There is a time for fasting and a time for celebrating.

Jesus wants our minds and hearts to be like new wine skins - open and ready to receive the new wine of the Holy Spirit.

＊＊＊ 1st Reading ＊＊＊

 Amos 9:11-15

 On that day

I shall restore the fallen hut of David and wall up its breaches and raise its ruined walls and so build it as in days of old. They shall conquer the rem­nant of Edom and the neighboring nations upon which my name has been called.” Thus says Yahweh, the one who will do this.

Yahweh says also, “The days are coming when the plowman will overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes overtake the sower. The mountains shall drip sweet wine and all the hills shall melt.

I shall bring back the exiles of my people Israel; they will rebuild the desolate cities and dwell in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will have orchards and eat their fruit.   I shall plant them in their own country and they shall never again be rooted up from the land which I have given them,” says Yahweh your God.

 

Ps 85:9ab & 10, 11-12, 13-14

The Lord speaks of peace to his people.

 

＊＊＊＊ Gospel ＊＊＊＊ 

Matthew 9:14-17

 Then the disciples of John came to him with the question, “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast on many occasions, but not your disciples?”

 Jesus answered them, “How can you expect wedding guests to mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? Time will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, then they will fast.

 No one patches an old coat with a piece of unshrunken cloth, for the patch will shrink and tear an even bigger hole in the coat.  Besides you don’t put new wine in old wineskins. If you do, the wine­­skins will burst and the wine be spilt. No, you put new wine in fresh skins; then both are preserved.”

 

 Gospel Reflection：

Fasting as Relative

Were the Pharisees and the disciples of the Baptist wrong in their fast? Not at all. Theirs was a preparatory fast, a fast meant to level the mountains and fill the valleys. It is a fast that speaks of a longing. It is a fast that is relative to a higher goal; a means to an end.

But now that the end is here – that the Master has arrived – it is no good to keep fasting; for, what is needed now is a feast, a celebration. That’s why all references by Jesus to the coming of the kingdom are in terms of a banquet.

What Prophet Amos describes in today’s first reading is such a scene of celebration: on that day, the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and the people shall eat fruits and drink wine to their heart’s content. If we can adapt the words from Ecclesiastes, there is a time to fast and a time to feast (cf. Eccl. 3:1-8)