Hi everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're looking at Mark chapter 2 versus 18 to 22.

That's what you'll hear if you go to Mass today and we want to pull apart that text,

see if we can understand what the original author was trying to get at. And this text in particular

is one of those ones where it is actually quite important to look at the cultural context. What

did these words mean in the time that they were spoken by Jesus? Because if we jump straight to a

spiritual application, we might get it wrong. And so, as you'll see here in the passage,

there's a few words that need to be unpacked. So Mark chapter 2 verses 18 to 22.

One day when John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting, some people came to Jesus and said to him,

why is it that John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?

Jesus replied, surely the bridegroom's attendants would never think of fasting while the bridegroom is still with them.

As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they could not think of fasting.

But the time will come for the bridegroom to be taken away from them, and then, on that day, they will fast. No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth

on an old cloak. If he does, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and the tear gets

worse. And nobody puts new wine into old wine skins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins and the wine is lost and the skins too.

No, new wine, fresh skins.

So that's our reading for today.

And as you can hear, there's a few elements there which are not entirely familiar to us with old cloaks and new wine skins and things like that.

So let's look at the start of the passage to work out the setting.

So it starts with the words one day.

So that's an indication to us that this could really have happened at any time in Jesus' ministry.

The setting could be anywhere and the timing could be at any time.

Often the gospel writers don't put things in chronological order.

...