RBWords

     These words of Jesus, used by the evangelist Luke to highlight the growing tension between Jesus' teaching and the established consensus of Jewish practice in his time and in the time of the community in which Luke was writing, present us in our own time with the same challenge.  The gospel continually calls us to conversion of mind and heart, but does not give us a specific form to follow!  Jesus' own disciples were accused of violating the existing forms of expression.  The scribes and Pharisees were not interested in "new wine," but preferred the old!   Jesus clearly represented something new that was disturbing.

     I entered religious life in the Fall of 1964.  I was 21 years old and the Catholic church that I knew had been pretty uniform in its observance, no matter where I went.  The wine was old and the skins were old, dating pretty much back to the 16th century Tridentine reform.  Little did I know that along with the rest of the church (even the Eastern rites], I would be living in a tumultuous period of church history beginning with the Second Vatican Council and continuing up to the present day.  It is still too early to write the history of much of what has happened, but I find Jesus' image of the patching and the wineskins to be helpful in understanding it.  Some of the questions are profound.

     If we can't repair the old cloak with new cloth, what can we do?  Use old cloth from another old cloak?  Doesn't that simply perpetuate the weakness?  Perhaps this part of the image doesn't help us as much with something like the Catholic church whose institutional expression is so large that the image loses its application.  What about the wine and the wineskins?  Here I find some challenges, too.  The wine, especially the old wine, is more valuable than the wineskins.  Jesus makes the point that one does not pour new wine (what he was teaching) into old wineskins (the strict expression of Pharisaic interpretation).  The practical consequences are clear.  However, one is still left with the question of pouring old wine into new wineskins.  This, I think, has been the challenge since 1965, when the Second Vatican Council ended.  Some folks believe that the old wine and old wineskins are self perpetuating - the skins never wear out and the vintage is inexhaustible!  Others point out that the same vines have produced new wine which can't go into the old wineskins.  What can we do with the new wine (which in the course of years can become old!)?  If we want the new wine to age well, should we design new skins that function as well as the old ones did for the old wine?  

    In this small space I cannot begin to exhaust the various arguments about the tension between new wine and old wine, new skins and old skins.  I know I like both old and new wine, and I wish we could come to a better consensus about the design and use of the skins.  I suspect that latter wish is likely to go unrealized!   AMEN