Saturday July 4, Week 13 - Cloaks and Wineskins, New and Old

Matthew 9:14-17

As I read today's gospel text it was a sort of Jeopardy experience.  The answer is the parable of the cloth and the wineskins, "No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth, for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.  People do not put new wine in old wineskins.  Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined.  Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved."  Now what's the question!

A few verses earlier we hear the pharisees and the disciples of John in attack mode as they want to know how eating with sinners and tax collectors, and not making a show of one's fasting practices, could ever be appropriate religious practice.  In verse 13 there is the reference to Hosea 6:6 about God's preference for mercy over sacrifice.  Unlike the Marcan parallel, Matthew adds the bit about preservation.  So, the question is how to move forward in such a way that the old (Judaism)and the new (following this man Jesus) are able to bless each other and offer something new that will grow in faith, hope and love.  AND, this is to happen in fidelity to what has gone before.  Not an easy task.  And we are still at this.  The parable is a start.

I still concern myself with what the "religious life" ought to look like.  Which I suppose is fairly benign as long as it doesn't get in the way of mercy.  But it does get in the way...doesn't it?  I think so...

ASIDE:  The Genesis reading today is about Jacob stealing Esau's identity!  The only thing I can say is Genesis is no Disney flick!  Rewards for bad behavior abound!  Again, I just love that centuries of editor's never felt the need to make this all nice.  Literary critic, Andrew McKenna, said something like "Biblical literature understands us better than we understand ourselves.  Our challenge is to approach these texts in such a way as to close the gap between their superior understanding of us and our inferior understanding of ourselves."  This text needs more than a blog entry to contribute to that narrowing;)  This blogger has more study to do...