New Wine

“No one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined. Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins. And no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’” Luke 5:37-39

In Jesus’ time, wine was put into goat, or ox leather skins. They still use this in Spain and in the East. New wine had to be put into new wine skins, as it would swell with fermentation and burst the wine skins if it was old and stretched already. Like all Jesus' teachings, He meant many things. How about the new wine being the gift of the Holy Spirit to us? If our hearts are like the old wine skins, hard, inflexible, judgmental, the Holy Spirit can't live in us! 

Perhaps Jesus was also talking about how “The New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old Testament is revealed and fulfilled in the New”, or “The New is in the Old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed.” That’s what St. Augustine wrote. Jesus’ teachings were the new wine that are exhilarating and fresh, and bursting with truth. As Scott Hahn wrote in his book, Consuming the Word, “In the Old Testament scriptures the entire New Testament was foreshadowed. In the New Testament dispensation, all the Old Testament scriptures were fulfilled.” 

It’s fascinating to read the New Testament under the light of the Old, and the New going back to the Old. For example in Genesis 22, Isaac carried the wood for the burnt offering up Mount Moriah. When Isaac asked his father Abraham where was the lamb to be sacrificed, Abraham answered, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the offering, my son”. 

In the 19th chapter of John, we read that Jesus carried his own cross up to Golgotha, where He was offered as a sacrifice for our sins. In John 1:29 and 36, Jesus is identified the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”, and in the Book of Revelation, there are 29 references to a lion-like lamb, slain but standing, and victorious. If we study the Old Testament and the New, we will realize they are but one word of God to help us understand His plan for us. Another example is several verses from Psalm 22 foretold Jesus’ suffering and humiliation in Matthew 27:41-43. 

We can think of these hidden treasures in the Old Testament as “Easter eggs”, what  computer geeks call “unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a bonus”. If we are willing to spend time digging them out, we will be rewarded as we see how our loving God reveals to us His awesome and masterful plan to save us.