Author: Rod Reasen II
When I was nineteen, I spent a summer delivering furniture. One morning, we loaded our box truck and headed for the main warehouse an hour away, the rising sun at our backs as we joined the slow line of cars following a semi out of town on a two-lane country road. Suddenly, the truck ahead of us slammed on its brakes and swerved, crashing into a deep ditch, bouncing back across the road into another, and finally coming to rest in a cornfield. My coworker pulled us over, and I ran to the wreck, where fuel was spilling, and flames were starting near the cab. The diesel fumes filled my nostrils as I opened that door and pulled the driver out to safety. After that, I barely remember the next hour on the road.
When we finally reached the warehouse, the owners were ready to scold us for being late until they saw my face, and their frustration turned to concern. I could not find the words to explain. The driver had barely survived, and the woman he swerved to avoid had nearly lost her life as well. I was never in direct danger myself, but I was in shock all the same, and I have never forgotten how quickly every mood and every priority in that room changed. In my story, an ordinary morning was interrupted by something terrible, and every priority died on the spot. At Matthew’s house, in today’s passage, scheduled mourning was interrupted by something wonderful, and the men holding the schedule refused to let their priorities die. It is the same collision running in the opposite direction, and both rooms ask the same question: when reality stands in front of you, will you keep measuring the morning, or will you see?
Matthew 9:14-17 [1]
“Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?” And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn 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. 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 is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”
The Collision at Matthew’s Table
A feast is underway at Matthew’s house. Freshly called from his tax booth and still amazed at his own transformation, Matthew has thrown open his home and invited every friend and tax collector he knows to come and meet the Savior who changed his life. Into that joyful room walks a collision of opinions and practices. The disciples of John ask it straight out: “Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?” The question might sound awkward, but it came from real pain and real devotion. Their master sat in Herod’s prison, and they may well have been fasting and praying for him even as the food was being prepared. Behind them stood the Pharisees, who had taken the one fast the Old Testament commanded each year and multiplied it into a twice-weekly rule, quite possibly being observed on the very day of Matthew’s feast. Their frustration was not really about the party. It was about watching other men rejoice while they were struggling. But the patience and the eternality of Jesus breathe clarity into the temporal, and He answers the question underneath their question.
Performance Versus Presence
How often do you find yourself going through the motions, showing up, doing what is expected, listening without really being there? You are present in body while your heart is somewhere else entirely. The Pharisees had built a whole religion on that condition. Fasting, which began as a meaningful expression of grief and longing, had hardened into a scheduled routine, and Jesus had already exposed the disease in the Sermon on the Mount when He said, “and when you fast,” warning His hearers not to perform their hunger for an audience. The ritual had become the focus; anyone who missed the schedule was judged, and the men keeping score held tightly to the actions while missing the entire meaning. They were about to do it again. Standing in front of them was God in human form, and their emotions blinded them into asking Him a scheduling question.
The Bridegroom
Jesus answers the question about fasting by revealing who He is. “Can wedding guests mourn while the bridegroom is with them?” The Bridegroom of Israel is God alone, “your Maker is your husband,” says Isaiah, so when Jesus takes that title at Matthew’s table, He is reminding them of exactly who is sitting in the room. The feast itself foreshadows the marriage supper to come, and His disciples are not neglecting a spiritual practice; they are groomsmen at a wedding feast. Joy is the only honest reading of the moment. Notice too that they asked about fasting, and He answered with the word for mourning, refocusing the whole practice out of the category of scheduled duty and into the category of grief.
Then the shadow crosses the feast. “The days will come,” Jesus says, “when the bridegroom is taken away from them.” The word He chose for taken away appears only three times in the entire New Testament, all three in this one saying, and it carries the sense of forcible removal. With that word, Jesus quietly gave the first hint of His death in Matthew’s Gospel. The wedding was always leading to the cross, and the Groom knew it while His guests were still celebrating.
Spurgeon saw the whole passage from inside that truth: “Our Lord is our joy: his presence makes our banquet; his absence is our fast, black and bitter. All Ritualistic fasting is the husk: the reality of fasting is known only to the child of the bridechamber when his Lord is no more with him.” [2]
The Garment and the Wineskins
Then Jesus widens the answer to the bigger question hiding underneath, which is whether He came to fit inside the old religious ways at all. No one patches an old garment with unshrunk cloth, because the new patch shrinks at the first washing, pulls away, and leaves a worse tear than before, and the Greek word for that tear is the root of our word schism. Christ did not come to be a patch, and yet every generation tries to make Him one, sewing a little grace onto a life that still runs on performance. The stitching never holds.
The wineskins carry the same lesson with the note of life added. New wine, still fermenting and expanding, stretches a fresh, flexible skin with it; but poured into an old skin that has gone brittle, it splits the seam, and the owner loses both. John MacArthur put the meaning of the two containers plainly: “Jesus’ new and internal gospel of forgiveness and cleansing cannot be attached to the old and external traditions of self-righteousness and ritual.” [3] But notice how Jesus finishes: new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved. Grace does not remove discipline; it transforms it, emptying it of self-earning and filling it with something the old skin never held. John Piper wrote in the margin of his Greek Testament beside this verse: “The new fasting is based on the mystery that the bridegroom has come, not just will come. The new wine of his presence calls for new fasting.” [4]
Then They Will Fast
So does this passage say fasting is wrong? Read it again. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. That is a prediction with an address, and the address is now. The book of Acts shows the church fasting at Antioch before the first missionaries were sent and fasting at the appointment of every elder, exactly as Jesus said they would. They feasted because He was there. We fast because we do not see Him yet. Both postures are the same devotion to the same Bridegroom. Fasting becomes a recalibration of our priorities and a reminder of where they belong.
The Challenge
The men who missed the moment at Matthew’s table were not the outsiders but the faithful, present in body, absent in soul, doing the right things while missing the Presence standing right in front of them. You and I can make the same mistake, serving, giving, reading devotionals, and doing every right thing this week, with our hearts drifting a thousand miles from God. The tax collectors and friends at that table brought nothing but their attention to the Savior. Tozer prayed the prayer that belongs at the bottom of this passage: “O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more. I am painfully conscious of my need of further grace. I am ashamed of my lack of desire. O God, the Triune God, I want to want Thee; I long to be filled with longing; I thirst to be made more thirsty still.” [5]
That is the purpose of fasting, not motion but hunger, aimed at the One who truly satisfies.
We never learned what happened to the truck driver that day, and while our deliveries ran hours late, we drove home grateful that lives had been spared from what could have been a deadly morning, reminded that the hand of God was at work even as every priority of our day was rearranged.
May the collision at Matthew’s table be a reminder to you of where your priorities belong.
Reflect
- Where in your life do you need to recognize a collision of priorities and adjust yours?
- When was the last time you wanted anything from God badly enough to miss a meal over it, and what does your honest answer reveal about your hunger?
Stay on Mission
They were followers of John the Baptist, the prophet who prepared the way for Jesus and who sat in Herod’s prison when this question was asked. They were not hostile men laying a trap but sincere men shaped by their master’s austere devotional life, and they may well have been fasting in grief over his imprisonment. Their confusion was honest: the One their master had pointed to was feasting with sinners while they fasted. All three synoptic Gospels place their question immediately after the feast at Matthew’s house.
In the Old Testament, the Bridegroom of Israel is God alone. Isaiah declares, “your Maker is your husband” (Isaiah 54:5), and Hosea builds an entire book on the marriage between the LORD and His people. By taking that title at Matthew’s table, Jesus identified Himself with the God of Israel and declared that His presence made the moment a wedding feast. John the Baptist had already called Jesus the bridegroom (John 3:29), so His questioners were hearing their own master’s words returned to them.
Wine was stored in goatskins, and a fresh skin stretched as new wine fermented and expanded, while an old skin had hardened and would split, losing both wine and container. Jesus used the image to teach that the new life of the gospel cannot be contained by the old system of external, self-justifying religion. As John MacArthur put it, the new and internal gospel of forgiveness cannot be attached to old external traditions of self-righteousness and ritual. The saying ends in hope: new wine in fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.
Once a year. The Law commanded Israel to afflict themselves on the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:29-31), which the nation practiced as fasting, and every other fast in the Old Testament arose voluntarily from grief, repentance, or desperation. By Jesus’ day the Pharisees had multiplied that single commanded fast into a twice-weekly rule, on Mondays and Thursdays, and had begun measuring everyone’s spirituality against a schedule God never gave. That man-made calendar is the backdrop of the question in Matthew 9:14.
In Mark 2:18-22 and Luke 5:33-39, in the same narrative position following the call of Matthew (called Levi in Mark and Luke). Mark notes that both John’s disciples and the Pharisees were fasting at the time, suggesting the question came on an actual fast day. Luke adds prayer to the description of their practice and alone preserves the closing proverb that no one drinking old wine desires new, a dry observation that men comfortable with old religion rarely reach for the new wine of grace on the first offer.
That sincerity is no protection against missing the moment. The men who missed what was happening at Matthew’s table were the faithful ones, present in body, keeping every discipline, and blind to the Presence in front of them. Leaders can build entire structures that run on performance, schedules kept, boxes checked, scores measured, while the life the structure exists to serve has moved on. The passage calls leaders to ask whether their disciplines are fresh wineskins stretching with what God is doing or old skins defended for their own sake.
Jesus assumed His people would fast, saying “when you fast,” not if (Matthew 6:16), and predicted it, saying that when the Bridegroom was taken away, “then they will fast” (Matthew 9:15). The book of Acts shows the early church fasting at Antioch before sending its first missionaries and at the appointment of elders. Christian fasting is not leverage, merit, or performance; it is hunger aimed at God, a recalibration of priorities, and an expression of longing for the Bridegroom until He returns.
[1] Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2001).
[2] Charles H. Spurgeon, The Gospel of the Kingdom: A Popular Exposition of the Gospel According to Matthew (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1893), commentary on Matthew 9:15. Public domain.
[3] John Piper, A Hunger for God: Desiring God Through Fasting and Prayer (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997), 40.
[4] A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1948), chapter 1, “Following Hard After God.”
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