A reading from the holy Gospel according to Mark
“Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.
But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus responds to people who ask him why his disciples fast. The disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, they say, so why shouldn’t your disciples do the same? Jesus then goes on to tell them the analogy of a new piece of cloth sown on an old cloak and of new wine poured into new wineskins. Both attempts would fail. Like the new cloth and the new wine, Jesus is the Good News, the last Word of God, that simply can’t be grafted onto what came before him. As Saint Paul says of Jesus in the first reading: “And when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.”
Help me understand this, Lord. Your Son is the bridegroom and each soul who belongs to the Church, the bride of Christ. Through Jesus Christ, I participate in the ancient beauty of the Church that is always new through him, with him, and in him. As Saint Augustine says in his Confessions: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new.” There is great hope in this, that the same Christ who died has risen to eternal life for you and for me; there is hope in the expectation of the return of the bridegroom in his Second Coming. Dying with him through baptism, we are brought into the Church and what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the sacrament of regeneration” to become a son or daughter of light and “a new creature.” Lord, this is a lot to take in. Help me understand the love you have for your people and deepen my faith and trust in you.
Thank you, Lord, for your presence in the Eucharist! You are beyond my comprehension, yet let me rest in your presence as a bride rests in the love of her bridegroom. Be with me today, Lord, and help me come to know the beauty I hope one day to see face to face.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.