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Catholic Commentary
The Question of Fasting and the Parables of the New and the Old
33They said to him, “Why do John’s disciples often fast and pray, likewise also the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink?”34He said to them, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them?35But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them. Then they will fast in those days.”36He also told a parable to them. “No one puts a piece from a new garment on an old garment, or else he will tear the new, and also the piece from the new will not match the old.37No one puts new wine into old wine skins, or else the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled and the skins will be destroyed.38But new wine must be put into fresh wine skins, and both are preserved.39No man having drunk old wine immediately desires new, for he says, ‘The old is better.’”
Luke 5:33–39 presents Jesus defending his disciples' eating and drinking by identifying himself as the Bridegroom figure from Old Testament theology, whose joyful presence makes fasting inappropriate. Through parables of patching garments and filling wineskins, Jesus teaches that his new covenant teaching cannot be fitted into old religious frameworks but requires transformed vessels and hearts.
Jesus is the Bridegroom arrived, and his presence demands a radically new structure — not a patch on the old, but entirely new wine that requires an entirely new vessel.
Verses 37–38 — The Parable of the Wine. New wine still undergoing fermentation produces gases that a rigid, already-stretched old wineskin cannot accommodate; the skin will burst, and both wine and skin are lost. New wine requires fresh, supple skins that can expand with the living ferment. The image of wine in Scripture carries eucharistic resonance (especially in Luke, who gives the Last Supper its most explicitly "new covenant" framing — 22:20). The "new wine" of the kingdom, which will become supremely the wine of the Eucharist, requires the new vessel of the Church and the new heart (Ezekiel 36:26) that the Spirit creates.
Verse 39 — The Saying About Old Wine. This verse is unique to Luke and is often misread as an endorsement of the old. It is better read as a frank acknowledgment of the psychological resistance to conversion. The person who has drunk old wine does not want the new — he has formed a habit, a comfort, a preference. Jesus is naming the pastoral obstacle his entire ministry will face: the human heart's tendency to prefer the familiar religious form even when something greater has arrived. It is a word of realism, even gentle irony, not a concession that the old covenant was sufficient.
Catholic tradition reads this passage at multiple levels of depth. The Church Fathers focused on the Bridegroom saying as a key christological text. Origen (Commentary on Matthew, 10.2) sees in the "friends of the bridegroom" an image of the apostles as intermediaries of the Bride (the Church) to Christ. Ambrose of Milan (Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, 5.10) links the "bridegroom taken away" directly to the Passion and interprets Christian fasting post-Ascension as a form of ecclesial longing — the Church's fast is an act of love, the fast of one who awaits the return of the Beloved.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1430–1439) presents fasting as one of the three interior forms of penance (alongside prayer and almsgiving), and situates it explicitly within an eschatological frame: it is a sign of conversion and a preparation for the coming Kingdom. The CCC (§796) also develops the Bridegroom ecclesiology directly, drawing on Ephesians 5 and Revelation 21: "The unity of Christ and the Church… is expressed by the image of the bridegroom and the bride." Christ as Bridegroom is not merely a metaphor in Catholic teaching; it grounds the theology of Holy Orders (the priest acts in persona Christi as Bridegroom to the Bride) and of the consecrated life.
Pope John Paul II explored this deeply in his Theology of the Body (audiences 87–117), arguing that the spousal meaning of the body finds its ultimate reference in the Incarnate Bridegroom who gives himself totally to the Church. The "new wine" of the Eucharist — explicitly identified with the "new covenant in my blood" in Luke 22:20 — is the fullest realization of what these parables gesture toward: a gift of self that no old structure could contain, poured into the new vessel of the Church born from his pierced side.
Contemporary Catholics face a version of the "old wine" temptation in at least two directions. Some are tempted to reduce Christianity to a comfort — a familiar cultural inheritance that asks little and changes less, precisely the attitude Jesus gently diagnoses in v. 39. Others are tempted in the opposite direction, treating every doctrinal or liturgical tradition as a stiff old wineskin to be discarded for whatever feels fresh. Jesus' parables refuse both errors. The new wine is genuinely, radically new — it cannot be domesticated into old habits of nominal faith. But the new wineskin is also real and necessary: the Church, the sacraments, and the disciplines of prayer and fasting are the supple, living structures designed to carry it.
The specific teaching on fasting (vv. 34–35) invites Catholics to recover the Church's fasting disciplines — Fridays, Lent, ember days in some communities — not as burdens but as the loving fast of friends who know the Bridegroom has been taken and who hold the space of longing until he comes again. The Eucharist itself, celebrated "until he comes" (1 Corinthians 11:26), is the liturgical enactment of this mystery: joy and longing, presence and absence, old covenant fulfilled in the new.
Commentary
Verse 33 — The Challenge. The questioners are not identified as hostile; Luke's language ("they said to him") may include a mix of Pharisees, scribes, and curious onlookers present since the call of Levi (5:29). The comparison is pointed: John's disciples and the Pharisees' disciples fast "often" (Greek: pyknós) and pray — two pillars of Jewish piety. The disciples of Jesus, by contrast, are seen "eating and drinking," a phrase that echoes the accusation made against Jesus himself in 7:34. The implicit charge is one of laxity, even irreverence. Fasting in Second Temple Judaism was practiced on Mondays and Thursdays by the devout (cf. Luke 18:12) and was understood as a form of mourning, penitence, and intercession.
Verse 34–35 — The Bridegroom Saying. Jesus' response is not a defense but a counter-revelation. He draws on the rich Old Testament bridal theology in which God is the Bridegroom of Israel (Hosea 2:16–20; Isaiah 62:5; Song of Songs throughout). The "friends of the bridegroom" (hoi huioi tou nymphōnos, literally "sons of the bridal chamber") were the groomsmen charged with accompanying and celebrating with the groom. Their joy at the feast was not optional but obligatory — it would have been a scandal and an insult to the groom for them to mourn. Jesus is implicitly claiming to be the divine Bridegroom, arriving at last among his people. This is not merely an analogy; it is an identity disclosure.
Verse 35 introduces a note of shadow. "The days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away (aparthē)." The verb apairō is used in the Septuagint of Isaiah 53:8 for the Suffering Servant being "taken away" (ērthē) from the living — a striking proto-Passion allusion. Luke is signaling what kind of bridegroom this is. The taking-away will inaugurate a new season of fasting for the disciples — not the old mourning-fast, but a Christologically transformed fast: a fast that holds the tension between the joy of the Resurrection and the longing for the Parousia.
Verse 36 — The Parable of the Garment. The logic is practical and double-edged. Cutting a piece from a new garment to patch an old one destroys both: the new garment is ruined, and the new patch (being unshrunk) will not match the shrunken, worn old fabric. The point is not merely aesthetic. The "old garment" is not condemned — it is the established covenant framework of Israel's law and piety. But Christ's teaching cannot function as a mere repair job for an existing system. It operates by a different principle of integrity.