Friday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

I think we often hear this parable as nothing more than a kind of unbridled enthusiasm for change and newness. Sometimes it is even preached that way: you introduce some change and then pull out this passage to justify it. But I don’t think that is the image.

It is not a justification for change for the sake of change. In fact, if you listen closely, the image is more about destruction. Jesus warns that you do not cut up a new cloak to sew a patch onto an old one, because in doing so you destroy the new cloak and make the old one worse. In the same way, you do not pour new wine into old wineskins, because you will destroy the wineskin.

At its heart, however, the image is Christ saying that he has not come to destroy; he has come to make new. The goal is not destruction.

Sometimes we think he came to tear down all the remnants of Judaism and build something completely new and unheard of. Yet that does not fit anything that happens in his ministry. He himself lives out and practices the Jewish law. We never see him criticize the Pharisees for being Jewish or for being faithful to the law. He criticizes them for their infidelity.

He tells them, in effect, “You are not being faithful to God’s law. You have created traditions and customs that contradict the very law you claim to follow.” Cf. Mark 7:8–13.

We have to remember that Christ did not tear down the Second Temple. That was the Romans, about forty years later. Christ had many criticisms to level, but they concerned infidelity.

Thus, in this parable, he is not saying, “Your fasting, your prayers, and all these things are evil, and I have new ideas that are better.” He is telling them that something beyond what they imagine is coming: he is going to make all things new.

He is not only going to invite the Gentiles into the faith and build a new community; he is going to renew every heart. Everything the Mosaic Law pointed to, every reality it was meant to foreshadow, he will bring about. Even their infidelities—their failures to live up to the covenant given to them—can be repaired. They, too, can be made new.

Everything Christ does is focused on that renewal: bringing about something greater and better, something more fully in conformity with who God truly is. Christ himself is God’s final revelation to humanity. In that sense, he is making everything new.

Christ nowhere rejects all that is old, calls it evil, or says it must disappear. He offers us a way to be renewed, to become more faithful, and to go out and truly proclaim what God was always saying.

Think back to his arguments about marriage and divorce. He tells the Pharisees, “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.” Matt 19:8. Christ reveals what God always intended, despite the concession made to human weakness. That is the newness Christ is bringing.

So we should never invoke this passage to justify every conceivable change we may want, or change for the sake of change. I’m not going to paint the church red next weekend and then tell you, “Well, we have to pour new wine into new wineskins.” That is not legitimate.

The change Christ brings is change meant to renew, to make better, to make new, so that we can receive the fullness of all that God has to offer us.

And so it is good for us to look into our lives and ask: Where are we not allowing that renewal to happen? Where do we cling to what is old simply because it is old? Where do we seek newness merely for the sake of novelty?

Neither of those things is what Christ is calling us to. He is calling us to fidelity. He is calling us to allow the Holy Spirit continually to enter into our lives, to recreate us and make us ever new, so that wherever he may call us in a given moment, we are ready to respond. We are ready to say yes and follow him into that great gift of eternal life.