Mark has combined the story of the complaints about fasting with the saying about wineskins because it seemed to him that they made related points: Something new had come upon the earth, a new revelation of the height and the depth of God’s love which made a lot of religious practices from previous times not nearly so important. One could fast if one wanted to. It was a good work, but it was not what Jesus’s good news was about.

  Once upon a time there was a very stern father who insisted that his children had to keep all the rules he made for them. He had the mistaken notion that he could keep close enough track of the children to make sure that the rules were enforced. They had to sign out when they left the house and sign in when they came home at curfew time – his not the official one. They absolutely could not drink. They could not go to R rated films. They could not date until they were in college. If they broke the rules, he would find out, he promised them, and ground them six months for every broken rule. So the kids decided that poor daddy meant well but he just wasn’t with it. Moreover he was not swift enough to keep track of them after they were twelve, to say nothing after the time they got their driver’s license. To prevent him from undue worry they decided to pull the wool over his eyes – big thick blankets of wool. I won’t tell you how they did it, because I don’t want to give anyone bad ideas, except to say there was a lot of climbing out windows. However, the kids said, we do what we want, which isn’t all that bad anyway, and dad doesn’t worry. Cool. Later when they were out of college they told their father all the tricks they had pulled. He was astonished. Well, he said, I guess it’s impossible to keep track of kids all the time these days. Right they said wineskins for grammar school kids don’t work for high school kids.

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