Mark 2:(13-17) 18-22

“No one puts new wine into old wineskins.” (Mark 2:22)

The bracketed verses set the scene. Jesus calls Levi from the tax booth and then eats with tax collectors and sinners, and when the scribes object he answers that the healthy have no need of a physician. The meal is the point, and it is the meal that provokes the next question. People come asking why John's disciples and the Pharisees fast while his disciples do not, and Jesus answers with a wedding: the guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them. The logic is not that fasting has been abolished but that it is out of season, and the sentence that follows, that days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, is the first shadow of the passion in Mark. Two short images close the reading. Unshrunk cloth sewn onto an old garment tears away and makes the hole worse; new wine bursts old skins and both are lost. Neither is a verdict on Judaism as such. They say that what Jesus brings cannot be fitted into existing arrangements as a patch or a top-up, and that the attempt damages both.

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