Friday of the 22nd Week in
Ordinary Time
September 5, 2014 8:30am
In today’s gospel, the religious
leaders get on Jesus’ back because he and his disciples do not follow the
religious laws on fasting.
And Jesus says, “The wedding guests do not fast as long as
the bridegroom is with them.”
So Jesus uses the image of a
wedding banquet with himself as the bridegroom.
The wedding banquet was a
Scriptural image of the kingdom of God.
So Jesus is declaring that the
kingdom of God is here, present in him, that God is present to us in him.
That, for his day and those
religious leaders, was a big dose.
And then Jesus talks about not
using a piece of new cloth to patch an old fabric because it really won’t match
and just won’t work well.
He also says that you don’t put
new wine into old wineskins because the new wine will ferment and burst the
old, brittle skins.
I think they used leather skins
to hold wine and not the oak barrels or whatever that we use today.
So he is saying: there is
something new here in me, the bridegroom with the wedding banquet or heavenly
banquet, and you just have to think differently and approach this differently.
You need a new mindset.
And that is what he means at the
end when he says that even though old wine can be very good and you may like it
a lot, don’t get so stuck on it that you refuse to try a new vintage or new
vineyard or new varietal.
Be open to the new that I bring.
I think this is always a good
message for us.
There is always something new in
the gospels.
It can challenge and cause
tension for us, but Jesus says: be open to new insights into yourself or new
implications of the gospel for the Church or for society.
Be open, keep alive and growing.
That’s what I get out of this
passage.
