NEW WINESKINS NEEDED

Earlier this week, Jesus told two parables that warned His hearers against trying to combine the old and the new. 

They were complaining to Him that he and His followers were not strictly obeying he Jewish ritual laws. So He made it clear to them that the Good News that He was preaching was indeed something quite new. You don't put new wine in old wineskins, or the new wine will burst the wineskins.

The Gospel, He tells them is not a patch-up job of Judaism, it is not simply a reform movement. Nor can it be contained within the limits of the mosaic law.

I think we can understand what He is saying here: the Pharisees will have to let go of their cherished  system of detailed laws and observances in order to relate in a new way to the God of infinite love and forgiveness, His Abba. They have a difficult decisio9n to make.

But what about me?

Do I ever try to squeeze the gospel down to a manageable size so that I can work with it without disrupting my present comfortable way of relating to the world?

Do I ever find myself trying to contain the gospel within the limits of my own easy truce with my faults and minor venial sins?  

 

I was asking myself this question when it occurred to me that the Lord is doing

something new with our community here at Newark Abbey. With the recent death of our beloved Abbot Melvin, we are now down to 11 members. 

What if the Lord is offering our community the gift of “new wine" while we are still using the old wine skins that we’ve grown used to over the decades? Maybe we should be looking at new ways of living the gospel in our monastic life.

It seems to me that maybe we need to be open to the possibility that the Lord is doing something really new, something that can’t be contained within our present wine skins? 

Maybe we are being faced with the same challenge as those Pharisees: Maybe the Lord is not asking us to “patch up” our present way of being, but is asking us to let him do something entirely new with our community.

Actually, this has a familiar ring to some of us monks who were here when God did the same thing in 1972.

Let us all pray for one another, that all of us will be able to recognize and then face courageously whatever challenges the Lord sends our way!