September 6, 2019
Jesus said, “no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined. Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins. And no one who has been drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.'” Lk_5:33-39
My little Apple computer is now 11-years old. And I was beginning to find that many of the new programs would just not run on it, while I couldn’t even update the old ones. The problem was, that the program that makes the whole computer work, what they call the Operating System, was out-dated. And in order to up-date it, the computer needed more memory space and a faster engine.
Just like Jesus’ example of new wine in old wineskins, it was beginning to look like I needed a whole new computer. Fortunately, I discovered that with a little “DIY,” that’s “do it yourself,” computer brain surgery, I could increase the power of my little box enough to bandaid my system for another few years of productivity, before that computer would become totally useless.
You see, the deal is, that none of the original programming is ever really obsolete. It just needs more memory, more power and more speed – so that it can draw on the old, in order to add-on the new.
And it’s the same with our faith. We have to remember the first chapter of Genesis: with God the Father’s Creation, the “mighty wind” of the Holy Spirit, and the spoken Word of Jesus, proclaiming the goodness of everything He created . . .
before we can ever come close to grasping the Redemptive suffering of Jesus, the Kingdom of God, the Grace of the Sacraments and the Revelation of Eternal Glory.
And behind it all, God gave us these super-powerful brains to fit both the old, and all of the new that we could ever possibly need. The question is, can we get past our “old thinking,” to allow ourselves to venture into something new?
Jesus found that many of the Pharisees just couldn’t. And instead of changing their thinking, they chose to blow up the new computer instead. Which was the total opposite of what the Colossians did with the teachings of St. Paul. They embraced their new life in Christ and became all the more loved because of it.
You see, it’s always our choice! And Jesus gave us a lifetime of opportunities to make it. The choice of love over hate; the choice of understanding one another over prejudice; the choice of hope over despair; the choice to change, even when we’re comfortable with the old; the choice to believe, even the unbelievable . . . that by our baptisms we have been given a whole new system, a system that unlocks our door to eternity . . . and His name – is Jesus!
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