Word to the Wise
Monday, January 20, 2025 - Monday in the 2nd Week in Ordinary Time
[Heb 5:1-10 and Mark 2:18-22]"No one sews a piece of shrunken cloth on an old cloak. If he does, its fullness fullness 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 skins are ruined. Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins." [Mark]
The image of the new/old cloth and the new/old wineskins is a bit of common sense that Jesus used to present himself as someone/something very new. The image arose in his growing conflict with the religious authorities who protested what they considered his casual attitude toward Mosaic law. He ate and drank with "sinners" and "unclean" people. He healed on the sabbath. Their opposition would prove to be presumably lethal but not ultimately triumphant.
The common sense meaning of the parable is still true. We Catholics in the Latin-rite (western) of the church have experienced the difficulty of accepting something that seemed totally new to us, even if it had its foundation in something much older than the way we were used to. The reforms (especially the liturgical reforms) of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) could not be easily poured into the old wineskins of the Council of Trent (1545-1561). This has been true on both the institutional as well as individual levels. In fact, the whole way in which the Church thinks of itself after Vatican II has meant that the "old wine" has to decrease and the new wine has to increase.
Pope Francis remarked to a group of young Jesuits that an old adage about it taking 100 years for the teachings of an ecumenical council to be fully accepted is in force and we are only "half way!" AMEN