May the metaphor Be With You!

Jesus used Parables frequently. The Gospels are filled with over 30 Parables that Jesus used to help us grasp and hold onto the Truths in His teaching. Today, in our Matthew 9 reading, Jesus employs a series of parables to respond to John the Baptist's disciples, who approach Him with a question. Here is the question:

Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, 'Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?

Image by mmgsangil

May the metaphor Be With You!

By Tim Trainor


Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Amos 9:11-15
Matthew 9:14-17


I love popular and oft-repeated sayings attached to images or movies that make their rounds in friendly conversations or via social media. One I'd like us to consider this morning is:

“May the metaphor Be With You!”  Get it? I know, corny, but funny.

Metaphors are great tools for enlivening a conversation. Some people have a weak metaphor game, and some have a very strong one. Jesus’ metaphor game was so strong that He built it up into parables!

A metaphor is a single image that helps capture an idea and advances discussion on it. A parable is like a metaphor, but it stretches a one-time image into some concrete, prolonged phenomenon to illustrate an abstract Truth. Per Wikipedia, “it may be said that a parable is a metaphor that has been extended to form a brief, coherent, memorable narrative.”

Jesus used Parables frequently. The Gospels are filled with over 30 Parables that Jesus used to help us grasp and hold onto the Truths in His teaching. Today, in our Matthew 9 reading, Jesus employs a series of parables to respond to John the Baptist's disciples, who approach Him with a question. Here is the question:

Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, 'Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?

It was a reasonable question. Fasting was part and parcel of righteous living among the Jews, even if it was seemingly often corrupted by self-righteousness and showy, empty religion. Rightly practiced, it was an act of mortification and was generally seen as a holy thing to do. So, yes, this was a reasonable question.

The fact that John’s disciples ask this of Jesus shows there was some confusion between the two camps while there remained a unity of purpose and deep appreciation of each other. John and his followers were not attacking Jesus. They appear to have been honestly trying to understand why there was this difference in the practice of fasting.

In the Wedding Parable, Jesus stretches the image of a wedding into a story to help John the Baptist's disciples better grasp when to fast.

And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn (or fast) as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.

As we will see, this was a profoundly theologically rich image with numerous implications other than just an answer to: “When to Fast'“

First, by employing a wedding metaphor, Jesus was saying something about His own identity.

He refers to His disciples as “wedding guests” and Himself as “the bridegroom.” Many of His original Jewish hearers would have been scandalized by this usage of the word “bridegroom” in relation to Himself at this point or later, upon further reflection. Why? Because it is an image used to depict God in the Old Testament!

In Isaiah 62, we read: “For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your Builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

Here, God is likened to a rejoicing bridegroom. In Hosea 2, the Lord God Himself takes this idea even further.

And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord.”

Here, we see this wedding metaphor stretched into a powerful statement about Jesus's identity. He is truly God with us! Furthermore, this image says something about Jesus’ mission.

Jesus calls us into a loving, celebratory union of joy and hope. His mission is not to press joyless servitude on miserable and frightened servants. It is to invite us into a union of love! God’s relationship to His covenant people is, therefore, a marital type of relationship. He is the bridegroom, and we, the Church, are the bride.

Jesus’ statement that the guests do not fast while the bridegroom is with them is telling. Per Jewish law, wedding participants and guests were freed from religious obligations, including fasting, during the seven days of the wedding celebrations.

In His earthly incarnate state, Jesus was physically with His people. This setting, aside from fasting, was a picture of what life in glory would be like. The Christian life is a feast, not a funeral!

There is, however, an ominous note in the words of His answer as well.

The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them…

It has been argued that this is Jesus’ first allusion to the coming crucifixion in the gospel of Matthew. Here, the Lord begins to prepare His disciples for the fact that the bridegroom will be “taken away.” It is a reference to the crucifixion and the ascension. In other words, He will not remain with them forever in His manifested incarnation. He will return to the Father.

Tacked onto the end of this announcement of His being “taken away” is a statement about what life will be like for the Church between the ascension and the second coming.

The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then, they will fast.

When Jesus is with His people, we do not fast. We are intended to live lives of celebration, peace, and joy in His presence. In the in-between time, between the ascension and physical return of Jesus, a joyful type of fasting should continue, for Christ is still partially with His people as we are indwelt by the Spirit of God! So, a form of 'expectant' fasting resumes as we await the bridegroom’s return.

Jesus next offers us two more Parables likened to religious patching/reuse guidance.

No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine spills and is lost, plus, the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”

I am going to focus on the wineskin metaphor, for it is essentially the same as that of the patch and garment advice but offers more vivid nuances. Plus, it is easy to grasp that unfermented wine put in an old skin will, when it expands during fermentation, destroy the old skin, and the wine will be lost, too.

In this saying, Jesus is pointing out to us the nature of the coming Kingdom of God and His ongoing work in revealing and ushering it in. In short, the Kingdom of God is like fermenting wine. It bubbles and expands. It is alive. It has vitality and energy that must be planned for to be contained and not lost!

The institutional Judaism of that day was like an old wineskin. It had maxed out its 'stretchiness,' so to speak, under the tension of added man-made rules. It had done all that it could, but, as we are told: “The Scribes and Pharisees had tied up heavy loads and placed had placed them on the shoulders of God’s people.

These two realities—the new wine of the Kingdom and the old structure of first—century Judaism—could not coexist. What Jesus had come to proclaim and demonstrate could not fit within the structure as the religious elites had shaped and contrived it.

The Kingdom of God was, therefore, a very real threat to the current status quo. The religious leaders clearly understood this, and thus, they were hostile towards Jesus.

But we must be careful here. Jesus did not come to destroy “Judaism.” Jesus was a Jew! He came to fulfill the true faith. He was the point of it all along. All the covenants and promises and the prophets' writings—indeed, all of the scriptures of Israel—had been pointing to Jesus. But the religious leaders with their old wineskins could not see this. His threat, I believe, was not to Judaism. His threat was to what it had become under their watch!

In saying what He said about wine and wineskins, Jesus was therefore proclaiming a new day, a day in which the Kingdom had come and yet was coming, a day in which the old and tired and worn-out religious edifice that had been built, at least in part, upon the backs of those who labored to live “up to code” was now being burst by the fermenting Kingdom that was currently spilling over the banks of human religiosity!

Jesus was the hope of Israel, but Jesus was a nightmare to Israel’s religious controllers.

Nothing sums up what Jesus was saying and how offensive it was other than Jesus’ short synagogue visit and sermon in Luke 4.

And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as was His custom, He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and He stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to Him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Today, this good news is: “Fulfilled in your hearing,” He announced.

Liberty, recovering of sight, plus a year of the Lord’s favor. Good news, one would think. But no!

Because all of this was happening via Jesus, a 'previously known local boy' plus opposition from the religious rulers was overwhelming evidence; therefore, all this new wine of the Kingdom could not be contained in their old wineskins, - so the locals tried to throw Him off a cliff!

This was Jesus' last visit to Nazareth, where He grew up.

The Kingdom of God always invites us into relationship and it is up to each of us to send a favorable RSVP. Don't be like the people of Nazareth. Relationship is always superior to mere observance, no matter how earnest and intense that observance might be.

In summary, the old wineskins cannot contain what Jesus is doing. This is the answer to the question posed by John’s disciples. This old approach to fasting had to be rethought in light of the coming of Jesus. Everything was changing! The Bridegroom had come! The old wineskin, the old way of thinking about religious observances and what they mean, was bursting at the seams in the presence of the one who calls us into a living, dynamic relationship of joy, hope, life, and proclamation!

This leads to these two closing questions:

Do you have any “Old Wineskins” that need to be exchanged? Do you sometimes hang on to things that you would be better off letting go of, such as old, worn-out ideas and habits that come between you and others and prevent you from being fully in the presence of Jesus? 

How about preparing a New Wineskin for filling while ‘the bridegroom is at least Spiritually with you here on earth? Help each of us, Lord, to create more space for You: to “fast” and renew our prayer life, to add devotions like the Rosary or Eucharistic Adoration, and thus ready each of us to receive all of You when we meet fully in person!

The King has come! Everything is now different. And praise GOD for it! As the Old French saying goes: “Vive la difference.”

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