I have never drunk wine out of a wineskin, and if anyone here has, I’d like to know the circumstances and your condition at the time, so please stop and tell me about it after mass. But here is what I have found out about traditional wineskins: When they’re new, they’re flexible and can hold anything. The point is that when they get older, as you might expect, they get dried out and brittle and inflexible. So that when you take an old skin and fill it with new wine, something that’s still fermenting and fizzing and bubbling, because it’s so new, an old, brittle container with a stopper in it just splits apart, and as Jesus said, both the wine and the container are lost.
Pouring something new into people seems to have been a habit with Jesus. Not new laws and new rules and new commandments, in fact the old commandments to love God and our neighbor seem to have been good enough for him. But he always managed to find something new in those commandments about how to live that some of his listeners found hard to swallow, like wine with an unfamiliar and maybe a strong taste.
Again and again in the gospel there’s a scene like this one today, the Pharisees complaining about someone else whose practice is different from their own. Nothing makes them angrier than someone telling them, as Jesus does, that other people, even the people they are complaining about, are the very ones who are more in touch with what God is doing at that moment than they are. Those other people, Jesus’s disciples, know the bridegroom is with them. The Pharisees don’t. So the outsiders turn out to be the insiders, and of course, the Pharisees are left standing outside. The Pharisees’ rules were supposed to bring them closer to God; instead, they have only had the effect of making them concerned about who follows those rules, not about the new thing God is doing. When the bridegroom appears, they can’t even see him. They have become brittle and breakable, and angry.
So many reactions to Jesus are like this, people trying to avoid making some leap into accepting something or someone. Today it’s “not now” — they shouldn’t be eating now, who are these people? There are plenty of people who say “not now” to Jesus in the gospel, but there are plenty of other reactions that are variations on the theme. There’s “not me”, like the rich young man who wanted to follow Jesus in some new way but wasn’t ready to take a step away from the life he’d always lived. And of course we have all those people who said “not them”, who couldn’t imagine that sinners and followers of alien religions and people their world regarded as unclean could be people whose lives were more pleasing to God than their own. Having to not only include but seek out and welcome people who were formerly off limits might have been what caused Jesus the most inflexible resistance of all.
Sometimes when we hear readings like today’s about Jesus we think that what he is saying is, there are no rules, don’t worry about fasting, about observances, about going to church. But that is the easy way out of today’s reading. What Jesus is asking us to do is much harder than if he just told us to fast or to go to church. He is asking us to give up the stiffness that over time has become something that holds us where we are, and makes us resistant to the new place God wants us to go.
Because whatever we have decided that we think about who God loves and who God judges, about who is unclean, about what good people we are, about the path we’ve chosen, we have to be aware that those conclusions may have turned into our rules, not God’s rules, and if they are our rules they may have dried out on us, and we haven’t noticed. Again and again, Jesus seemed to push people over the edge in this regard, telling them that just the one thing they couldn’t accept was the new thing they needed to accept, and it was the brittle people, set in their ways, who couldn’t hear it, simply because it all sounded so new to them that it was impossible it could be true.
Lent starts next week. And that means it is time for fasting, just as the Pharisees felt. All those traditional Lenten disciplines, prayer and fasting and giving alms are good things, and we’re fortunate to be able to try to follow them with one another in this parish. But they are good only if they take away our hardness and stiffness, they are intended to soften us up, to get us ready for something new that God will show us, ready to bend ourselves around to take in something that we have resisted and resisted. So no matter what else you give up for Lent, keep wine like that on the menu. It’ll hurt to stretch, but you’ll feel like a new person.