Friday, 8/5/14
Our Lord’s old caution against putting new wine into old
wine skins could apply to the need for making fresh starts in many areas. Like,
he might have been saying his fresh teachings could not be fit into the aged
Judaic religion.
Putting aside the many circumstances in which we might apply
his advice, we can make it more forceful if we have experienced the homey
wisdom or foolishness behind his advice. I mean, we will see the foolishness of
using the old wine skins if we have brought disaster on ourselves by trying to
put new wine into old skins.
I have one of my old Korean stories in which I tried
something like that. Our town held
a market on every fifth day, and folks would tell me when something unusual was
brought in for sale. I once bought a kitten that way, and more than once I
bought wax from the hives of wild bees.
Once Joanna, our cook, said someone from the hills had
collected loads of wild grapes, and no one was buying them. So, Joanna and I filled
a tub with wild grapes, dancing on them like in the movies, and storing the
juice in a urn big enough for a man to hide in. What we had looked like a
mixture of blood and mud, but wheeling the urn out into the shed, we tied a
cloth over the lid.
Removing the cloth three weeks later, we bumped heads trying
to see into the urn. Seeing nothing, we brought up a chili-dipper of it, and we
found it to be a clear ruby wine. Down
to the market again, we bought twenty corks and bottles into which we ladled
the wine, storing the bottles under my cot.
One night a week later the wine came to full fermentation. It
began firing the corks into my underside for an experience that showed me just
what Jesus had meant.
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