20 February 2026
Friday after Ash Wednesday
Fr. Alessandro Coniglio
May the Lord give you Peace. I am Fr. Alessandro Coniglio, and I speak to you from the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum of Jerusalem.
The short page of the Gospel of this day may seem at first sight to contradict the norms of the Church, which today, as on the coming Fridays, ask us to fast in order to enter into the penitential spirit of Lent. Instead, if we are to believe the disciples of the Baptist, they and the Pharisees made wide use of this ascetical practice, while the disciples of Jesus seemed not very observant of fasting.
Thus the Gospel passage questions us about the meaning that fasting or other penitential practices may also have for us today. We live in societies that have elevated hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, to a supreme value, also because of an exasperated consumerism. In such a context, speaking of deprivation of pleasure, of asceticism, of fasting, seems to be an anachronism.
Yet we know from the Gospels that Jesus himself prepared for his mission with a time of forty days of fasting in the desert, therefore the Lord did not despise this practice. Also in today’s Gospel page, Jesus suggests the idea that, even if now his disciples do not conform to the ascetical practices of other Jewish groups of the time, like the followers of the Baptist and the Pharisees, the day will come when they will be called to fast. Why?
Jesus uses a nuptial image to describe the relationship that the disciples live with him, he is "the bridegroom"! Now, if with Jesus, God has come to seal a marital covenant with his people, indeed with the whole of humanity, this is an announcement of joy, which leaves no room for the sadness of a penitential practice. This spousal image the disciples of John should have understood very well, because John himself had affirmed that he was only the friend of the bridegroom, called to "rejoice greatly at the bridegroom’s voice" (John 3,29). If John the Baptist himself had experienced the fullness of joy in the presence of Christ the bridegroom, who came to seal a nuptial covenant with humanity, his disciples too should have lived this happiness. And the disciples of Jesus were in fact experiencing it, and this is the reason for their abandonment of certain penitential practices.
But Jesus notes that the moment is about to come when the bridegroom will be taken away from the bride, and he will be taken away in a violent way. The Lord announces, though still in a veiled manner, his destiny of passion and death. When this has been fulfilled, then his disciples will have to pass from garments of celebration to garments of mourning.
This is exactly the meaning of the season of Lent that we have just begun, and of its penitential practices. It reminds us that when the Lord Jesus came to unite humanity to himself in a covenant of spousal love, humanity rejected him and we still today too often confirm with our sinful life this rejection, and condemn Jesus anew to death, by refusing his invitation to enter into the full joy of the relationship of love that he wishes to establish with us.
May our fasting today remind us that we are called to live in joy, but this joy we will not be able to attain unless we learn to renounce ourselves and our sin, in order to abandon ourselves to the embrace of the One who, to save us from our sins, died for us on the hard wood of the cross.
Peace and good from the Holy Land.
