to be new in the Lord? How might we reconsider our own bad habits or wayward patterns of thinking that, like worn cloaks and aged wineskins, cannot nurture the freshness and vitality of God’s living Word?
