Embrace the new!

Luke 5:33-39

The Pharisees and scribes said to Jesus, "John's disciples are well- known for keeping fasts and saying prayers. Also the Pharisees. But you seem to spend most of your time at parties. Why?" 34 Jesus said, "When you're celebrating a wedding, you don't skimp on the cake and wine. You feast. Later you may need to pull in your belt, but this isn't the time. As long as the bride and groom are with you, you have a good time. 35 When the groom is gone, the fasting can begin. No one throws cold water on a friendly bonfire. This is Kingdom Come! 36" No one cuts up a fine silk scarf to patch old work clothes; you want fabrics that match. 37 And you don't put wine in old, cracked bottles; 38 you get strong, clean bottles for your fresh vintage wine. 39 And no one who has ever tasted fine aged wine prefers unaged wine. "

Food for thought!

There is in religious people a kind of passion for the old. Nothing moves more slowly than the religious. The trouble with the Pharisees was that the whole religious outlook of Jesus was so startlingly new they simply could not adjust to it.

Jesus used two illustrations to make his point. "You cannot put a new patch on an old garment," he said, "The strong new cloth will only rip the rent in the old cloth wider." Bottles in Palestine were made of skin. When new wine was put into them it fermented and gave off gas. If the bottle was new, there was a certain elasticity in the skin and it gave with the pressure; but if it was old, the skin was dry and hard and it would burst. "Don't," says Jesus, "let your mind become like an old wineskin. Be elastic, be open to new ideas, be open to Good news.

The whole passage is about Jesus' condemnation of the shut mind and a plea that we should not reject new ideas.

(i) We should never be afraid of adventurous thought. If there is such a person as the Holy Spirit, God must ever be leading us into new truth. Imagine: how would medicine fare if doctors were restricted to drugs and methods and techniques three hundred years old?"

(ii) The man with something new has always to fight. Galileo was branded a heretic when he held that the earth moved round the sun. Lister had to fight for antiseptic technique in surgical operations. Simpson had to battle against opposition in the merciful use of chloroform. Let us have a care that when we resent new ideas we are not simply demonstrating that our minds are grown old and inelastic; and let us never shirk the adventure of thought.

(iii) We should never be afraid of new methods. That a thing has always been done may very well be the best reason for stopping doing it. That a thing has never been done may very well be the best reason for trying it. There is a wise and an unwise conservatism. Let us have a care that in thought and in action we are not hidebound reactionaries when we ought, as Christians, to be gallant adventurers.