Be open minded!

Luke 5:33-39 

Some people said to Jesus, “The disciples of John fast frequently and offer prayers, and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same; but your disciples eat and drink.” 34 Jesus answered, “Do you think you can make the guests at a wedding party go without food as long as the bridegroom is with them? Of course not! 35 But the day will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast.” 36 Jesus also told them this parable: “You don't tear a piece off a new coat to patch up an old coat. If you do, you will have torn the new coat, and the piece of new cloth will not match the old. 37 Nor do you pour new wine into used wineskins, because the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will pour out, and the skins will be ruined. 38 Instead, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins! 39 And you don't want new wine after drinking old wine. ‘The old is better,’ you say.”

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 don't tear a piece off a new coat to patch up an old coat,'' he said, "If you do, you will have torn the new coat, and the piece of new cloth will not match the old." 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 survived 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. As yesterday Jesus told us: ''Put out into deep water and pay out your nets for a catch.'' 

Jesus does not tolerate the shut mind that is allergic to new ideas. In other words, we should never be afraid of adventurous ideas. Yesterday, Jesus challenged Peter with new way of fishing (by day & by going deep). Because Peter was receptive to Jesus' new ideas, he and his friends ''netted such a huge number of fish that their nets began to tear, so they signalled to their companions in the other boat to come and help them; when these came, they filled the two boats to sinking point.''

This said, the road for science of scientific progress has not been a smooth one. Religious intolerance has been common, with George Bernard Shaw famously saying, “All great truths begin as blasphemies” (from his play Annajanska, 1919).  As Arthur Schopenhauer noticed, an important idea or truth must ‘endure a hostile reception before it is accepted’ when he said “…First,  it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” Let us have a care that when we resent new ideas we are not simply demonstrating that our minds have grown old and inelastic.

We should never be afraid of new methods, new ways of dong things. That a thing has always been done in a certain way 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. Be open minded!