No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one

6 SEPTEMBER (Lk 5,33-39)

Fasting is ancient religious practice, dating back to the dawn of time, but never directly willed and commanded by God. Famous is the fast of Moses on the mount.

“Bear in mind and do not forget how you angered the Lord, your God, in the desert. From the day you left the land of Egypt until you arrived in this place, you have been rebellious toward the Lord. At Horeb you so provoked the Lord that he was angry enough to destroy you, when I had gone up the mountain to receive the stone tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you. Meanwhile I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights without eating or drinking, till the Lord gave me the two tablets of stone inscribed, by God’s own finger, with a copy of all the words that the Lord spoke to you on the mountain from the midst of the fire on the day of the assembly. Then, at the end of the forty days and forty nights, when the Lord had given me the two stone tablets of the covenant, he said to me, ‘Go down from here now, quickly, for your people whom you have brought out of Egypt have become depraved; they have already turned aside from the way I pointed out to them and have made for themselves a molten idol. I have seen now how stiff-necked this people is,’ the Lord said to me. ‘Let me be, that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under the heavens. I will then make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.’ “When I had come down again from the blazing, fiery mountain, with the two tablets of the covenant in both my hands, I saw how you had sinned against the Lord, your God: you had already turned aside from the way which the Lord had pointed out to you by making for yourselves a molten calf! Raising the two tablets with both hands I threw them from me and broke them before your eyes. Then, as before, I lay prostrate before the Lord for forty days and forty nights without eating or drinking, because of all the sin you had committed in the sight of the Lord and the evil you had done to provoke him. For I dreaded the fierce anger of the Lord against you: his wrath would destroy you. Yet once again the Lord listened to me. With Aaron, too, the Lord was deeply angry, and would have killed him had I not prayed for him also at that time. Then, taking the calf, the sinful object you had made, and fusing it with fire, I ground it down to powder as fine as dust, which I threw into the wadi that went down the mountainside (Dt 9,7-21).

This is a fasting, fruit of the great sorrow for the sin committed by his people. But the Lord has always purified external religious forms, including fasting. He asks for no forms, but for obedience, love, charity, justice and true holiness. The Lord asks every one of his servants a perpetual, daily fasting from all sin and transgression of the commandments and violation of his Law.

In the New Testament, or the New Law, He wants us to live in the fullness of the virtues, including the virtue of temperance, sobriety, poverty in spirit, mercy and great charity. We do not fast by remaining in selfishness. We deprived ourselves of many or a few things because our brothers are in need of them for a living, rather often for surviving. In this sense, deprivation is the soul of almsgiving.

And they said to him, “The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same; but yours eat and drink.” Jesus answered them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.” And he also told them a parable. “No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak. Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined. Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins. (And) no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.'”

The new wineskin that Jesus wants everyone to use as a container of the gospel life is the great charity. It is that love which is capable of giving its life for the brothers and not just things that we do not need any more because we have to update our wardrobe, because fashion dictates it. The new wineskin is to believe that the poor, the needy is Christ himself and to him the best things go. The best of the best to him. The worst of the worst to us.

Virgin Mary, Mother of the Redemption, Angels, Saints, teach us this new way.