Biblion Bible Commentary
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New Wine in Old Wineskins
Matthew 9:14-17
14 Then John’s disciples came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples don’t fast?” · WEB
A question about fasting answered with a wedding, and two images about what will not be patched onto what.
"Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples don't fast?" Matthew 9:14.
The question runs as in the earlier account Mark 2:18–22, and Matthew's only change is who asks it: here it comes from John's disciples on their own behalf, which makes it a sincere question from an allied group rather than a challenge from opponents. They are ascetics and John is in prison, and they cannot see why this teacher's followers look like they are celebrating.
"Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?" Matthew 9:15.
The answer reframes the whole practice. Fasting expresses absence, grief or waiting; a wedding is not the occasion for it, and the disciples are at one. That is an extraordinary claim to make in passing — the presence of this teacher is being described as the arrival of the celebration Israel had been waiting for.
And the second half is the first shadow in the Gospel: the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast. The verb is violent rather than gradual, and it is the earliest indication in this book of how the story ends.
"No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch would tear away from the garment, and a worse hole is made" Matthew 9:16.
The two illustrations make the same point from opposite materials. New cloth shrinks and tears the old fabric it was meant to mend; new wine still working bursts a skin that has already stretched and hardened. In each case the damage is worse than the original problem.
What is being refused is the attempt to fit what he brings into the existing structures as an improvement to them. This is not an argument against the law — the sermon settled that Matthew 5:17 — but against the system of practice that had grown around it, into which the new thing cannot be patched without wrecking both.
"They put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved" Matthew 9:17.
The closing clause is easy to miss and is the generous part: both are preserved. The point of the fresh skin is not to discard the wine's container but to keep the wine — and the sentence quietly refuses the reading in which everything old is simply thrown away.
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