Matthew 9:14-17
Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?” And Jesus said to them, “The wedding-guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, 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 greatest barrier to experiencing joy, I’ve come to believe, is often our own expectations.
Don’t get me wrong – expectations have their place. Time and experience teach us certain things about the world, about the people around us, and about ourselves. And appropriate and reasonable expectations derived from these experiences can help prevent us from making mistakes or being disappointed. Reasonable expectations guide us in making better choices. And so on.
But expectations can also act like filters, screening out all that doesn’t fit those expectations and robbing us from experiencing anything genuinely new. And they can also function as barriers, not letting anything in that doesn’t conform to already established expectations.
And that’s what’s happening here. John the Baptist’s disciples assume they know what the religious life looks like. So when Jesus and his disciples do not conform to their expectations – in this case, employing fasting as a spiritual discipline – they are confused and don’t quite know what to make of it. (One way, by the way, to read the words and actions of the Pharisees and scribes is to recognize that they similarly believe that they know what authentic relationship with God looks like, and when Jesus does not conform to those expectations they are not only confused but afraid, and caught in fear turn against Jesus.)
Jesus’ answer to John’s disciples is striking. You simply can’t fit new experiences – of God, of the kingdom, of joy – into old expectations and frameworks. It would be like trying to mend an old piece of cloth with one that was new and not yet shrunk – the minute the cloth began to shrink it would pull apart the old cloth and you’d be worse off than before. When you try to hold the new in the container of the old, the very “newness” of the new shatters the old the way new wine as it ferments shatters old wineskins.
It seems like such a simple observation, but it holds the key to understanding much of the gospel story – Jesus’ new vision of the Kingdom challenges and threatens old paradigms to the point where the keepers of those paradigms would rather get rid of Jesus in order to preserve their old expectations than entertain a new idea. And it explains the challenge of the life of faith for us today – we’d really, really like to fit Christianity into the paradigms and containers of the world with which we’re familiar. And we’d really like to judge the promises of the abundant life and joy that permeate the gospels by the standards of our expectations, expectations often formed by experiences of scarcity, fear, and disappointment.
So the central question of the life of faith may be this: will we take the leap? Will we be open to the possibility that the God who raised Jesus from the dead regularly surprises us? Will we suspend our expectations in order to entertain the joy and abundance Christ offers? Or, to put it another way, will we give up fasting in order to feast from the banquet of the kingdom of God?
Prayer: Dear God, surprise us. Break through our expectations and envelop us with your surprising, shattering, and life-giving love. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
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