I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to preach through Luke 5:33—6:11. I had preached on the parallel passage in the gospel of Mark, so I had assumed it’d be pretty smooth sailing.
New cloth, old garment. New wine, old wineskins. The new expands (or shrinks) and causes harm to the old object it was placed in and you end up wrecking both. The point here is of incompatibility. If you try to combine the new with the old, both will end up being ruined.
When I preached on this parable in Mark I absolutely loved this point from James Edwards:
“He is not an attachment, addition, or appendage to the status quo.” Jesus is not something that you add to an already comfortable Christianity. He’s not something that you make fit into your box and if it will fit then that’s cool. Jesus radically transforms everything. Jesus blows the box up and replaces it with His fullness. We don’t make Jesus conform to us, to our rules, to our Christianity…He conforms us, our rules, our Christianity. It’s been said that the goal of Bible reading isn’t to master the text but more fully to be mastered by the text. In a much greater way we can say this about Jesus, our goal is not to “figure Jesus out”, to somehow “master Jesus”…our goal is to be transformed and changed by Jesus.
I still think that’s a pretty solid application point you can make (especially from the gospel of Mark). But when I stumbled upon Luke 5:39, I started wondering if maybe Luke was doing something a little different than Mark.
“And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
Why is Jesus saying that the “old is better”? Plenty of commentaries answered this question by saying that Jesus is being a bit tongue-in-cheek here and saying that the Pharisees would never embrace his new wine while they were obsessed with their old wine. And that very well could be accurate, but I’m not convinced. Old wine really is better. And I think Jesus knows his wine. But even more than that I think Jesus knows his Old Testament.
I think we’ve made a slight misstep here in the way we interpret this passage—or rather how we paint the backdrop to this passage. We tell the story as if the Pharisees are faithful followers of the OT and the OT system and that Jesus is doing something entirely different and blowing up that whole way of thinking. But this is really problematic for Luke because he is all about showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the OT hope and promises. He doesn’t want to blow it up—he wants to fulfill it.
Is it possible, then, that the “new stuff” in this parable is actually the Pharisees? Their fasting laws, their Sabbath restrictions, etc. are NOT the intention of the Old Testament. They’ve added new things in order to help us obey.
Think of it this way. The Law (and you can see this with Paul and in Hebrews) is a shadow that is pointing to Christ. It’s not complete. It’s not meant to be. This is why the author of Hebrews says that it’s not “faultless” and that it has woven within its fabric the need for a new covenant. To use our parable, it’s a bit like a garment that has a hole in it which needs a patch.
Something is incomplete with the law because as it says “do not covet” something happens within us. It stirs upon within us covetous desires. You don’t want to step on the grass until you see a sign that tells you not to do this. The Pharisees knew this. The history of the Jewish people bore this out. They had gotten booted out of the land because of this. And so to combat this they came up with a strategy, they developed more strict laws. They built fences around the commandments. Rather than just saying, “Obey the Sabbath” they developed an entire system of how many steps you could take without breaking this. And it is some of these “laws” which are confronting Jesus in these chapters of Luke.
But the fundamental problem isn’t that you need new laws. It’s not that you need to put a new patch on an old garment or to put new wine into old wineskins. The problem is that you need a new heart. You need an entirely new heart. You need something compatible. You need to be born again.
When this happens you want to change. You want to obey. And so you don’t need a shadowy thing—a thing that says, “do this, don’t do that” in order to love your neighbor—a changed heart looks for ways to love neighbor. This is why Paul argues in Galatians about the fruit of the Spirit and says, “against these things there is no law”.
If you really understand the “old wine” then you aren’t going to desire this new wine of the Pharisees. That’s one way to take verse 39. The gospel is older than the laws of the Pharisees. God’s intention for the Sabbath predates their silly rules.
At the end of the day, though, I think our application is pretty similar. Jesus is incompatible with a system of legalism. Jesus is incompatible with first century Judaism, and he’s often incompatible with all the junk we build too. What’s needed is the gospel.
I still think James Edwards’ comment on this text is fitting:
The question posed by the image of the wedding feast and the two [short] parables is not whether disciples will, like sewing a new patch on an old garment or refilling an old container, make room for Jesus in their already full agendas and lives. The question is whether they will forsake business as usual and join the wedding celebration; whether they will become entirely new receptacles for the expanding fermentation of Jesus and the gospel in their lives.
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