The Guests Were Not Fasting At The Wedding

He figured it out on the Thursday, and he did not enjoy figuring it out.

He has run the same shop for nineteen years, and nineteen years of that will teach a man to think in exchanges without ever deciding to. Somebody puts a thing on the counter. You put a number beside it. Everybody knows where they stand and nobody has to be embarrassed.

So when he started this, he did what he does. He wrote at the top of a page what he was asking God for, in three words, because it is only three words and he has never needed more. And underneath it he wrote what he was giving up.

And then, without thinking about it at all, he drew an arrow between the two.

That arrow is the thing he cannot defend. He looked at it on the Thursday and understood that somewhere in the back of him, in the part that does not consult him first, he had priced it. He had decided what this was worth and what it ought to get, and the whole week had been sitting on that arithmetic like a floor.

He would not say it out loud. If you asked him he would say the right things, about seeking God and about wanting to be closer. But the page has an arrow on it, and the page is more honest than he is.

If you have got an arrow drawn somewhere too, come and sit down. Nobody is taking the notebook off you and nobody is going to make you say the three words.

Somebody asked Him straight out why His friends were not doing it

There is exactly one place in the Gospels where somebody walks up to Jesus and asks Him to explain why the people around Him are not fasting, and what He says back is not a rule. It is a picture, and it is a wedding.

The question came from John's disciples, and it was not a trap. They fasted. The Pharisees fasted. And here was this teacher whose friends were eating, and they wanted to know why.

And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.Matthew 9:15

Read what He does not say. He does not say fasting is finished. He does not say it is optional, or advanced, or for people at a certain level. He says: look who is standing here. You do not fast at a wedding while the groom is in the room.

Which means that the whole thing, from His own mouth, is about who is present and who is not. It is not about what changes hands.

You are not standing at a counter, and there is nothing on it with a price written on the side. The written word puts the reason for fasting entirely inside a relationship rather than inside a transaction (Matthew 9:15), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man who has spent nineteen years learning to think in numbers.

Longing is not a currency

Here is the plain version, and it is smaller and kinder than the arrow.

Fasting is what wanting looks like when it gets into your body. That is all. It is prayer that the hungry part of you is included in, so that the whole of you is turned the same way at once instead of just the part that thinks.

It is not payment. Nothing here is being bought, because nothing here is for sale, and God is not a party to an exchange with you. He is not more willing on Friday than He was on Monday. There is no version of this where you go without something and God, who was previously undecided, is moved.

If that sounds like it takes something away from the practice, notice what it actually removes. It removes the possibility of doing it wrong. A payment can be short. A longing cannot.

You have been loved at full strength the entire time you were trying to work out the exchange rate. That is Romans 5:8, not my encouragement, and His Spirit is what makes it land in the specific part of a man that keeps a ledger.

And the wedding picture holds the ache too, which is why it is a better answer than a rule. The days would come, He said, when the bridegroom is taken. There is a real absence in the middle of the Christian life, and fasting is one of the honest ways of saying so with your whole self. Not a complaint. A kind of reaching.

The part that outranks all of the teaching

I am going to stop the teaching here, because a page about this that will not say the next paragraph is a page that can do harm.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you simply do not know, then speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule. There never will be. The not having one is deliberate.

You are not one inch further from God because of what your body cannot do. Scripture settled that long before you got here, in the sentence that says God accepts a gift according to what a person actually has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been given out on the basis of what somebody is allowed to eat.

And because this subject leans private, one more thing. Privacy here is about audience and never about concealment. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife or your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is ordinary good manners. None of that is a failure of anything.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.