“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins.” — Mark 2:22
Let me first start with this: I like drinking wine, but I’m no connoisseur. I’ll drink what tastes good, what is familiar, or (gasp) what is most affordable in the moment.
If I’m not even a connoisseur, then I definitely can’t tell you anything about Jesus’ use of this term ‘wineskins’ in the passage above or other comparable passages (see Matthew 9:14-17 and Luke 5:33-39). But a quick Google search explains that it’s an old-timey way of transporting wine in the time of Jesus: It’s like Capri Suns or Kool Aid juice pouches, but made of animal skins and for wine.
So now that’s settled. The basic gist is this: Don’t put your new wine in an old skin (other translations say ‘bottles’). Or, for a dry version, don’t put new Capri Sun in an old Capri Sun pouch (????)
I kid about the Capri Sun, of course. But in the way that scripture sometimes comes around and comes alive at a particular moment in time, this idea of putting new wine in new wineskins, rather than old, has been speaking to me lately.
It seems fairly straightforward and obvious: Why would you put something new, which we can read as having greater value, into something old? Jesus makes it clear why we don’t recycle the wineskins: We run the risk of the skins bursting, losing both the skin and the wine.
Applying this beyond wine, if you’re growing and changing, don’t try to stuff yourself into old ways of doing things. Put another way: We love character development, and it’s important for our life — but don’t throw yourself in a Groundhog Day-esque loop. Growth can’t be sustained if we continue our old habits.
I’m currently in a time of transition. Maybe all of this talk of “post-COVID” and things going “back to normal” has me considering what is next in life, now that most of the major milestones of young adolescence are out of the way. And while I am poising for major change (which I promise to share when the time is right), it means a great deal of adjustment in the way I live my life, relate to others, and exist in the world around me.
But old habits die hard. I can be rendered entirely useless at the thought of starting something new, especially where new habits are needed for the purposes of growth. I ask myself what compelled me to start certain things (i.e., I recently decided that I needed to stop eating sweet things all the time because I can, and you can probably guess how that’s been going).
When zoomed in, sometimes these little efforts can feel meaningless or trivial. But in the grand scheme of life, every bit counts. It just takes some time to see the change at the start.
Which brings me back to the wineskins. I think for some time now I had grown pretty content with the way that my life was rolling. I was fine with my choices and told myself that bigger decisions could come later.
But parallel to this, changes were happening that demanded my attention. I could no longer be content (or now, complacent) with my actions. And I found myself doing what humans are known best for: finding shortcuts. I didn’t want to go through the hard work; I just wanted something quick and easy. The old wineskins came in handy.
Of course, the old wineskins come in handy until you suddenly lose both the skins and the wine. I found myself feeling a lot of anxiety and face to face with a real choice from Jesus: “Are you going to choose what I have in store for you, or are you going to continue on the way you’ve been living?”
In this choice, I’m face to face not with a tyrant demanding that I choose Him, but a loving Father holding out both options with abandon. Of course, He knows the better option — He is God, after all — but He still left me with the power to choose. He gave me freedom to work, contemplate, and decide.
I think we all know the feeling of relief and joy that comes when we choose ‘the right thing’. Whatever that may have looked like for you in your life will probably vary from situation to situation, person to person, but the reality is that we have in God someone who desires our happiness, and wants us to be free to choose that for ourselves.
On the theme of new wine being put into new wineskins, there is a song by Hillsong aptly named “New Wine” that talks about how that growth and change comes about: through the crushing and pressing. These words alone evoke uncomfortable imagery of being crushed and pressed. But out of this, there is new purpose, new opportunity, new learning, new WINE. The difficulty, the frustration, the heartbreak, it all becomes worth it when we’re able to look back and see how far we’ve come and taste the wine that has come through that suffering.
But when we have that new wine, we must protect it. We must preserve it. Because in the new wine there is fulfillment of a promise: The suffering we’ve endured, even if we can’t understand or see it yet, will yield results that may not just be helpful for us, but for others as well.
There is a line in the aforementioned Hillsong song that says this: “When I trust you I don’t need to understand.” That is a difficult thing for me to wrap my head around. Doesn’t understanding bear trust, and trust come from understanding?
But it also reminds me of a conclusion that came to me as well: There truly are some things that happen in life that we will never fully understand while we’re on this side of heaven. This is not to say we become indifferent to them, but perhaps the complexity of these issues call us to deeper trust and abandonment: loss, suffering, sickness, heartbreak, death. It is in this space where we grow, and it is in that growth that we need to preserve what we have grown in and through.
Old habits do die hard. But when we protect how we’ve grown and entrust that growth to our Lord, we can see how the things that used to bring us comfort suddenly are powerless. Our eyes are trained to someone greater, and we’re suddenly choosing the love He’s meant for us all along.
In the meantime…
“Where there is new wine, there is new power / there is new freedom and the Kingdom is here.”
United in the Eucharist,
Rachel