New Wine is for Fresh Wineskins: A Biblical Case for Observing Lent

Today, as I prepared for my youth bible study tomorrow morning, I was reading Mark chapter two and I came across one of those passages. You know, the ones that never quite make sense? You hear them over and over again, but you never sit down and just try to make sense of it? Well, today I came across one of those and I realized that, if I’m going to teach this passage tomorrow, I had better sit down with a couple of commentaries and figure it out. Here’s the passage I’m talking about:

¹⁸ Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting. And people came and said to him, “Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” ¹⁹ And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. ²⁰ The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day. ²¹ No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. ²² And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” (Mark 2, ESV)

I hope I’m not the only one, but I have never understood the whole “new patch, old garment, new wine, old wineskins” metaphor. What does that have to do with whether or not Jesus’ disciples fast? Well, I looked to my commentaries and found something rather cool.

The point of the metaphor is to say that old and new don’t always mix. What are the new and old things? The old thing is the Jewish tradition of fasting. After all, Jesus was challenged because his disciples were not keeping to the Jewish fasting calendar. Why are they not observing the religious holidays like all other Jews? When Jesus replies, he does not say that fasting is wrong, but rather that this is the wrong time to fast.

You see, the Jewish fasts were traditionally associated with the great calamities of their past, the greatest of which being the temple. They fasted to mourn the temple’s destruction by Babylon. You can see this in the Old Testament: In Zechariah 7:1-3, the people of Bethel send a messenger to Zechariah asking if they should continue to fast, now that the new temple is being rebuilt. In Zechariah 8:9-13, God responds that there is a day coming when they will have no reason to fast anymore.

Fast forward to Mark chapter two, and the people ask him, “Why aren’t your disciples fasting?” Jesus says, “As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.” The bridegroom, of course, is Jesus, and as long as he is here it is not the time to fast. That time will come when Jesus is taken away.

When Jesus explains that it is the wrong time to be fasting, he is giving a whole new basis for the practice. Jews base their fasting on the Temple. Christians, on the other hand, base their fasting on Jesus. This brings us to the wine and wineskins. Jesus is the new wine, and the Jewish fasting customs are the old wineskin. If Jesus is the messiah, you can’t take him and fit him into the old Jewish customs, any more than you can put old wine in new wineskins. Jesus is bigger than that. He is greater than the temple. He triumphs over history. His coming is so important and so joyous that it overwhelms the sorrow of the destruction of the temple. A temple-focused religion simply cannot contain the full significance of Jesus Christ.

But notice that Jesus does not say, “Don’t put new wine in any wineskins.” He says, “New wine is for fresh wineskins.” What does that mean? It means that followers of Jesus will base their lives, their calendars, around Jesus instead. They will create a new custom that puts Jesus in his proper place. And remember, that custom must involve fasting, because Jesus said that his followers would fast when he was gone.

This brings me to the Church calendar, and to Lent. You see, the entire purpose of the Church calendar is to focus our time on Jesus Christ. From the beginning of Advent to Pentecost, every year we recapitulate the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This has always been my reason for following the Church calendar: it makes Jesus the focus of my year and molds my sense of time around his life. The purpose of Lent is to give us that time to fast, repent, and mourn the death of Jesus Christ—just as he said we would. Sundays, and especially Easter, are days in which we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus (This explains why Sundays do not count as part of Lent: Sunday celebrates the fact that Jesus is alive today, and we do not fast while the Bridegroom is with us).

Now, am I saying that Jesus commands us to follow the Church calendar? Absolutely not. Am I saying that Jesus tells us to focus our calendar and our holidays around him? Absolutely, yes. You cannot carry wine without a wineskin, and you cannot treat Jesus Christ as the center of your life without making him the center of your time. How you choose to practice that is up to you. But I know of no better way to do it that the ancient tradition of the Church calendar.