OF WINESKINS AND COATS

 No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; if he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.  And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins.”

The Parable of the Wineskins

Wineskins were the bottles of the Biblical times. They were usually made from the hide of a goat, sewn together where it had been cut to remove it from the carcass. This formed a sack that could be tied at the neck and hung up. The resilience of the new rawhide took up whatever expansion might result from the process of fermentation.

 

Partially fermented wine (the ‘must’) was stored in these wineskins, but as the fermentation process continued, it produced more gases and so stretched the wineskin.

An old skin which was no longer elastic could not stretch for this new wine, so you needed to use new skins for the current years’ wine production.  If an old wineskin was used, the expansion will cause the wineskin to explode.

The Parable of the Coat

We know that cloth made from natural fibre shrinks when it is washed and, if you put an unprewashed piece of material onto cloth that has already shrunk,  the former will itself shrink when it is washed  and tear a hole. 

So, no one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. If they do, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old.

These parables came in response to the Pharisees’ question about Jesus’ practice of fasting compared to their own and John the Baptist’s. 

WAS JESUS SAYING, "OUT WITH THE OLD, EMBRACE THE NEW?"

I have come not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it.

Jesus appears to have no problem with the teaching of the Pharisees; it is their lack of living it out that he has a problem with (Matt 23.1–4). In other words, it is not that they are too ‘Jewish’ that bothers him—it is that they are not ‘Jewish’ enough. This fits with his wider attitude to the law: it might need reinterpretation in the light of his own ministry (and ultimately in the light of his death and resurrection, on which see Luke 24), but he has not come to ‘do away with it’ (Matt 5.17).

Matthew reinforces this idea explicit in his unique saying of Jesus, which he possibly sees as autobiographical:

Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old. (Matt 13.52)

This parable also apparently applies to John the Baptist’s asceticism, which Jesus seemed to view as good but passing away, since it was part of the Old Covenant which he was fulfilling and renewing.

The problem here is that this assertion completely ignores Jesus’ actual teaching about fasting: ‘But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast’ (Luke 5:34). This is supported by the Didache, and by the teaching of Christian leaders down the centuries (Wesley is a good example). In other words, Jesus is not rejecting ‘the Pharisees’ paradigm or way of living’ in any simple way since he assumes that his followers will indeed revert to this pattern once he has gone.

In other words, the parable is not about creating new structures or institutions (which surely themselves, over time, will become rigid as the old wineskins have done) but about people who are willing to receive the teaching about what God is now doing. 

We don’t necessarily need to scrap the patterns created in response to earlier teaching (though we might be interested in reforming them). Much more important is whether, as people listening to this teaching, we enact the traditions we have received with flexibility, compassion and grace. It was this that the Pharisees lacked.

So, what is the ‘new wine’ God is pouring into your life at the moment, and are you being flexible like ‘new wineskins’ into order to receive it—without scorning the old thing that God did in your life yesterday?