Jesus went out again beside the lake; the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him.
And as he sat at dinner in Levi's house, many tax-collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax-collectors, they said to his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax-collectors and sinners?' When Jesus heard this, he said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.'
Now John's disciples and the Pharisees were fasting; and people came and said to him, 'Why do John's disciples and the disciples of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?' Jesus said to them, 'The wedding-guests cannot fast while the bridegroom is with them, can they? As long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast on that day.
'No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak; otherwise, the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.' (NRSV)
The Pharisees are at it again, criticizing Jesus for every move they consider apart from their teaching. Jesus eating with "tax collectors" and other "sinners" seem to have set them off this time. They are quick to point out the social faux paux to Jesus. Jesus takes the opportunity to clarify that his mission is to help those that society thinks are lost.
Evidently, the eating arrangement gets even more convoluted when they point out that John's disciples are fasting. This is possibly a religious fasting period for them. People of the time linked fasting to mourning. Jesus uses the opportunity again to teach that they are not mourning because he is there with them. The time for mourning will be when he is gone.
Jesus is here to do something completely new. He is the "new wine." The Pharisees are critical of Jesus because they try to look at what he is doing through the lens of the old regulations and expectations (aka "wineskins"). If you put new wine in old wineskins, the seams would break because the skins would have already stretched out. Because we don't put wine in skins, this metaphor seems foreign to us but understandable.
Today I'm thinking of being Church. Of how church is and how church evaluates itself. We refer to the church as the 'body of Christ.' We often look at church through the lens of old regulations and expectations, "old wineskins," when quite clearly God is up to something entirely new. How can we be fresh receivers, "new wineskins," of what God is doing through Jesus Movement in this world? God is redeeming the world through Jesus. Jesus doesn't fit the old expectations. We shouldn't expect things to be the same as they've always been. How can we look at what God is doing in this world through fresh eyes?
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