04 September Catholic Mass Daily Bible Reading.
USCCB. Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke 5,33-39.
The scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus, "The disciples of John the Baptist fast often and offer prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same ; but yours eat and drink."
Jesus answered them, "Can you make the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?
But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days."
And he also told them a parable. "No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined.
Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.
(And) no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, 'The old is good.'"
Copyright © Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, USCCB
Saint Augustine (354-430)
Bishop of Hippo (North Africa) and Doctor of the Church
Sermon 210, 5 (7)
"The days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days"
Let our “loins be girded and our lamps lit”; let us be like “servants waiting for their master to return from the wedding feast” (Lk 12:35). Don't let us be like those unbelievers who say: “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1Cor 15:32). The more unsure the day of our death is, the more painful are the trials of life, and the more, too, we should fast and pray since, to all intents and purposes, tomorrow we die. Our Lord said to his disciples: “Yet a little while and you will no longer see me and again a little while and you will see me” (Jn 16,16). Now is the time of which he said: “You will grieve but the world will rejoice” (v. 20); now is the time in this life of suffering when we journey apart from him. “But,” he adds, “I shall see you again and your hearts will be full of joy and no one will take your joy away from you” (v. 22).
Even now the hope we thus put in the one who is faithful to his promise will not leave us without some joy until we are filled with overwhelming joy on the day when “we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is” (1Jn 3:2), when “no one shall take your joy away from us” (...) “A woman in labor,” says our Lord, “is in anguish because her hour has arrived. But when she has given birth to a child she feels immense joy because a child has been born into the world” (Jn 16:21). This is the joy no one can take away from us and with which we will be filled when we pass from our present understanding of faith into eternal light. So let us fast and pray now because we are in the days of childbirth.