Mark 2:18-22 Disciples and Time
Mark 2:18-22
18And the disciples of John and the Pharisees were fasting; and they come and said to him, 'Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?' 19And Jesus said to them, 'The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. 20But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day—21 'no one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch (τὸ πλήρωμα) pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. 22And no one puts new wine into old wineskins— if they do, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins— but new wine into fresh wineskins.'
18Καὶ ἦσαν οἱ μαθηταὶ Ἰωάννου καὶ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι νηστεύοντες. καὶ ἔρχονται καὶ λέγουσιν αὐτῷ· διὰ τί οἱ μαθηταὶ Ἰωάννου καὶ οἱ μαθηταὶ τῶν Φαρισαίων νηστεύουσιν, οἱ δὲ σοὶ μαθηταὶ οὐ νηστεύουσιν; 19καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς ὁ Ἰησοῦς· μὴ δύνανται οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ νυμφῶνος ἐν ᾧ ὁ νυμφίος μετ' αὐτῶν ἐστιν νηστεύειν; ὅσον χρόνον ἔχουσιν τὸν νυμφίον μετ' αὐτῶν οὐ δύνανται νηστεύειν. 20ἐλεύσονται δὲ ἡμέραι ὅταν ἀπαρθῇ ἀπ' αὐτῶν ὁ νυμφίος, καὶ τότε νηστεύσουσιν ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ. 21Οὐδεὶς ἐπίβλημα ῥάκους ἀγνάφου ἐπιράπτει ἐπὶ ἱμάτιον παλαιόν· εἰ δὲ μή, αἴρει τὸ πλήρωμα ἀπ' αὐτοῦ τὸ καινὸν τοῦ παλαιοῦ καὶ χεῖρον σχίσμα γίνεται. 22καὶ οὐδεὶς βάλλει οἶνον νέον εἰς ἀσκοὺς παλαιούς· εἰ δὲ μή, ῥήξει ὁ οἶνος τοὺς ἀσκοὺς καὶ ὁ οἶνος ἀπόλλυται καὶ οἱ ἀσκοί· ἀλλ' οἶνον νέον εἰς ἀσκοὺς καινούς.
Translation Notes
The wedding guests (vv19) The literal meaning of hoi huioi tou numphōnos is the sons of the bride-chamber.
But new wine, fresh skins (vv22) The Jerusalem Bible uses this translation, which seems to me to highlight the emphasis of the phrase which is about preserving the wine, not the new skins.
The Time… the Time…
The pericope of Mark 2:18-22 begins with disciples, and how to be a disciple. We find here the disciples of John, the disciples of Jesus, and the disciples of the Pharisees. Mark was making a blunt point here, which may miss, until we learn that Pharisees didn't have disciples: If you warmed to their understandings and disciplines you became a Pharisee, not a disciple of the Pharisees. So, Mark's listeners were perhaps for a moment puzzled, and then thought, "Ah, the point is disciples."
The pericope is comparing three distinct ways, potentially competing ways, of worshipping God. Two of these ways regularly fast, and one does not. In the Judaism of Jesus' time there was one obligatory fast for ordinary people, which was on the Day of Atonement. During Jesus' lifetime, it appears that the Pharisees, like John's disciples, were unusual1 in that they saw regular fasting as a vital component in any genuine turning2 towards God. This was so obvious and important from their perspective, that their question to Jesus may have been honest bemusement, rather than a criticism: "How can your disciples be serious in their worship of God if they do not fast?"
Jesus' answer is, "Look at the Time."
What is the Time?
In our affluence, even as Christians, we have largely forgotten the time in a kairos3 sense. It's why we laugh to hide our discomfort at Billy Connelly's joke about his epitaph,4 "Jesus Christ, is that the time already!?" Connelly reminds us that in our unprecedented safety and affluence, we have largely forgotten the time. In Jesus' time, and even more so in the traumatic time of Mark, "the time" was an urgent question about life, death, and hope for a future. Mark lived in a time of massacre, a time of Shoah,5 or Calamity. Where was God in that? When was the Messiah coming—was the Messiah coming? What is the time of our salvation?
I labour this point because I suspect that until imminent death, or a cancer diagnosis, has us asking, "Is that the time already?" the coming of the Messiah can remain almost as an intellectual curiosity,6 rather than being a matter of the survival of a hope which enables us to go on living. Our affluence means that in my most committed and costly discipleship, I have still had a physical security completely unknown to any person of Mark's time.
In the time of Jesus and Mark, the fasting of the Pharisees and John's disciples was not the optional spiritual practice of our time. It was a desperate plea to God: "When will you notice my degradation?7 When will you see my distress? When will you help me? When will Messiah come?" When I understood this, the text of Mark 2:18-22 came alive.
Jesus says, "The Time has come. We live in the Time of the Bridegroom."
The Time of the Bridegroom
The Old Testament imagines God as the (often spurned) husband of Israel.
4 Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed;
do not be discouraged, for you will not suffer disgrace;
for you will forget the shame of your youth,
and the disgrace of your widowhood you will remember no more.
5 For your Maker is your husband,
the Lord of hosts is his name;
the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer,
the God of the whole earth he is called.
6 For the Lord has called you
like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
like the wife of a man’s youth when she is cast off,
says your God.
7 For a brief moment I abandoned you,
but with great compassion I will gather you.
8 In overflowing wrath for a moment
I hid my face from you,
but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,
says the Lord, your Redeemer. (Isaiah 54:4-8 NRSV)
Mark builds on this imagery. Jesus comes to us as the bridegroom. He is the Huios of God who comes to redeem us. We live in the fulfillment of that which is foretold in Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Yet, the imagery is violently gendered, and especially so in Ezekiel 16. There, Israel is cast as a whore in an extended diatribe which I would never read out in worship, for all the sins of the nation are cast upon women. Even in the promise of redemption, the society of men still cast verbal stones upon womanhood, an abuse which allows them to escape some of their own culpability.
But now, says Mark, this time of shoah is the time of the bridegroom! In Palestine, marriage was a time of rejoicing which would involve the whole village. To fast at such a time—to decline to rejoice with the families involved would be a terrible insult. This is why we do not fast, says Jesus. Now is the time of the wedding, the rejoicing, and the bridegroom has arrived.8
So the image of the wedding itself is wonderful while yet deeply gendered. It is an image of redemption and, by the time of Mark, a bold claim that despite the calamitous trauma of the time, we are redeemed. But wholeness and redemption is cast entirely in an image of the man redeeming "a fallen woman." We too often unthinkingly foster this with an unconscious and un-examined assumption that people who have not married, especially women, are not quite whole. Nor do not stop to imagine how our words feel to those trapped in loveless and violent marriages.
We think of marriage as romantic and companionate, as it no doubt often proved to be in Jesus' time. But first of all, marriage was about the stability and continuation of two families, an alliance which enabled the society to persist and flourish. This is why the Pharisees and John's disciples fast: it is at once a symbol of repentance and also a plea for the the bridegroom to come soon, so that life may persist. Mark, in a time reeling from the calamity of the destruction of the temple, is saying, "But the bridegroom has already come!" Rejoice! Except…
On that day
Except that Jesus also said, "the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day."9 (Mark 2:20) This means the image of the bridegroom is highly contextual. Jesus' words are uttered before the day, against fasting. But Mark and his audience, including us, are living after the day. Some parts of the early church seem10 to have fasted as a response to that taking away of the bridegroom which Mark otherwise calls a handing11 over.
Listeners who knew the Prophets would recall Amos 8:9-10
9 On that day (ἐν τῇ ἡμέρᾳ ἐκείνῃ LXX), says the Lord God,
I will make the sun go down at noon,
and darken the earth in broad daylight.
10 I will turn your feasts into mourning,
and all your songs into lamentation;
I will bring sackcloth on all loins,
and baldness on every head;
I will make it like the mourning for an only son,
and the end of it like a bitter day.
And they would remember the story of the crucifixion when "darkness came over the whole land" at noon. (Mark 15:33
But this fasting is a response to that handing over, "mourning for an only son," not as a mistaken plea for the bridegroom to come.
Finally, we should note that the image of the bridegroom in Mark "rattles against" later Christian traditions in which the final "eschatological consumation"12 is imagined as a wedding banquet.13
Cloth and Wineskins
The image of the patch is first of all abut preserving the old garment! The new and the old cannot exist in the one garment. There will inevitably be a tearing. Every thing is torn in Mark: Caiaphas tears his clothes when confronted with Ho Huios tou Theou,14 the curtain in the temple is torn at his death,15 and the heavens are torn (Greek) at his baptism16 . The old and the new simply cannot be together. The same thought is expressed in the image of the wine skins, but there the use of new wine skins not only preserves the old wine skin, the past container of the faith, but also preserves the new wine. Again there can be no mixing of the two. How clear this must have seemed in Mark's time following the destruction of the temple where even the building itself is torn down. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that some Christians would not have noticed the subtlety of Marks language. The patch which tears away is a translation of the word plērōma which in other contexts means fullness! (eg Mark 6:43, Galatians 4:4)
What might we read in this imagery of immiscibility, which is at the same time an image of preservation, with its hint of superiority which is contained in the word pleroma? I have no Jewish friends, but have been blessed with a number of Muslim friends and neighbours. It is clear that they speak of the same God who has met me. It is clear that they are informed by, and are living out, a deep humanising spirituality. Their generous sharing of food with Christian neighbours on feastive17 occasions is something we followers of Jesus would do well to reciprocate. I have been moved and informed by the wisdom of Muslim friends; the witness of one of them brought me back into active congregational ministry. But discipleship is an immersion, a baptism, in a worldview and in a loyalty. I suspect that, no matter how much we learn from each other and value each other's wisdom, no one can wear the cloth of two different Ways. But the separation, and the hatred, which used verses like these as justification, is simply not of God.
If we read Mark 2:18-22 in a "that means this" fashion, we will miss its richness. It requires of us an act of imagination and holding together of multiple images. We are living in the new age, but in a "now and not yet," which can dramatically influence every aspect of our being. The Basileia is at hand and we can live in imitation of Jesus, which already heals and reshapes us. That will be a cost to us, for it will put us at odds with empire, behind which stands the crowd, "until the Kingdom [sic] is finally in place." Byrne continues
In this situation the demonic will be recognizably at work when the categories of the old understanding, in all likelihood cloaked in religious "righteousness," are invoked or appealed to in such a way as to challenge messianic joy, to undermine the relationship with God characteristic of the Kingdom, or to suggest that the sufferings of the present, "in-between" time are signs of separation from the Bridegroom rather than union with him.18
In this situation, any exclusion which suggests Jewish or Muslim cousins are somehow less worthy or less human, will be a manifestation of the demonic in us. Such exclusion is the unconscious, or denied, scapegoating by which we disciples of Jesus reassure our insecurity that we are the holy ones, telling ourselves how much better we are than "those Jews and Muslims."19 And when it comes to a time of Mark 3:6 in our lives, it will be we who go out and conspire with the Herodians, empire, to destroy him.
Andrea Prior (January 2025)
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1. But by the time of Suetonius, "fasting like a Jew" was a common phrase, which seems to reflect a change in spiritual practice. Black, Mark in the section "The Bridegroom, the Patch, and the Wineskins (2:18-22)" (Suetonius lived approximately 69 - 122 CE. Cf https://www.britannica.com/biography/Suetonius) See also Malina, section "Textual Notes: Mark 2:18-22" Kindle Edition Location 3238
2. That is, a vital ongoing component of repentance.
3. Chronological time is measured on a clock, kairos time has a sense of a critical or opportune moment.
4. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024/sep/28/jesus-christ-is-that-the-time-already-billy-connolly-on-death-despair-and-his-new-book-of-drawings (Retrieved 7/1/2025)
5. Cf Zephaniah 1:15 "a day of desolation of devastation (shoah) and distress"
6. Or worse, a marker for identify conflict and exclusion.
7. Malina section :"Reading Scenarios: Mark 2:18-22", Kindle Location 3241
8. In the Palestine of Jesus and Mark, the bridegroom came to the bride's house, cf Matthew 25-1-10.
9. ἐν τῇ ἡμέρα ἐκείνῃ is a common phrase in the LXX eg Isaiah 2:11, 3:18 etc
10. Scholars Bible, p56 makes this claim, whereas Moloney says there is no evidence for it. See section "Jesus is questioned over fasting 2:18-22"
11. The Greek word we often translate as betrayed is paradidōmi, which means to hand over. Cf Mark 9:31
12. Black, Mark, under the section: "The Bridegroom, the Patch, and the Wineskins (2:18-22)"
13. Cf Matthew 22:1-14; 25:1-13; John 2:1-12; Revelation 19:9-10; 21:2
14. Mark 14:63 diarrēxas
15. Mark 15:38 eschisthē
16. Mark 1:10 schizomenous
17. A deliberate misspelling :)
18. Byrne pp 62 cf Romans 8:17-18
19. This does not mean we may not question or critique aspects of Jewish spirituality, nor does it mean we have any right to reject their critique of aspects of our own.
Good people.
