CONTROVERSY ON FASTING

Even as Jesus is portrayed as fulfilling prophecies, he is also portrayed as upsetting religious customs and traditions. This seems to be contrary to Jewish understanding of prophets: people called by God to return Jews to the “true religion”, People who called the Jewish back to the law of God. Jesus seems not to be in that line.

In the Gospel of today we find the controversy on the practice of fasting. The primary fast of the Jews was the Day of Atonement, one of the seven annual solemn assemblies of the Law of Moses. The Pharisees also fasted on the second and fourth days of every week. Apparently, the disciples of John were doing something similar.

Although such fasting was not part of the Law of Moses by Jesus’ day, it had become an important expression of the Pharisees’ meticulous devotion to the ceremonial law. If Jesus’ disciples were not fasting, then it called into question their piety, sincerity and devotion toward the ceremonial law; it called into question Jesus’ attitude toward the ceremonial law. Jesus had already healed on the Sabbath, and his disciples had already been noticed picking grain on the Sabbath and eating without the prescribed ceremonial washing. Add to that the lack of fasting, and the Pharisees must have found this rabbi increasingly troubling the ordinary way of living.

In any case, fasting in the manner of the Pharisees, as a sign of their devotion to the ceremonial law, was incompatible with the new covenant Jesus was inaugurating. For Jesus’ disciples, fasting while Jesus was with them would have been like sewing a new piece of cloth on an old garment — it would have been incompatible. Jesus’ point was that the old has gone, the new has come. The two are not compatible. To put new wine in old skins ruins both the skins and the wine. New wine requires new skins.

Today, it’s still easily found that people pour the new wine of the gospel into the old wineskins of the Law. We like to have a way of measuring our lives; we like to have regulations in our lives, which is something good. The danger and the problem is when we slide toward formalism. The danger is when we think that the simple fact of following the law makes us at the right side. We satisfy our conscience that I been faithful to the law of my community, my congregation, my church, my country then I a good at right person. The gospel tells us simply that our faithfulness to the law is null if it does not help us to reach higher values of charity and service. It becomes worse when our faithfulness to the law is in order to please somebody or in order to acquire something we want.

Jesus is not telling us to not follow the law. He wants us to nourish good motivations. Why am I faithful to the community schedule?

Let us ask the good Lord to give us his grace so that our faithfulness to different regulations wherever we are may lead us to be people of service, charity and love.