The New and the Old

There is something special about the table. There is something about sitting down with friends and family, spooning food on our plates and sharing our lives together. But we have cheapened the value of meals today. It is hard to find the time in the midst of soccer practices, evening meetings for work, and school plays and chorus concerts to sit down together, turn off the television and share a common life around a common meal.

In Jesus’ day meals were significant. They were a means of fellowship and the formation of spiritual and relational bonds. They were a locus of learning and conversation. Yet, they could also be destructive. The table could be a place of oppression and marginalization, a place where the people were not only included, but excluded. Your choice of table partners mattered, because table fellowship symbolized relational and spiritual unity.

Enter Jesus. Luke’s gospel reveals that Jesus had some fairly unorthodox and libertine eating habits. He would frequent banquets and “eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners” (Lk. 5:29ff.). These life (and dining) choices were a radical statement. Was Jesus really was claiming to have spiritual unity with these people? It was the question the religious leaders asked him then. I wonder if it is the same question we are asking today.

In response to his liberal choice of table companions, the leaders came and challenged him. Jesus’ three parabolic statements (5:36-39) help us interpret this entire scene and give us new eyes to see how the kingdom of God is breaking into the world, even today. The three parables point clearly to a very scary and overwhelming claim: there is a great chasm separating the kingdom of God and the perceptions and preconceptions of Jesus’ religious contemporaries.

In Jesus the kingdom of God is breaking into the world in new ways. It is the new garment, the new wine. It is not just useless to try to combine the old and the new, it is destructive at best. The conventional ways of the religious, the ways upholding oppressive separatist piety and religious structures, only lead to the loss of what is new and the destruction of what is old. Jesus’ gospel was a gospel of inclusion. It was open to all. All people, especially the outcast and the unexpected, were invited to come and sit with him at the table.

Yet, the part of this section that keeps me tossing and turning at night is the final verse. “No one after drinking old wine desires new wine, but says, ‘The old wine is good’” (5:39). This was a scathing critique of the religious leaders, who refused to drink the new wine of the inbreaking kingdom of God in Jesus. Yet, I have to wonder, 2000 years removed, are we resting on our own separatist piety and religious laurels, or are we joining the mission of God? Maybe my sleepless nights expose the answer in my own life. How will you sleep tonight?