Reading Lk 5. 33-39
Introduction
Let’s start with a story. It was a sunny summer afternoon. Down on the beach, a group of children were putting the finishing touches to a sandcastle they’d been working on all day. It was a magnificent sandcastle, with turrets and moats and flags and a drawbridge, and shells for decoration. But there was one problem. The tide was coming in. What should the children do?
That’s the first part of a parable, and you can ring in at the end of the programme with your answers.
Pharisees
For the moment, however, we’re in Luke 5. Jesus is in Galilee, and people have come from all over to hear him. One who has come is a paralytic, and when his friends lower him through the roof into the house where Jesus is teaching, he forgives him his sins and then heals him. After the meeting Jesus leaves the house and goes to the tax office, where he tells the tax man to follow him. The tax man does; and not only that, he puts on a big feast for all his friends and invites Jesus to it.
At this point the Pharisees can contain themselves no longer. Jesus is breaking too many rules. Not only does he equate himself with God by offering to forgive the paralytic’s sins, he then goes off to a party with a bunch of tax collectors. Tax collectors were almost by definition corrupt, and were shunned by all respectable people. Look, they say. You set yourself up as religious. Really religious people, like John, and us, encourage their followers to fast and pray - and yours are at the 19th hole with a bunch of conmen. What’s going on?
The Pharisees don’t get a good press nowadays, but they did have a point. They were founded as a reform movement when the Jews returned from exile in Babylon. Their name comes from the word for holy. Their aims were to restore the Word of God to a central place in the life and experience of Israel, and to eliminate the evil practices which had taken root amongst the people while in captivity. High ideals. The problem was that their faith had become rule bound and ultimately hypocritical. In their determination to live by the law they had carefully broken it down into 613 rules plus 1521 emendations. So for example to avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain they refused to say it at all. To avoid sexual temptation they would lower their heads so as not to look at passing women. Apparently the most determined ones were known as ‘bleeding Pharisees’ because they bumped into so many walls. There were obviously a lot of women around... And to avoid defiling the Sabbath they outlawed 39 activities that might be construed as work. They had been so careful for so long that if righteousness could be gained on earth surely they were the ones who had gained it.
This is the religious world into which Jesus marched. The Pharisees were the pillars of the godfearing society Israel wanted to be. But they had turned Israel’s relationship with the living God into a set of rigidly enforced external rules and observances, impossible for the poor and crushing in their comprehensiveness. Jesus cocked a snook at the lot of them. He was abrasive, rude and cuttingly clever whenever he found himself being challenged by a Pharisee. He assaulted their authority and rejected their rules. He flew against the social norms they tried so hard to keep. It was forbidden to speak to women in public and unusual to engage with them at any kind of intellectual level; Jesus had long conversations in broad daylight with women he’d never met. It was not the thing to associate with prostitutes, tax collectors and the irreligious; Jesus made them his friends and accepted their hospitality. Lepers and adulterers were outcasts to be excluded or even stoned; Jesus healed and forgave them. Children were to be seen and not heard; Jesus insisted that God regards them as being of particular importance. He delivered village idiots and healed foreign servants. And all this in a society based on the observance of rigid religious laws of cleanliness, purity and respectability - laws upheld by the Pharisees and generally understood to have come from God himself. It isn’t surprising they didn’t like it. In fact, they were about as keen on it as Louis XVIII on peasants’ rights and as the tsars on the Bolshevik revolution. So once again they try to show him up. Why do your disciples eat and drink instead of fasting and praying? In other words, why do you mount this challenge to our religious heritage and our status as the people of God?
The parables
Jesus doesn’t give them a straight answer. Instead, he offers three comparisons. They all have the same function. Not to clear up misunderstanding, but rather to escalate the conflict.
The first is an illustration from a wedding feast. ‘You cannot make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you?’ They’ll fast when he’s gone.
The comparison seems simple. Feasts are allowed for weddings, so why not now?
But in fact it isn’t simple at all. Weddings and bridegrooms are symbols the Pharisees are used to. The image of the bridegroom was used throughout the Old Testament to represent God’s union with his people. The wedding therefore represents a new life, a life to be lived in intimate relationship with God. So Jesus is making it worse. He escalates his claims. He is the bridegroom, and what is being celebrated is salvation.
He goes on. ‘No one tears a piece from a new garment and sews it on an old garment; otherwise the new will be torn, and the piece from the new will not match the old.’ We’re still in the world of weddings, but once again the comparison has overtones. The garment represents the cosmos; psalm 102 the heavens will wear out like a garment. It’s another traditional metaphor for the end of a world order, and once again Jesus is applying it to himself.
And then, still in the world of feasts, he moves on to the wine. And like bridegrooms and garments, wine too has a long-established symbolic meaning as the vehicle of health and new life.
And that’s what would have struck the Pharisees. Not only does this man assault tradition in his words and behaviour, but when asked to justify himself he does so in using the very language of that tradition. When accused of insulting God, he claims with one phrase after another to BE God.
So that’s Jesus’s one in the eye for you, to the Pharisees. Effectively he says, If you want to appeal to scripture, let me answer you in terms of scripture. Let me explain to you that you’ve hit the nail absolutely on the head: this does matter. What I am saying and doing IS absolutely fundamental, and it IS in total contradiction to what you are saying and doing. You’re on the way out.
But what about the bewildered audience. What would you have been making to the cut and thrust of this furious argument in religious language? This is where I think the challenge of the parable form comes in.
Email
I had an email the other day from an old friend. This is it. ‘From: FionaRoberts@bottlegreen.com.’ No, honestly, she used to take me on wild tours of the vineyards of Bordeaux and Tuscany, she hasn’t stopped drinking since, and now she’s a Master of Wine. Bottlegreen.com is her company’s address. Anyway, the eminent theologians who wrote all the commentaries I consulted weren’t much help on wineskins, so I emailed Fiona. This is what she says. ‘It’s all to do with hygiene. Old wine skins will have built up acetobacter, making wine vinegary, and other spoilage yeasts, microbes, etc. A skin is impossible to sterilise, so only a poor shoddy winemaker would put his clean new wine in a dirty vessel.’ There follow various rude remarks about Italians using old barrels.
So here Jesus is stating the obvious. You don’t put new wine in old wineskins. They knew that. He also says you don’t patch an old garment with a piece of material you’ve cut out of a new one - you’d wreck the new one, and it won’t match anyway. That’s obvious too, however attached you may be to your favourite shirt. So why did he say it? Why does he use these homely illustrations in such peculiar ways?
Nature and function of parables
One third of the recorded teaching of Jesus comes to us in the form of parables, and we have two of them here. What are parables? Essentially they are comparisons. We are used to comparisons: if I say the house was like a pigsty you immediately know it was dirty and messy. But parables are more complicated than that because it is not one thing that is compared to another but one event that is compared to another. Parables are stories. Jesus explains a point by telling a story.
Now that all sounds very simple and helpful until you realise that at the end of the story you aren’t always exactly clear what he means. The men who wrote them down worried about this, and so have generations of commentators. The usual scenario is this: someone asks Jesus a question, and instead of giving a straight answer he tells a story. It sounds like a good way to do theology; keep it simple. But is it? If I say to Roger, ‘why were you so late home last night’, and he says to me ‘well, it was like this: there was once a farmer who had many labourers on his farm...’, am I going to find that a short and helpful way of getting my question answered?
So let me make a proposal. When Jesus told a parable, he was not intending to explain. That doesn’t mean, as some have thought, that he was intending to confuse. It means he was doing something else. And usually what he was trying to do was to challenge. The parables are not helpful illustrations nor coded teaching for the disciples: they are nothing less than weapons of warfare. And in this case as in so many, the enemy was the Pharisees, and the surprised observer as they come down in flames is you.
The old and the new: conflict between two world orders
What then was the issue? What exactly was it that Jesus was wanting to challenge? Who was the war between? Well, the parables are about the old and the new. Throw away your old clothes and put on the new ones. Get rid of the old wineskins and put the new wine into new ones. The old clothes and the old wine represent a whole world order, a whole way of looking at life - the way upheld by the Pharisees. Jesus on the other hand is the new wine. He brought a new way of looking at the world, at the human condition, and at God. This new way he called the gospel, which means good news. No wonder they didn’t like it. He threatened their whole religious framework, their whole philosophy of life. He brought good news to the poor, the oppressed and the lost, and the good news is that the world was no longer the way the religious people said it was. Relating to God wasn’t going to be about keeping the 613 rules and the 1521 amendments. It was going to be done another way, and furthermore in a way that called for a party. Strong stuff.
Gospel today
Well that all sounds rather historical, doesn’t it. That is what happened 2000 years ago, and everything has been different since. As we stand here we wear the new garment and drink the new wine. But do we?
Let me ask you a question. What is the church? When I went to theological college our first module was called ‘the church in the modern world’, and that is the question we started with. Within 10 minutes we had discovered that collectively we hadn’t the faintest idea. The church is about justice. Faith. Love and compassion. Worship. Gathering together as Christians. The kingdom of God. Where we do the Bible. Where we minister and receive ministry. No two people were in agreement.
Well, if we don’t know what the church is, perhaps we know what the gospel is. In 1983 a panel of bishops, theologians and other dignitaries sat down at a meeting of the British Council of Churches to discuss a book about evangelism in the modern culture. The question arose, ‘well, what is the gospel anyway?’ Apparently only 2 of them were even prepared to hazard a guess.
Let’s just look at verse 39. Luke has Jesus say, ‘and no one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘the old is good.’ The problem with new wine is it tastes a bit raw. Very raw indeed, in fact, as I discovered when Fiona’s vineyard owners handed me glasses of the current year’s vintage. There is a lot to be said for a nice, familiar, seasoned claret, matured in oak casks and kept in the traditional way in a cool cellar before being brought out to accompany a candlelit dinner. It is a natural human tendency to cling to the familiar, to carry on in the old ways of doing things, to comfort the palate with the reassuring taste of the conventional.
And that’s what we have done, nationally at any rate. Jesus came with something totally subversive. That subversive thing was the notion that we might have life, that life is to be found in relationship with God, and that it was to be had through him. I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. I am the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by me. That was the gospel. It was on offer not just to the religious people but to everyone, and it had nothing to do with the 613 rules and 1521 amendments, with the temple and the synagogue, the priests and the rabbis. That was the old world, and Jesus burst in and turned it upside down. He offered hope to women and children, the sick and the sinful; he demonstrated his power with healings and deliverances, sounded the death knell for the religious establishment, and proclaimed the beginning of a new world order, the kingdom of God. We know all these things; but we don’t always think about how appallingly revolutionary they were. The Pharisees weren’t a wicked bunch. But they were wedded to the status quo, to the choice vintages of the Wine Society. Jesus brought the new wine of revolution. They couldn’t cope. Religious leaders conspired, and Jesus was got rid of.
After his death, and the coming of the Holy Spirit, the community of those who embraced this new order grew and grew. Thousands of people were converted at a time in Jerusalem, in the city where only a few weeks earlier Jesus had been crucified. Churches sprang up all over the Roman empire, despite the persecution which was heaped on their members. Jesus died in around 30AD. Within 15 years nearly 30% of the world’s population had been exposed to the gospel, which is a staggering statistic. In the year 314 the emperor Constantine himself became a Christian, and Christianity was declared the official religion of the Roman empire. It all sounds like a big, if unexpected, success story.
And yet was it? Is this radical faith the one which we still live, which informs our society, which has passed on its values to the people we know and to the world as a whole? Even taking into account the fact that many people do not wish to embrace the gospel, are we sure that it is still the same radical gospel which is on offer to them? And is it the same radical gospel which we ourselves live, or has it been turned into something else?
I think that if we look at history we find that in times when Christians have drunk the new wine and not the old, the gospel has flourished and had an impact on society. And in times when they have forgotten to be subversive but settled for the conventional, then the gospel has made no headway at all.
So the question for us is, which is it now? Well, the general consensus is that by and large in the West we have reverted to the claret. It is true that we live in a culture which on the whole is not receptive to the gospel. But we do not help the gospel, because many of us have lost touch with its dynamic power. We live by the truth OK; but it is a truth which has been much reduced. We have watched the gospel be turned from something subversive and life-changing to something tamed, packaged and institutionalised. It hasn’t been deliberate; but too often we drink the old wine of yesterday’s way of doing things, and we adopt the values of our culture. So gradually the gospel has become emptied of its content, familiar but somehow unrelated to the realities of everyday life.
Two ways to study a cat: the parable now
Someone once observed that there are 2 ways to study a cat. You can put it down on a dissecting table, take it apart and label the parts. That gives you all sorts of information about it. I remember doing this as part of my A level biology course, except we did rats and frogs, not cats. That’s one way of finding out what makes a cat tick. Then there’s a second way. You can put a mouse down in front of the cat and see what happens. Which way will give you a better feel for what a cat is like?
That’s what it’s like with the parables of Jesus. We can cut them up, look at the imagery, consider the context, compare them with the culture: or we can put them down in front of our own world and see what happens. In telling a parable Jesus was deliberately not giving his hearers a load of information. He was giving them a challenge. The parables never tell you what to do: they always make you think.
In a parable the ordinary world goes haywire, and you have to think why. Of course I don’t cut up new clothes to patch old ones. Of course I prefer 78 claret to last season’s sharp new brew, and of course when I make my annual batch of elderberry wine I don’t put it into dirty bottles. So a parable isn’t a homely illustration which makes a simple point. Rather the reverse - it turns the homely upside down and challenges us to look at reality a different way. A parable is a question waiting for an answer, an invitation waiting for a response. Its fundamental message is that things are not as they seem, and that you must be open to having your tidy vision of reality shattered.
Implications
So what does that mean for us? It’s conventional in a sermon to expound the text and then offer an application, to say ‘and so we should do this’. But if you look at the parables of Jesus, that is exactly what he didn’t do. The parables never tell you what to do; they always make you think. To tell us what to do would have been to offer a new code in place of the old; burgundy instead of claret, if you like. Jesus could have put it all in straight prose, but he didn’t. He chose this weird topsy turvey story approach. Why - because parables aren’t to correct our thinking, they are to lead us into a different way of thinking. A parable is a signpost. It is not the destination.
So what are we to think about. What are the questions?
I think perhaps there are two.
1. Firstly, a question for each one of us. Are we drinking the new wine, or have we without realising it slipped back into pouring ourselves a glass of the old? That is, are we living our lives in the same radical and subversive way that Jesus lived his, or are our lives in fact indistinguishable from those of our non-Christian neighbours? Are your values those of the culture, or are they those of the gospel? When something goes wrong, do you reach for the old bottle or the new? At work, are your priorities the same as those of your colleagues, or are they different? Do you use your money in the same way as the people next door, or are your values different from theirs? Is there unresolved pain in your life, as their is in theirs, or has the gospel changed that for you? What are your ambitions, and which world do they belong to, the everyday world of the conventional, or the upside down world of the parables? What do you want of your life: comfortable conformity or the excitement of revolution?
2. And then there’s a question for the church. If we want to revitalise the gospel in our society, and to make it accessible to the majority who have heard it only in its tamed, scaled down version, how are we to proceed? I suppose again by asking questions. What, in what we do, is done because that’s the way it’s always been done? The old wineskins are yesterday’s religion. So in our attempts to live out the gospel we must be ready to chuck out everything that went with yesterday, and get hold of spanking new wineskins for today. All irrelevant religious baggage must go. I must say I say this with a sinking heart, as a minister in a national church which is clinging like fury to a whole cellar full of old wineskins. It doesn’t have to be like that. We’ve set up these think tank groups. Let’s think. What is the best vehicle for the gospel, tomorrow? And that applies to whatever area of the church you are involved with. Be radical. Radical just means root. How can we chop out the dead wood and make space for new shoots to spring up from the roots?
Sandcastles.
We started with a modern parable. It was a sunny summer afternoon. Down on the beach, a group of children were putting the finishing touches to a sandcastle they’d been working on all day. It was a magnificent sandcastle, with turrets and moats and flags and a drawbridge, and shells for decoration. But there was one problem. The tide was coming in. The children ran in despair to their parents.
Further up the beach a second group of children are working. These children have seen the coming tide, and have begun work on a new castle higher up the beach, just above the tideline. It is a newer, flatter structure, more resistant to wind and wave. They hope that when they come back the next day it will still be there.
But standing on some high ground above the beach is a third group of children. These children are looking out to sea, and have noticed the first signs of an impending storm. They can see that the storm is going to wipe out both the traditional castle and the newer design. They too want to play together, and to build something; but they decide to run with the tide and the storm, to draw patterns on the sand to form their castles, to embrace change and incorporate it into their game.
Which group are you in?