The third controversy dialogue! This time, the question is, “why aren’t your disciples fasting like the disciples of John and the Pharisees?” Yeshua/Jesus, however, doesn’t bother to answer that question. Instead, He asks a better question and answers that one instead–in a very confusing way. This can be a troublesome passage of Scripture because the mini-parable of the wineskin and the torn cloak can be a bit confusing but hopefully, you will come out of this much clearer on the concept that Yeshua was striving to communicate.
Transcript below–
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Mark 12—The Wedding, the Wineskin, and the Torn Cloak
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.”
This week we are talking about the third controversy dialogue—the first concerned Yeshua’s claim to be able to declare sins forgiven, the second revolved around who should and should not be included in table fellowship with a righteous man, and this week the subject is “to fast or not to fast.” To summarize, Chapter one of Mark was all about commissioning and Yeshua’s battles against the spiritual powers of darkness in the form of demons and sickness. Starting in chapter two, He starts having to contend with opposition from people. In the first controversy, they wouldn’t even challenge him verbally, just in their thoughts. In the second, they questioned His disciples instead of Himself. This week, they are going to up the ante by speaking to Him personally, on the surface not about His own behavior but about that of His disciples. They still aren’t willing to come at Him head on. This is still rather passive-aggressive behavior.
Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com
All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. I am not planning to check up on you. Totally not the Bible police.
Alrighty then, fasting in first century (and before that, even) Judaism. Let’s talk about this. First, we’ll go to Scripture—Zechariah 7:4-5—but we are going to ignore Yom Kippur references because this situation in Mark has zero to do with that kind of commanded fast day. We’re going to be talking about fasting for mourning and repentance:
4 Then the word of the Lord of hosts came to me: 5 “Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted?
So, we have two fasts mentioned here and we also know of at least two other communal fasts days being observed by the nation. The fast of the seventh month is obvious and that would be Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonements on Tishri 10 where the entire Nation is commanded to fast. But Zechariah also mentions a fast in the fifth month and you might not know about it so let’s quickly review. The fast of the fifth month would be on the 9th of Av, which commemorates the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem and is also associated with the destruction of the Second Temple as well, according to the timetable set forth by Josephus, who was actually there. According to Ta’anit 68a-d, which is a commentary on Mishnah Ta’anit 4.6, concerning fasting and prayer, there were five reasons for fasting on the 17th of Tammuz, in the fourth month, and four reasons for fasting on the 9th of Av. In addition, we have the fast on the 3rd of Tishri because of the murder of Gedaliah the Governor, and on the 10th of Tevet in observance of the fall and taking of Jerusalem.
So, quickly, on the 17th of Tammuz they believed that Moses had broken the first tablets in response to the Golden Calf incident, the Tamid offering (twice daily) offering in the Temple was interrupted by the Roman siege and never resumed again, the walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Romans, Apistemus burned a Torah scroll, and an idol was set up in the Temple. It is not clear historically who set up the idol, however, or when and who Apistemus was. On the 9th of Av, the disastrous result of the ten bad spies report fell upon Israel as they were told that they would die in the wilderness, the destruction of the First and Second Temples occurred on this day. Also, after Biblical times, in the second century, this day was associated with the end of the Bar Kochba revolt and the razing of Jerusalem before it was rebuilt as a fully realized pagan city.
The commentaries to Ta’anit 1.4-6 (I use the Kehati) also tell us that the Torah scholars fasted on Mondays and Thursdays for various reasons but especially concerning the need for rain.
And the disciple/teacher relationship. This is one of the positive things that the Jews picked up from Hellenism because it isn’t Jewish or Biblical in origins. The whole idea of young men binding themselves to a teacher of some sort, to whom they were to show more preference to than their own earthly fathers. It is so important to understand the difference between what is pagan and what is cultural. There is nothing pagan about having a teacher and being a disciple, it’s just good administration! It’s kind of like the “sons of the prophets” but obviously very different in scope. They weren’t Torah scholars, they were learning to sit in the counsel of God and deliver His words to the people. They didn’t have Torah scrolls just laying around to use and frankly, in the days of the prophets, Torah scrolls were few and far between and all but lost. It wasn’t until well after the exile that Torah study became something to do and focus on. And, of course, we see the creation of the synagogues in Hellenistic times as well. The Greeks did contribute positively to Judaism, but also very negatively. Their way of thinking is what was behind the shift from seeing Torah as a way of living righteously and in harmony into more formalized law codes, which I believe led to much of the animosity between the Jewish factions during the centuries leading up to Yeshua’s birth until after the destruction of the Second Temple when one group emerged victorious.
But the teacher/disciple relationship was very intimate. The disciples were supposed to emulate everything about their Master, from the way he taught to what he taught, and to just do as he did. So, if you see the disciples doing or not doing something then the blame goes on Yeshua, that was the mindset. They wouldn’t do things that didn’t reflect His beliefs and His way of doing things. I mean, at least James and John asked before calling down fire on Samaria, right? If they aren’t ritually washing their hands then He gets asked why. He gets the blame for their behavior. Okay, I think that is enough background for now.
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?”
John’s disciples—that’s John the Baptist’s disciples, of course. And remember, John was arrested back in 1:14, but his disciples would continue living as their master taught them. This was a formal relationship that was ongoing even though John was imprisoned by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. The Pharisees, as there were only 5-6000 of them in all of Israel at the time, and that’s not many, they really were loosely affiliated and bound only by doing the same things the same way, for the most part—they still had lots of debates which we see recorded in later writings. There were two schools, Hillel and Shammai. In the end, Hillel won out. Anyway, the Pharisees had no authority of their own—unlike the Sadducean chief priests who were Roman collaborators, and the Herodians, who were allied with the Roman puppet ruler Herod Antipas. But the Pharisees were popular with the people.
So, we have both groups fasting—the Pharisees and John’s disciples—but nowhere is it even hinted at why or what time of the year it is. Nada. So, let’s assume it is not important why. People came to Yeshua—not John’s disciples or the Pharisees. They asked Him why His disciples weren’t fasting like the others were. Notice something—they aren’t saying, “Why aren’t you fasting like WE do?” Hey, at least this group is actually challenging Yeshua to His face, right? And the question isn’t an inherently moral one because we don’t know why the fasting is taking place but we can reasonably expect that not everyone is doing it. And I want to point out something important here—fasting twice a week is the luxury of wealthy men who aren’t working hard in the weather all day, okay? People who actually know hunger aren’t out there fasting, they are eating very little every day and just trying to stay alive.
I also want you to remember that, according to John, at least two of Yeshua’s disciples had once been John’s disciples. So, they had changed allegiance and adopted a new way of doing things.
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.
Does Yeshua say that the disciples of John and the Pharisees are wrong to fast, or sinning? No. He only addresses the question that He is asked, namely, why are HIS disciples not fasting along with the others. Now the question being asked is, “Why are you in disagreement with them?” but the question He answers is, “should the present age involve fasting for the companions of the Bridegroom?” The question He answers is about the appropriateness of certain actions at certain times—which will also come up next week in the fourth controversy dialogue and the third food controversy. It is not a commentary on fasting being inappropriate in general. I mean, Yeshua fasted for forty days and nights so he was definitely not an anti-fasting advocate. This is not a debate. This is just an explanation of “why not now for these people?” and not a condemnation of the practice in general. The disciples of John and the Pharisees are not being labeled as doing anything wrong.
So, fasting is not condemned but to fast at a wedding would be a grave insult to the host. Utterly inappropriate behavior. Other people in town, not invited to the wedding, could fast to their heart’s content, but those called to witness the joy of the union would be shaming the host by refusing to join in the festivities. Paul says in Romans that we are to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who rejoice. We don’t do a comedy routine at a funeral or mourn at a baby shower, right? It’s disrespectful and, beyond that, it’s just plain cruel behavior. I am actually going to quickly tell you a story about my wedding. During the middle of the reception, my husband’s uncle got a call that a family member (who was not in attendance) had unexpectedly and tragically died. Word quietly spread among those who absolutely had to know and not to anyone else. Mark and I didn’t even know until the next day. Some people just quietly walked out of the wedding because they were too upset to celebrate, and quite understandably. What did happen is that the wedding celebration was not compromised. We have something very similar here. There is both a time and a place for everything. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them leaving the party to mourn, how awful it would have been for them to stick around and pretend to be happy. In the same way, turning the wedding into a funeral would have also been wrong. I mean, if the person had died right then and there it would have been an entirely different story and mourning would have been inevitable and appropriate, but that was not the case.
So, Yeshua addresses the situation with His disciples who are eating and drinking (the second food controversy) while others are abstaining for unknown reasons. The reason, He claims, is because this is a time of joy and celebration. Of course, in hindsight, because we have a narrator, we know that they are in the presence of the Divine Messiah—the answer to Israel’s prayers for salvation and deliverance and the fulfillment of the Isaianic New Exodus, the promised Yahweh-Warrior! There has never been such a great cause for joy in the history of the world, not before and not since. How can anyone fast??
In the Psalms of Solomon 3:8, the reason for fasting is explained as “He maketh atonement for (sins of) ignorance by fasting and afflicting his soul, And the Lord counteth guiltless every pious man and his house.” Elsewhere, as in the Book of Esther, we see fasting participated in during times of great mourning, sadness, in order to divert disaster and to petition God.
Although the bridegroom imagery is popular in Christian circles, it appears only in this metaphor, which appears in all three Gospels, and once in John. In other words, we’re really overdoing it in our romance-obsessed culture. Not too much should be read into the parable of the bridegroom because Yeshua was describing what the Kingdom is like, not what He is like. I was actually rather shocked when I realized how little material a whole lot of artwork is actually based on. We shouldn’t try to go too far beyond a simple metaphor here—Yeshua says this situation is like that situation where you cannot mourn at a wedding. This is a word picture. When we see works such as “like” or “as” or personification at work, these are simply modes of comparison and we have to be careful about putting too much of what we want and think we need to see into the text.
20 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in that day.
Okay, back to doing things at the appropriate time. Here we have what is probably the first veiled reference to His death in this Gospel. At a wedding feast, the guests leave and not the bridegroom. The bridegroom and the bride stay. We shouldn’t mistake this for a modern wedding where the happy couple leaves early. So this would have sounded odd to them—why would the bridegroom be taken away from his wedding? We know, of course, but they couldn’t know. I think everyone was just looking at him like, “Like, you totally made sense until that last bit, so, you know, whatever…”
But, as I said, we know what was going to happen and they would have a few days of absolute despair and sorrow.
Now, we get to the very first parable, a mini-parable, in the Gospel of Mark. This one confuses a lot of people because it gets inappropriately combined with other stories concerning wine. If you recall last year’s episode on parables, you cannot swap the meaning of parable images from one to another. Seed doesn’t always mean the same thing, nor does wine. Each parable stands by itself. If one symbol only meant one thing, there would be a lot of really messed up stuff in the Bible. Just as an example—Noah released a dove from the ark, in Psalm 74 the downtrodden of Israel are compared to a dove, in the Song of Solomon, the bride is compared to a dove and her eyes are also compared to a dove. In Isaiah and Nahum, doves are associated with mourning, Jeremiah and Ezekiel compare people escaping destruction to doves. Hosea calls doves silly and lacking in sense, and Yeshua calls them innocent but not wise. Then, of course, the Gospels compare the Holy Spirit, the Ruach, to a dove. Now, you see all these inconsistent images—each true in their own way as a comparison, but not something where you can plug and play, making every dove image to be an image of Ephraim as Hosea does. It’s not reading the Bible as an ancient text when we want everything to line up nicely. Sometimes a dove is just a dove.
Let’s look at this mini-parable—but Luke adds an extra verse so we’ll combine that here:
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.”
Luke adds:
39 And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’”
On the surface, this is a big “no duh” right? Of course, you don’t sew a new piece of cloth onto an old garment and of course, you don’t put new wine into old wineskins. Nowadays we don’t do too much patching because we just toss out the old and buy something new because clothing is so cheap when it is made with the equivalent of slave labor in third world countries, but they weren’t quick to throw out anything that was old. Despite this, they would have patched old with something else old. With old scraps.
As for wine, it was poured, freshly pressed, into goatskins—which is super gross. The grape juice would react and ferment and would swell the skin, which would expand because that’s what skin does when we feed it too much—not, NOT that I know this from any personal experience, oh no. I am still the same size five I was when I got married. Or maybe twice that, but that’s beside the point. Anyway, wineskins can’t be reused because they dry out and get brittle. Apply a bit of pressure to an old one and it will split and burst. Again, people are saying, “No duh, what does this have to do with fasting? Is fasting the patch or the cloak? It can’t be the wine, so, is it the wineskin?”
But Yeshua isn’t doing any of that—He is talking about something larger—the Kingdom. But to see that, we have to also include the wedding story into the parable, and it usually gets excluded. Three metaphors about doing what is inappropriate at the entirely wrong time. You don’t mourn during times of joy. You don’t tear a piece off of something that is new while trying to salvage something that is old, and you don’t try to force something explosive into something that was not built to withstand the pressure. Even though, as Luke adds, people hate change. That’s why he added that after drinking the old wine no one wants the new because the old is good enough. That’s how we all are, isn’t it? Comfort zone theology.
The Gospel—the Kingdom of God, in the person of Yeshua, is finally invading the wretched existence of His impoverished, beleaguered, oppressed people. They’ve been praying for this salvation, this deliverance, this change. But whenever Heaven invades Earth, things on earth have to radically change. Yeshua didn’t come because everything was hunky-dory just as long as the Romans were gone—the overthrow of the Seleucids out of Israel and the installation of the Hasmonean priest-kings was proof that Jewish self-rule was just as (or even more) oppressive and murderous than foreign rule. It takes a special kind of psychopath to starve his mother and brothers in prison, but Aristobulus I did just that. Alexander Jannaeus had 800 Pharisees crucified just for opposing him, and had their wives and children slaughtered before their eyes as they hung on those crosses. The Romans stepped in and put Herod in charge and he was a monster, but so were his predecessors. The hatred continued between the Pharisees and the Sadducees and it was so terrible that the Talmud, in Yoma 9b, called the first century a time of gratuitous, senseless hatred. It was a time of terrible hatred and oppression—not just against the Jews from the Romans but in terms of Jew vs Jew. Hellenism inspired factions, and factions went to war with one another for supremacy over doctrine and beliefs. There were assassins, the Sicarri, wandering Jerusalem during the feasts and carrying out political assassinations.
Yeshua was born into this horrific mess, into a time of disease and death and hatred and demonic torment. This was the old cloak. This was the old wineskin. This is the world as it was before the Cross. They wanted the Romans gone, but they needed new hearts and a new way of looking at God’s laws and His intentions or having the Romans out of the way would be meaningless. The old was not good enough. They would still suffer under Jewish leadership if the Romans were gone—they would probably plunge right back into the brutal civil war that had marked those Hasmonean years. There’s a reason why Yeshua was so controversial and it wasn’t because He was throwing away God’s laws but because He was bringing an honesty and integrity to them that would blow the current system apart. He wasn’t playing ball—not with the Sadducees, or the Pharisees, and certainly not with the Herodians. The isolationist anti-Gentile policies would have to be a thing of the past because they would be pouring into the Kingdom, as Yahweh promised in Isaiah.
The Pharisees had, under Greco-Roman influence, turned Torah away from being a way of wisdom and life and a system that was meant to show us how to love God and others, really to protect others from ourselves into a legalistic system of the observance of minutiae on one hand and the creation of some seriously bad loopholes on the other. What must we do in order to say we are observing this commandment on one hand vs how can we create loopholes for ourselves to get out of some of the more difficult, circumcision of the heart-type of requirements. We talked about this last year in my series on the Seven Woes of Matthew 23—the maddening demands coupled with some disturbing loopholes that allowed people to break their oaths and vows while the minutiae of cleansing bowls and cups based on whether or not there were handles and all that sort of thing. Don’t think I am saying that every Pharisaic ruling was one of the evil “traditions of men.” I share in my Hannukah program how Yeshua only used that term when calling out behavior that was oppressive to others—like using legal loopholes related to the korban regulations (offerings) to keep from having to support parents in their old age. Of course, religion can be a positive or a negative thing. Yeshua gave us religion ruled by the two great inviolate principles of interpreting Torah. Is it loving to God? Is it loving to others? The Pharisees, some of them in some ways, gave lip service to that in favor of trapping God with the words of the Bible in such a way as they could justify some things that broke the law to love neighbor and respect parents if only they could find another verse that gave them an out. And before you get all huffy, we still do that! Part of being a disciple of Yeshua is in allowing Him to show us where our wineskins are still old and where we are hoarding the old wine of our beastly nature. When He fills those old flesh areas with new wine, they begin to crack and in my own life, whenever I start feeling that happening, I call it a boiling out. The refinement heats up and I can feel the pain. Until one day, whatever it is that needs to go, that gets in the way of my loving God and others gets revealed and shown in all of its ugliness and God gives me the choice to keep it or to get rid of it. But I can no longer ignore it, even if I really wasn’t entirely aware of it before. And oftentimes, we really aren’t aware of what unloving jerks we are. I mean, that’s what this walk is about, right? Submitting to the fire and seeing what boils out and being unendingly shocked at how carnal we still are.
But the Kingdom of Heaven (which the Gospel told us was invading the earth in the person of Yeshua ben Yosef, Jesus Christ), like Aslan, is good but not tame (now there was an excellent metaphor courtesy of CS Lewis), it is not a patch to be applied to our otherwise carnal natures, it is not new wine that we can expect to be safely stowed away without doing damage to the person whom we once were. It is not compatible with who we were and are and will never stop its work until we are bursting at the seams with its byproduct—love.
No, it is explosive, it is demanding. It seeks out and conquers that in our lives which is incompatible. It tears, it bursts out, and it is utterly inappropriate for us to prefer that old flesh nature, saying, “it is good enough.” Yes, we cling to the old. We desire that comfortable old cloak, and that old familiar wine–but it has to go. And so desperate we are to keep it that we take a little bit of the Gospel here and there and apply the comfortable parts to our lives. Or, just as terrible, we settle for external obedience so that we can look good while what is inside has ceased to live, like settled old wine. The people in Yeshua’s day wanted to remain the same (don’t we all?). They just wanted to get rid of the Romans and believed that would be enough to usher in a new age of living by their own laws in peace. But the nightmarish Hasmonean times after the death of John Hyrcanus should have been proof positive that such an alteration would only be a regime change. God intended to change the world from within, one person at a time. The cloak, as it was, could not be patched, and the wineskin had served its purpose. Neither could handle the Kingdom of Heaven on its own terms and survive radically unchanged. Everyone was going to have to re-evaluate and choose where to put their trust. Would it be in the “new thing” promised by Yahweh in Isaiah 42, 43, and 48 or would they cling to just wanting their comfortable old hope of the same old same old with only their external circumstances changed?
Remember, in Isaiah, how Yahweh was repeatedly saying that He was going to do a new thing:
Isaiah 42:9 “Behold, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare; before they spring forth I tell you of them.”
Isaiah 43:19 “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
Isaiah 48:6 “You have heard; now see all this; and will you not declare it? From this time forth I announce to you new things, hidden things that you have not known.”
Yeshua is ushering in a new age, yes, an age where Yahweh has once more intervened for the salvation of His people. But, like the exiles who balked at the idea of pagan Cyrus being the arbiter of their deliverance, resulting in only 5% returning to Israel when commanded to by Yahweh Himself, the people to whom Yeshua was being revealed, those who heard Him preach, who saw great healings and exorcisms and miracles—would they accept this messenger? He, at least, is a fellow Jew, of the royal line of King David. Cyrus was a hard pill to swallow—maybe Yeshua would be easier to accept?
Of course, we all know from our own lives that God cannot possibly make it easy enough for our carnal natures to submit willingly to the new things He wants to do in our lives. We all want His blessings but on our terms, and pain-free at that. We want Him on our side, on our side. We don’t understand that He needs to be on everyone’s side, and it is we who are to be on His side. Folks never really change, eh? Same old battle, only the day of battle is constantly being renewed.
So, what have you been content and even desperate to patch up so that it looks like the ugliness is gone when it is actually alive and well? Maybe only your family sees it? Maybe only anonymous people on the internet get an earful of it? Maybe only you know it is there because you have it stomped down? Maybe you have given up all but just a bit of a vice? Goodness, I know from my own life, and this is hilarious, that you can give up every food that is bad for you and still be a glutton on the good stuff. It’s ridiculous. Some folks give up all physical manifestations of pornography while still engaging in a very ribald fantasy life (and that was me for years after giving up porn). I call it “it’s better but it isn’t good, it’s still bad.” We like to adapt our sins instead of getting rid of them entirely, right?
