Fasting With Jesus

5 July 2025   Matthew 9:14-17

“Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them?” Matthew9:15

In the Old Testament, fasting was what people did when something was missing. Righteousness was missing because of sin, a loved one was missing because of death, understanding was missing because revelation hadn’t happened yet, and so people would fast as an act of preparation for whatever God meant to come next.

That’s the way it was for the disciples of John the Baptist who approached Jesus and asked Him why He and His disciples didn’t fast. Didn’t they think something was missing? Didn’t they think there was something to get ready for?

Like He did with so many other things, Jesus turned their understanding of fasting upside down.

Jesus told them that fasting while He was there was nonsensical. He called Himself the “Bridegroom,” and anybody who was in the least bit familiar with Holy Scripture would have gotten that reference immediately – in the Song of Songs, the Bridegroom was a metaphor for God. Jesus was telling the disciples of John, “Why would I have my disciples fast? What revelation do they need to prepare for? The revelation of God is standing right in front of them, in fact standing in front of you, too.” Jesus wasn’t just announcingthe revelation of God, He was the revelation of God, and fasting when God is standing right in front of you doesn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t. If God is right in front of you, you have enough.

It could be objected, of course, that Jesus Himself fasted – it was the start of His public ministry, for forty days he neither ate nor drank (Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-13). But because He was Emmanuel, God with us, there was nothing missing in Him, and His fasting meant something entirely different. His fasting was confirmation that everything truly and eternally needful was present in Him. He needed nothing and no one else, and yet He was there for everyone. His fast was therefore one of such astonishing power that the Devil himself showed up trying to undo it. The Devil offered Jesus food, influence and rule over the whole world, to which Jesus said, “I have already everything I need. I am already everything that everybody needs. I am already everything that you need. You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him alone shall you serve” (cf. Luke 4:8). Jesus alone was enough, and the Devil knew it, so the Devil left.

Jesus makes a place for fasting for us today (cf. Matthew 9:15), but it is not the fast of something missing, not the fast of something we lack. It is His fast, the confirmation that in Him we have everything we truly, eternally need. We can do without food for a time, or sleep for a time, or anything of this world for a time. Fasting is our testimony that in the fullness of time we have everything we need always and only in Jesus.

“You shall be my witnesses,” Jesus said, “in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). The Church doesn’t just have this mission; the Church is this mission, and it can’t be accomplished by believers who always think that they lack something, that crucial components are missing, that they never have enough. It can only be accomplished by believers who know that in Jesus we have enough, and are enough, that in Him we are sufficient for this world and the next.