Transcript:

This passage will be familiar to a lot of people. The passage goes like this: “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”.

Jesus knew that acknowledging the reality of God’s love and accepting it was essential to the repentance that was required of us. And if we are to experience the reign of God in our lives, then we have to be open to that of God in our lives, then we have to be open to that. Without this, we remain locked in our sin, or trapped by it or held back by it. And Jesus here makes the point that the good news can’t be patched onto the old cloak of the law, nor could it be poured into its ancient skins. The new way of life that Jesus was initiating would need to be expressed in new ways. That would require a new mindset. That would require a new mindset.

The kingdom, the reign of God, has the vitality and the potential of an un-shrunken piece of cloth or of a new, unfermented wine.

The dynamism of the ripped cloth and the burst skins reflects the dynamism of Jesus’ new teaching and liberating action have inflicted on the prevailing order, and so attempting to contain or grapple with the new reality in old, worn-out categories is futile and it’s destructive. A complete change of heart is required. I read recently someone put it this way every time a child is born into our world, a new cloth is created and we are gifted with new wine.

In other words, every generation brings with it a new energy and a new revelation, not contradicting the old, but is for us to be faithful to what has gone before, by being as open to the surprise of God’s action in our lives, just as our ancestors in faith were. We’re being called always forward into a future full of hope. Forward into a future full of hope. And so Jesus is saying to us that his new way, his kingdom, his reign can’t be contained just by what’s gone before. We must be always open and looking for the potential and the possibility of living out God’s kingdom in our time.