Word to the Wise
Monday, January 20, 2020 - Monday in the 2nd Week in Ordinary Time
[1 Sam 15:16-23 and Mark 2:18-22]"No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak. If he does, its fullness pulls away, the new from the old, and the tear gets worse. Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins are ruined. Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins." [Mark]
There's an old joke in many organizations: "How many____________does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "CHANGE?????!!!!!" That bit of humor can be applied to many different situations (including our beloved Church!). In the Gospel According to Mark "change" is represented in the person of Jesus. Resistance is represented in the religious authorities (scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, etc) who saw in him (correctly) a "change" and something/someone NEW! Any "change" was seen to be a threat!
The tension between old and new, continuity and change, continues in our own time. The words may vary. TRADITION is weighed against NEW WAYS., even when the "new ways" are actually based on traditions long-forgotten. Certainly this has been manifested in the liturgical life of the Church since Vatican II. In some ways this has been resolved by keeping the old wine in old skins and pouring the new wine into new skins. But I am left wondering if perhaps a good way to secure the old wine when the old skins are showing signs of breaking is to pour it into new skins.? What would that look like in our liturgical life? An example of this could be the continual effort to find ways to make the wisdom and insights of our Dominican brother, Thomas Aquinas, more accessible to our own age. He is definitely old wine (13th century) On a pastoral level, I find myself continually challenged to share older wisdom to much younger minds at our campus ministry here at Texas Tech.
The words of Jesus today give us much to think about. What kind of "wineskins" are we? AMEN