New Wine into Old Wine Skins

Mark 2:22: And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, he pours new wine into new wineskins.

What a curious scripture we have here today.  I ran across this in my daily reading and I began pondering on it.  Jesus is talking about the sabbath with the Pharisees and then all the sudden he pulls out two pithy statements about new patches on old cloaks and new wine in old wine skins.  Curious indeed.

The religious powers that be of Jesus day where the Pharisees.  They were the keepers of the law and they kept to it very strictly.  Jesus is bringing a fresh, new way of experiencing God that if was kept to this old way of doing religion would make the wineskin burst.  There are two challenges to us in this scripture.  The first is the fact that we can't let our faith get stale.  Anyone who has exercised can tell you that you can not keep doing the same exercises in the same way if you want to continue to grow in strength.  You have to change it up to shock the muscles.  I believe that we have spiritual muscles in much the same way.  It is the job of each generation of faithful disciples of Christ to exercise their spiritual muscles in new ways.  We need to continue to reevaluate what we believe and what we do through the lenses of scripture, experience, tradition and reason.  We do not go about this process 'willy nilly' and change things on the whim of culture.  That is the second perspective we can learn today.  While we do need to be aware of when we need new wineskins, we don't go changing the way we do things and how we believe just because of societal pressure.  It is a careful and delicate process, but one that needs to be done, especially in our society of immense cultural change.

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