Recently I’ve had the experience of moving my parents from a big house into a smaller apartment. And if you’ve never done anything like this in your family, when it does comes up, take my advice, and do whatever you have to do to be out of town on urgent business the weekend it happens.
It’s not the physical labor of doing it. It’s not even the challenge of trying to sort through years’ worth of accumulated stuff, trying to make decisions about what you’re going to get rid of to fit a whole houseful of things into a small apartment. No, it’s the resistance that you meet at every step of the way from the owners of these possessions, every one of which suddenly has importance, critical importance.
You discover things that represent a project that still might get finished someday, even though it hasn’t been touched for years. You discover things that represent some phase of life that someone has a hard time admitting is long past. It all looked like junk to me, but that’s the battle, of course, and while I was conspiring with my brother and my nephew to literally sneak things out of the house, and pretending that we were going to carefully take care of some of these treasured items, when in reality we had a plan to get rid of them within hours of taking them away, as, God forgive me, I’m doing those things, I’m thinking to myself, I will never, never be like this about stuff when it’s time to move on.
But of course, it won’t happen that way. My track record of not doing things that I said I would never, never do, is no better than yours. I have said all kinds of things to my children I swore I’d never hear myself saying. All you parents out there, you know you have, too, and kids, just you wait. So I suspect that there will be a scene like this moving day somewhere in my future.
Because at some level, this is human life, forming attachments that we hate to give up, making rules that we always follow, even after they don’t make sense, setting up things as important that we later refuse to admit aren’t as important as we thought they were once. We are not flexible people, and we can be inflexible about important things critical to our lives and about unimportant things, too, and what’s worse, we lose track, all the time, about which are which.
Today’s gospel has something to do with the new and the old and how we feel about them. It’s not at all about the future always being better than the past, about the new being better than the old. But it is about attachments.
It’s another in a series of encounters early in Mark’s gospel between Jesus and people who don’t understand why his rules seem different from what they are used to. This whole section is even called the conflict stories, because Jesus keeps running into people who ask him: Why do you seem to have made up your own rules? What happened to what I thought was right? Why don’t your disciples fast, they ask Jesus, when John the Baptist’s disciples and the Pharisees do?
Now Jesus fasted as well, like all Jews he fasted on the Day of Atonement, but John’s disciples and the Pharisees were even more disciplined fasters, they added fasts, they fasted every Wednesday and Friday, and many other days. They set a standard, people thought, for what was pious. And of course, they were pious. How could you listen to this new holy man who seemed like he was working with a new set of rules about what was holy, and what wasn’t?
Jesus’s answer came in the form of these puzzling little images of the garment that can’t be patched any longer, and the wine container so old and brittle that it can’t be used for new wine. We could be tempted to believe that what Jesus is saying here is, forget all that need to fast and discipline yourselves, that’s in the past. That’s not at all what he’s saying — in fact, he tells them that there will always be a time to fast. He’s telling people that their attachment to an external sign, to something changeable, to a discipline, a habit, a vision of themselves, that these attachments can interfere with their ability to see God when God is right there in front of them and they don’t know it.
In these conflict stories it becomes clear just how new Jesus was — totally new. Not the Messiah people were expecting, if they were expecting one at all. We, on the other hand, like to think that we’re accepting of new things, but the reality is, we don’t like the new when it means we have to become new.
We don’t want to become new people. We think the world would be turned upside down if we had less money, if we decided that the life and the career we have weren’t right any longer, if the church changed and something we’re very attached to, something we thought was a sign of holiness, if that somehow went away. We’d be knocked for a loop, and sometimes without even meaning to, we hang onto an old way of life, and our old standards, when something new is right there waiting for us. We like to call God “unchangeable,” when in fact, that could be said much more accurately about us. One psychologist says that at different times in our lives our difficulty and exhaustion comes from literally carrying around a second self that isn’t any longer alive, but that we are hanging onto because we can’t imagine life without it. The old wineskin, the old garment, the old self, waiting for the new one that is always being offered to us.
We’re beginning our annual time of fasting this coming week on Ash Wednesday, and it’s a season of repentance, as we all know, but to repent is to turn again, maybe to turn to something new. These people who questioned Jesus in today’s gospel were wondering if God could possibly be so different from what they had come to think. The Pharisees, just a few verses after this gospel, are already plotting how to destroy him. If only we had enough confidence in God, we could be different, and be ready for the new with even greater eagerness than we cling to what we have.