Mark 2:18-22
“Notice what you notice.” Back home from the hospital and a 5-verse reading from Mark. It turns out that I have something to say about “new wine in old wineskins”.
As many of you know I am a beer homebrewer – over 12,000 bottles capped in 20+ years. So here’s a bit of the process. First I cook a barley malt and water mixture, adding hops during and after the cooking. Then I transfer this mixture to a 5-gallon bucket and cool it by adding ice and cold water to get it to 70-75 degrees. Then I add yeast and “put it to sleep”.
The mixture “wakes up” when alcohol is being generated in a chemical reaction. In that same reaction carbon dioxide is released. The CO2 goes out of the container through an airlock that keeps the beer from being contaminated. If that airlock gets clogged by any internal matter (hops or malt chunks), the mixture continues to ferment and continues to generate CO2. Eventually enough CO2 is generated inside the bucket that the whole airlock blows out, not unlike a pressure cooker. And yes, this happened to a friend of mine, but never to me. But that’s another story…
So, making wine is a similar process, except that the grapes mixture is poured into wineskins. When wineskins are new they expand to accommodate the CO2 gas. But there is a limit to that expansion – the wineskins can only hold so much CO2. So putting new wine into old wineskins will explode the whole mixture.
So Jesus is putting forth an analogy between Himself and the Pharisees and scribes. Jesus is the new wine and the teachings and ritual behaviors of the Pharisees and scribes are the old wineskins. The two do not mix – new wineskins are needed, a seeking of the Kingdom of God through repentance and renewal. Thankfully Jesus has prepared the way and done all we need to seek that Kingdom. Just do it!
Blessings, y’all!