19 January 2026 – Monday of the 2nd week of Ordinary Time
1 Samuel 15:16-23; Mark 2:18-22.
HOMILY
The Gospels of recent Sundays have described the beginnings of Jesus' missionary activity. Already, the young rabbi and his disciples are beginning to amaze everyone. Of course, people began to realize that Jesus had come to bring something new. His miracles, his teaching, the power he claimed to have to forgive sins, all this caused a great stir throughout Galilee. Everyone wanted to see and hear him.
At the same time, the behaviour of Jesus and his disciples was intriguing. It was not the behaviour one would expect from men of God, from ‘perfect’ men. Not only did Jesus choose a tax collector as one of his disciples, but he even ate a meal at his house. He also readily associated with sinners. His disciples ate without performing the ritual washing of their hands and did not observe fasts as the disciples of John the Baptist did. It is always disturbing to see people who present themselves as witnesses of God and who behave differently from what is expected of such witnesses.
So Jesus is asked the question: ‘Why do your disciples not fast, as do the disciples of John and the Pharisees?’ To understand Jesus' answer, we must remember that fasting in the Old Testament was linked to the expectation of the Messiah. It expressed dissatisfaction with the present time and an impatient expectation of the coming of the Saviour. The meaning of Jesus' answer is very clear: the Messiah has arrived. This type of fasting no longer makes sense. This is a time for festive clothing, a time for new wine.
The temptation for the disciple is to want to accept the challenge of the new while retaining the security of the past. Such an attitude, says Jesus, is like trying to sew a new patch on an old garment, or putting new wine into old wineskins. This exposes one to contradictions and inner turmoil. Jesus invites his disciples to take a stand and flee from such compromises.
Paul had to face that problem. He experienced a moment of choice in his life that was a break with his past. That choice and that break were necessary to definitively avoid the inner turmoil that would have been created by a compromise between the demands of the old Law and the Law of Love of Christ.
King Saul, whose painful story we heard in the first reading, also experienced this same situation. After a victory over the Amalekites, he wanted to obey the Lord's command by condemning King Amalek to anathema. But neither he nor the people wanted to condemn all the goods taken from the enemy to anathema. And because of his disobedience and that of the people, he lost his kingship.
Is Saul's tragedy not our own? We want to be faithful to God, but we do not want to get rid of all our idols. We want to practise justice, but we want to succeed in business. We want to be good monks whose lives are entirely centred on the pursuit of prayer in solitude, but it is difficult to give up the joy of meetings and distractions.
When, instead of choosing, we allow ourselves to be torn apart internally like the fabric onto which a new piece of cloth has been sewn, it is because we are forgetting part of this morning's Gospel—the part where Jesus says, ‘The bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast.’ We are living in this period of history. Fasting now has the meaning of showing fidelity and constancy in love, even when we are no longer filled with the presence of the bridegroom. Fasting is the joyful celebration of the presence of an absence, not the nostalgia for the absence of a presence.