Luke 5:33-39 New Wineskins
Good morning! I’m very glad to be back with you all, we had a great time at Saint Joe’s with Andrew last Sunday but I’m very glad to be back home.
We are going to look at Luke 5:33-39, and that’s on page 861 in the pew Bibles.
One of the things that I both love and hate about Scripture is how the Lord uses it to humble me.
Nobody likes to be humbled, I hate it. But we all need to be humbled from time to time, and the Lord does that, and I love it because I know it’s from Him and He loves me.
Our passage for today is one of those passages, so let’s look at it and you can all share my embarrassment. Fortunately, this isn’t a one point sermon so there’s other things to talk about besides me!
33 And they said to him, “The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.” 34 And Jesus said to them, “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? 35 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.” 36 He also told them a parable: “No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. 38 But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’ ”
Let’s pray.
So here is Jesus with His disciples at a party. This may be the party that Levi threw after being called by Jesus to follow Him as it appears here in Luke’s Gospel, or it may be at another party at another time, it doesn’t really matter. What we know is that Jesus was at a gathering with His disciples and they were eating and drinking instead of fasting and somebody questioned Jesus about it.
So let’s start with the basics, what is fasting? Simply put, fasting is the purposeful denial of food for a time as a religious duty, going without food for spiritual benefit.
When I was a youth pastor we had an event every year called the 30 hour famine where we would fast for 30 hours and used it as a fundraiser for starving kids in Africa. I’m not sure there was a lot of spiritual benefit but we always had a lock-in and we had a good time.
So does the Bible command us to fast?
In the Old Testament there was only one command to fast and that was on the Day of Atonement from Leviticus 23 but in the New Testament there is no command to fast, no requirement for fasting. The early church did practice this discipline as we can see in the book of Acts but it was not a requirement.
Jesus Himself gave guidelines for those that do fast in Matthew 6:16-18.
“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, 18 that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
Is Jesus commanding His followers to fast? Nope. Is Jesus forbidding His followers to fast? Nope.
He is reminding us that fasting is between us and the Lord not as a show of spiritual greatness for those around us to see and admire. He’s saying, if you fast keep it to yourself, it’s between you and the Father.
The disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees didn’t have the freedom that Jesus taught His disciples. They had regular fasting days and specific times every day that they had to pray and they were seen as the more spiritual people in their culture. So when Jesus comes along the expectation was that he and His disciples would be even more spiritual and disciplined than John the Baptist and the Pharisees and all their disciples, but here He was eating and drinking!
34 And Jesus said to them, “Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? 35 The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.”
A couple of things to notice here: Jesus refers to Himself as the Bridegroom and this is a reference to a statement made by John the Baptist himself as recorded in John 3:29-30,
29 The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. 30 He must increase, but I must decrease.”
Jesus is the Bridegroom and the church is His bride, it’s a beautiful picture of love and dedication, of commitment and service.
The second thing to notice in this statement is when Jesus says, “The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.”
The phrase, “taken away from them,” can also be rendered, “torn away from them.” This is the first time in the Gospel of Luke that Jesus intimates His coming bloody death on the cross.
When those days came, there certainly was fasting among the disciples. But while He was with them it wasn’t a time for fasting but for feasting! Fasting is associated with mourning but feasting with celebration. What Jesus and His disciples were doing was the right thing, celebrating that Messiah had come!
As it turns out, the rules that the religious leaders had put in place to govern the people and their religion was off base and empty anyway and it had been for a long time. Isaiah 58:1-10 describes this tension between the empty religious ritual and the true fasting that the Lord delights in.
“Cry aloud; do not hold back; lift up your voice like a trumpet; declare to my people their transgression, to the house of Jacob their sins. 2Yet they seek me daily and delight to know my ways, as if they were a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the judgment of their God; they ask of me righteous judgments; they delight to draw near to God. 3‘Why have we fasted, and you see it not? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you take no knowledge of it?’ Behold, in the day of your fast you seek your own pleasure, and oppress all your workers. 4 Behold, you fast only to quarrel and to fight and to hit with a wicked fist. Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high. 5Is such the fast that I choose, a day for a person to humble himself? Is it to bow down his head like a reed, and to spread sackcloth and ashes under him? Will you call this a fast, and a day acceptable to the Lord? 6“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? 8Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. 9Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, 10if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday.
The fast that the Lord chooses sounds an awful lot like: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Matthew Henry wrote, “[Jesus] insisted most upon that which is the soul of fasting, the mortification of sin, the crucifying of the flesh, and the living a life of self denial, which is as much better than fasting and corporal penances as mercy is better than sacrifice.”
Those who were questioning Jesus about fasting were expecting Him and His disciples to follow in the footsteps of the only spiritual leadership that they knew, to follow the pattern of empty ascetic ritualism, and so Jesus gave them a parable.
“No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. 38 But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’ ”
Here’s that part that is especially humbling for me. As a younger man I was very impatient with the church. I had ideas of what the church should be like and do and I got very tired of waiting around for a few more funerals in order for things to change. When I expressed my frustrations to those who knew me and I trusted I often got the response, “You can’t pour new wine into old wineskins.”
My interpretation of this was that me and my ideas were new wine and the church I was in at the time was an old wineskin and in order for me to do what I wanted to do I was going to have to start fresh with a new wineskin because the old wineskin couldn’t handle it.
Just so you understand the picture Jesus is painting: new wine, as it ferments gives off carbon dioxide as the yeast digests the sugars in the wine. If you put new wine into a closed container without letting the gas out, the container will explode. New wineskins were made out of fresh skins that were stretchy and could expand while old wineskins were dried out and no longer flexible. New wine in an old wineskin would expand and split the skin and pour out the wine ruining both.
So what does that picture have to do with me? Absolutely nothing, that’s the humbling part.
The contrast that Jesus is drawing is not between personal preferences of style within the church, He was contrasting the old empty ritualistic and self imposed rule based attempt at justification by following the Law with the new justification by grace through faith and the freedom that it brings.
The expectation was that Jesus just brought a new flavor of the same old stuff, the old wine that they preferred, but instead He brought something totally new, salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone for God’s glory alone. A faith marked by freedom and feasting, celebration and joy.
I’ll close with Hebrews 8:6-13,
Christ has obtained a ministry that is as much more excellent than the old as the covenant he mediates is better, since it is enacted on better promises. 7 For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no occasion to look for a second.
8 For he finds fault with them when he says: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 9not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. For they did not continue in my covenant, and so I showed no concern for them, declares the Lord. 10For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws into their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 11 And they shall not teach, each one his neighbor and each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. 12For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.”
13 In speaking of a new covenant, he makes the first one obsolete. And what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.
The disciples’ feasting turned to fasting when the Lord Jesus was torn from them and crucified, but their sorrow turned to joy when He rose from the grave, and now He lives within us, His disciples, by His Spirit and He’ll never leave us!
So now when we fast we fast because of sorrow over sin, not to earn God’s favor but to humble ourselves, to seek that which is the soul of fasting: the mortification of sin, the crucifying of the flesh, and the living a life of self denial, which is as much better than fasting and corporal penances as mercy is better than sacrifice.”
Amen.
