Maxine King

“Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? 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.”

Dear friend,

In the Gospel appointed for the Daily Office today, Jesus is questioned on some unusual practices in his and his disciples’ shared life. Perhaps most prescient for us during our Lenten observance, he is asked about his disciples’ lack of fasting, right after he is questioned about his eating with sinners and tax collectors. Jesus answers by comparing himself to a bridegroom, and his disciples as the wedding guests, who do not fast while they are with the bridegroom. Nuptial metaphors between Jesus and the Church abound in Holy Scripture, and images of a wedding feast are often eschatological in Jesus’ sayings and parables, and this image culminates in the book of Revelation, when St. John describes hearing a song exclaiming that the marriage of the lamb has come, and further, that “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:7-9).

However, the plainest meaning of Jesus’ analogy in this instance is that the marriage feast was occurring in those very days, and that it would in some sense cease when the bridegroom is taken away in his Death, and then, after his Resurrection, his Ascension. The point, I think, is that this wedding feast does represent the final consummation of God being all in all (1 Cor. 15:28), but that it is also something that the disciples, sinners, and tax collectors foretasted when they were with our Lord in the flesh.

It may seem, then, that Jesus’ statement that his disciples will fast when the bridegroom is taken away from them refers to us, the Church after our Lord’s Ascension. However, we also experience the fact of the bridegroom’s presence among us, day after day in the Church, as a foretaste of that heavenly banquet that is to come. This, I think, helps us make sense of what seems an odd and splendid contradiction that so much of the Church’s traditional piety around fasting is always oriented towards a feast -- whether it’s a fast of a night or an hour before receiving Holy Communion or the extended fast of Lent as a preparation for the extended feast of Easter.

Lent, then, is a holy season when we acknowledge the ways in which the bridegroom is not with us by our own choice -- the ways in which we refuse to participate in the groaning of all creation towards its ultimate end, which is sin. This is why we fast, pray, and give alms, to acknowledge our sins, and to make amends. It is a lovely contradiction, then, that even amidst this season of self-denial and fasting, we as tax collectors and sinners also feast with and on the Lord in Holy Communion -- in fact, it is not unusual across different Churches for one to feast on the Blessed Sacrament more regularly when fasting! The Christian life is marked by such a mixture of fasting and feasting, and I pray that we may joyfully embrace its strange contradictions especially in this most holy season.

Maxine King, BITD Corps Member