36 He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. 38 No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
Jesus has just called Levi — a tax collector, a man whose profession placed him outside the boundaries of respectable Jewish society — and Levi has thrown a great banquet in his honour. The room is full of tax collectors and others the Pharisees consider undesirable. The Pharisees and their scribes are watching and they are troubled. Why does Jesus eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?
Jesus answers them. He has come for the sick, not the healthy. For sinners, not the righteous. The physician goes where the patients are.
But the Pharisees press further. John’s disciples fast and pray regularly. So do ours. Why do your disciples eat and drink?
And Jesus tells them a parable about cloth and wine. On the surface it is a parable about incompatibility — about what happens when you try to combine things that do not fit together. Underneath it is a parable about the nature of what Jesus is bringing and the kind of container it requires.
The first image is a practical one that anyone in the ancient world would have understood immediately.
A garment has worn through in one place. You need a patch. The obvious solution — cut a piece from a new garment to cover the hole in the old one — turns out to be no solution at all. You have damaged the new garment for nothing. And the patch will not work anyway. New cloth has not yet shrunk. When it is washed it will shrink and pull against the old cloth around it, making the tear worse than before.
The logic is simple. New cloth and old cloth do not belong together in this way. The properties of each make the combination destructive to both.
Jesus is not making a general statement about the value of old things versus new things. He is making a specific point about what He is bringing and what the existing religious framework can and cannot accommodate. The Pharisees’ question about fasting was really a question about why Jesus and His disciples did not fit the established patterns of Jewish piety. Why don’t they look like us? Why don’t they follow the forms we have developed?
The answer Jesus gives is not that the old forms are worthless. It is that what He is bringing cannot be contained by them. Trying to fit the kingdom He is inaugurating into the existing structures of religious practice — as if it were simply a patch on an existing garment — will damage both. The new will be wasted and the old will not be helped.
The second image makes the same point with higher stakes.
New wine is still fermenting. It produces gas as it continues to develop and that gas needs room to expand. Old wineskins — dried out, stiff, no longer flexible — cannot accommodate the expansion. The pressure builds, the skin splits, and everything is lost. The wine poured out on the ground. The skin ruined. A double loss that could have been avoided by understanding the nature of what was being contained.
New wine requires new wineskins. Not because old wineskins are inferior in some absolute sense — they served their purpose — but because what is alive and still developing requires a container that can move with it. Flexibility. The capacity to expand as the contents expand. The ability to be shaped by what is inside rather than constraining what is inside to a predetermined shape.
What Jesus is bringing is new wine. The kingdom of God breaking into history. The fulfillment of everything the Law and the Prophets were pointing toward — but arriving in a form that does not fit neatly into the categories that had been developed around the waiting. The Pharisees had built elaborate structures of religious practice — fasting schedules, purity codes, tithing regulations, table fellowship rules — to contain and express faithfulness to God. These structures had served a purpose. But they had also, over time, become rigid. And rigid containers cannot hold what is still alive and expanding.
The new wine needs room to become what it is becoming. The old wineskin, however honourable its history, cannot give it that room without splitting.
It is worth being precise about what Jesus is describing as new, because the parable can be misread as a general endorsement of novelty over tradition — as if Jesus is simply saying that new things are better than old ones and religious structures should always be updated.
That is not what He is saying.
The new wine is not new for its own sake. It is new because something genuinely unprecedented is happening. The Son of God is present. The kingdom that Israel had been waiting for across centuries of prophecy and exile and longing is arriving — not in the form anyone expected, but arriving nonetheless. The healings, the table fellowship with sinners, the calling of tax collectors, the authority over demons and disease and death — these are not new religious ideas. They are the irruption of the age to come into the present age. They are what happens when the one who holds all things together steps into the middle of time.
This cannot be accommodated by adjustment to existing religious categories. It is not a matter of adding new practices to the Pharisaic framework or modifying the fasting schedules to make room for it. What Jesus is bringing is categorically different — not in the sense of replacing the God of Israel or the covenant promises but in the sense of fulfilling them in a way that redraws every line that was drawn around them.
The wineskin that can hold this is not a different religious system. It is a person — a human life genuinely open to what God is doing. Flexible enough to be shaped by it. Alive enough to expand with it. Willing enough to be made new in order to contain the new.
The final line of the passage is the most quietly devastating of the three.
And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say — the old is better.
Jesus does not say the old wine is bad. He says that people who have been drinking it for a long time tend to prefer it. The palate adjusts. The familiar becomes the standard by which everything else is judged. The old wine is comfortable. Known. It tastes like it is supposed to taste because it has always tasted this way.
The new wine tastes different. It is still becoming what it will be. It requires adjustment. It does not immediately satisfy in the same way the old wine does because the old wine has trained the expectation.
This is a description of the Pharisees. Not a condemnation of people who are evil — a description of people who have been faithful within a system for so long that the system has become the thing itself. The forms of piety have become indistinguishable from the reality the forms were always supposed to point toward. When the reality arrives in a form the forms cannot contain — when the Son of God shows up eating with sinners instead of fasting with the righteous — the trained palate says something is wrong with Him rather than something has been limited in us.
The old wine is better. We have always done it this way. This is what faithfulness looks like.
And in saying that, they miss the one the whole old system was pointing toward.
This parable is sometimes read as a straightforward endorsement of change over tradition — as if Jesus is simply telling the religious establishment to get with the times. But the text is more careful than that.
The old wine is not worthless. The old garment is not thrown away — it is simply not patched with new cloth. The old wineskins served their purpose and are not condemned for having done so. The Law and the Prophets were the container that held the wine of God’s promise through the long centuries of waiting. The problem is not that they existed. The problem is the assumption that they are the final and permanent form of what God is doing — that the container is the same thing as the contents, that faithfulness to God means faithfulness to the existing structures forever without remainder.
The danger Jesus is naming is not tradition itself. It is the calcification of tradition into a barrier against the living God. The point at which the wineskin stops being a container for the wine and starts being the reason the wine cannot enter.
The new wine also carries its own warning. Not everything that claims to be new is the genuine article. The parable is not a blank cheque for theological novelty or the casual dismissal of everything that came before. The new wine Jesus is describing is new because it is the fulfillment of the old — rooted in the same God, the same covenant, the same promises — arriving in the form those promises always intended. Genuine newness in the kingdom is always connected to the deepest roots of what God has always been doing.
The question this passage leaves with anyone who reads it honestly is a personal one.
Where have the wineskins become rigid? Where have the forms of faith — however genuinely useful they once were — calcified into containers that cannot expand with what God is actually doing? Where has the old wine become so comfortable that the new wine is being evaluated against it and found wanting, not because it is inferior but because it is unfamiliar?
And equally — what does it look like to be a new wineskin? Not the person who discards everything that came before in the name of relevance, but the person who is genuinely flexible. Open to being shaped by what God is doing rather than requiring what God is doing to fit the existing shape. Willing to taste the new wine long enough to discover that it is not worse — just different, and still becoming what it will be.
Jesus is still the new wine. The question is whether the container we bring to Him is rigid enough to split under the pressure of what He is — or flexible enough to be shaped by it.
New wine. New wineskins. The old pointed here all along.
All glory to God — forever and ever. Amen.
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