WEEK 13 06 – Year I
On Being New Wineskins for Jesus’ New Wine
(Gen 27:1-29; Ps 135; Mt 9:14-17)
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Have you ever wondered about this passage that speaks of wine and wine skins? What is this newness that Jesus is talking about?
The gospel today invites us to be open to the power of the Spirit of Jesus at work in our lives.
The New Jerusalem Bible provides a concise explanation of this gospel. It states that like the Pharisees, John the Baptist and his disciples fasted over and above the requirements prescribed by the Law to hasten the coming of the Day of the Lord by their devotion. For us, however, Jesus is the Bridegroom. His disciples do not fast because with his coming, the Messianic Age has dawned. The old wine and skins represent the elements in Judaism destined to pass away; the new wine and fresh wineskins represent the new spirit of the kingdom of God. The additional practices of John and his disciples, intended to give new life to the old order, were in fact leading to its downfall. Jesus declines either to patch or to add; his purpose is to produce something quite new – even the spirit of the Law is to be raised to a new plane.
To expand on that explanation, the old wineskins represent the Old Testament, while the old wine symbolizes the teachings of the Old Testament. An example centered on the commandment to love will illustrate this reality. In the Old Testament, every Jew knew the Great Schema by heart – to “love God with all your heart, soul and might” (Dt 6:4-9). They were to recite those words to their children, talk about them everywhere they went and at all times, bind them as a sign on their hand, fix them as an emblem on their forehead, and place them on their doorposts and gates.
The Orthodox Jews take this teaching very literally. At the airport on our recent pilgrimage to the Holy Land, a Jewish man stood in a corner, rolled up his shirtsleeve, wrapped a leather strap around his arm and proceeded to pray out loud to YHWH. At the Western Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, we saw an Orthodox Jew wrap a leather strap around the arm of a tourist and lift up his baseball cap to place a square amulet on his forehead. Our Reformed Jewish guide even joked that they would get better reception that way!
That Great Schema is also part of the new wine of Jesus, but with a difference. In another part of the Old Testament (Lev 19:18) is buried another commandment, to “love our neighbour as we love ourselves.” That too is part of the new wine of Jesus. The problem with this Old Testament wine is that this commandment is lost among hundreds of others, and was largely ignored by especially the Jewish religious leaders like the Pharisees who kept putting the keeping of rules and regulations over this law to love others.
What is new about Jesus’ teaching is that he lifted this obscure commandment from Leviticus and placed it on an equal par with the Great Schema, to teach us that from now on, it is just as important to love our neighbour as it is to love God. In fact, perhaps the best way to love God is precisely to love our neighbour. If we can’t see the face of Christ in the person we meet on our way to Church, we may not really be meeting him in our prayer before the Blessed Sacrament either. This is truly the new wine of Jesus Christ.
This reality plays itself out in balancing devotion with fellowship. The two lungs of the church are private devotional prayer, and the public priestly prayer of Christ, the Eucharist. It is very tempting to turn the Eucharist into private devotional prayer, exemplified by those who think no talking should be allowed in church. The more biblical understanding is that fellowship is part of the Eucharist and that the Eucharist has already begun as the faithful are entering the church and greeting one another. That is because the first, primary and most important presence of Christ at the Eucharist is in the faithful who are there. It is always easier to relate to a quiet Jesus in the tabernacle than it is to relate to a difficult neighbour, but the task of genuine worship starts with the latter.
In short, it is not those greeting one another at the entrance of the Church who are disturbing those reciting the rosary (private devotional prayer) just before the mass (the public priestly prayer of Jesus Christ); rather, those who are reciting the rosary just before mass are actually disturbing those coming in by preventing fellowship from happening! We have put the cart before the horse. The solution, where some folks insist on praying the rosary before mass, would be to start early enough to allow at least ten minutes of fellowship before the processional hymn.
This gospel passage strikes right at the core of the “New Way” Jesus came to bring about. The teaching that to love one another as we love ourselves is as important as loving God with our whole being, is new; to love others as Jesus loved us, is especially new; to love our enemies by forgiving them over and over is new, and far transcends the Old Testament “eye for eye and tooth for tooth.” Would that we could catch the spirit and essence of Jesus’ teaching, this new wine that Jesus is offering us, in which all is made new.
Anyone who can truly accept others as they are without judging them; who can bless and affirm others to bring out the best in them; who can forgive others seventy times by expressing their feelings to them with love without any thought of revenge or punishment, and who can accept some inconvenience and suffering in their lives without resentment or bitterness – these persons are truly fresh wineskins capable of bearing the new wine that Jesus offers us.
The Eucharist is an experience of that new wine of Jesus of forgiveness and healing, brought about by the power of the Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead that now transforms humble gifts of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus.
May our celebration today transform us into fresh wineskins called to both contain that new wine and pour it out on a world so desperately in need of it.
