Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 382

No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth, for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.

People do not put new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined. Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved."

Wineskins were familiar items throughout the ancient world. More resilient than glass or clay jars, they could be tossed by sailors as they loaded ships. They needed no great care when handled by merchants and consumers in the marketplace. If they could not be refilled with fermenting grape juice, they were just as handy for water, milk, or olive oil. Everyone knew that fermenting wine generates explosive gasses. If its working in a glass bottle, a porous cork will allow the gasses to escape. In a new wineskin, the flexible leather will expand,  but old, dried and cracked wineskins will split open.

Because they were so familiar, everyone knew how to use them properly, and everyone knew someone who had done something stupid with a wineskin.

And, we can suppose, wineskins were a familiar metaphor for old and new customs. Life challenges us with new developments often, if not daily; and every age meets the unprecedented.

No one knew that better than Jesus. The Word made Flesh found no welcome among the very people who had been formed by the same Word of God. As Saint John said, "He came unto his own and his own did not receive him."

But the Jews who knew their history, like the wise Nicodemus, knew they had seen many centuries of continual change. The patriarch Abraham was a nomadic merchant, peddling wares with a mule train. His great-grandchildren migrated to Egypt to work as slaves under the Pharaoh; their descendants escaped slavery to reoccupy Canaan and, eventually, to establish a kingdom. It lasted five hundred years but, like all kingdoms, collapsed under the changing fortunes of history. Nonetheless, the Spirit and the Word still gathered, inspired and encouraged people to believe in God under Persian, Babylonian, Greek, Seleucid, and Roman oppression. Given that long history of pouring the wine of the Holy Spirit into new wineskins of succeeding ages, should anyone be surprised by the novelty of Jesus?

Unfortunately the Pharisees had become brittle. Terrified by the Roman army -- which did not hesitate to use terror -- Jerusalem lived beneath a potential avalanche of violence. They were afraid to breathe. A zephyr of the Holy Spirit in the warming rays of God's love might trigger mass executions and widespread devastation. We would call their collaboration with the Romans Stockholm Syndrome. They clung to their belief that they truly loved God and the Law of Moses. They could not imagine how much their fear and hatred controlled their religious piety.

But their rejection, too, was foreordained. God's mercy shines most brilliantly in the darkest moment, when an imaginative optimist can neither find nor fabricate a reason to hope. Jesus' very deliberate march to occupied Jerusalem and his immediate surrender to the quislings of that city proved God's intense fidelity. Nothing can prevent the Love of God.

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Having witnessed the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, fearless and supremely confident of their own resurrection, the disciples of Jesus drank the new wine of the Holy Spirit from the fresh skins of the Gospel and shared it with the whole world.