Fr Paul Gooley reads from the Gospel of Matthew (9: 14-15) in which Jesus is questioned about why his disciples do not fast, to which he replies, ‘How can the guests of the bridegroom mourn while he is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; then they will fast’.

Fr Paul says the Gospel reading seems at first sight a puzzling choice for the start of Lent, for it actually rules out fasting. The Pharisees, who observed the Law very strictly, fasted regularly, but Jesus’ disciples did not. ‘Why not?’ they ask, with the implication, ‘Does not every seriously religious person fast?’ Jesus then introduces the wonderful image of the wedding-feast. Right the way through the Old Testament the prophets had likened the last times, when God would finally come to his people and set everything right, to a wedding-feast, the completion of the wedding of God and his people.

Now, when Jesus has come, is the time of that wedding-feast, a figure which Jesus uses in so many of his parables.

But notice that there is something wrong. ‘When the bridegroom is taken away’. That does not happen at a wedding-feast. A bridegroom will eventually go away, but not ‘be taken’. From the very beginning of the Gospel (and in Mark this occurs in the first confrontation with the Pharisees) we are being warned that this bridegroom’s path will not be smooth and comfortable.

Today’s Gospel Lesson – the path of Lent is not meant to be smooth and easy.