Is it possible, then, that the “new stuff” in this parable is actually the Pharisees? Their fasting laws, their Sabbath restrictions, etc. are NOT the intention of the Old Testament. They’ve added new things in order to help us obey.

I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to preach through Luke 5:33—6:11. I had preached on the parallel passage in the gospel of Mark, so I had assumed it’d be pretty smooth sailing.

New cloth, old garment. New wine, old wineskins. The new expands (or shrinks) and causes harm to the old object it was placed in and you end up wrecking both. The point here is of incompatibility. If you try to combine the new with the old, both will end up being ruined.

When I preached on this parable in Mark I absolutely loved this point from James Edwards:

“He is not an attachment, addition, or appendage to the status quo.” Jesus is not something that you add to an already comfortable Christianity. He’s not something that you make fit into your box and if it will fit then that’s cool. Jesus radically transforms everything. Jesus blows the box up and replaces it with His fullness. We don’t make Jesus conform to us, to our rules, to our Christianity…He conforms us, our rules, our Christianity. It’s been said that the goal of Bible reading isn’t to master the text but more fully to be mastered by the text. In a much greater way we can say this about Jesus, our goal is not to “figure Jesus out”, to somehow “master Jesus”…our goal is to be transformed and changed by Jesus.

I still think that’s a pretty solid application point you can make (especially from the gospel of Mark). But when I stumbled upon Luke 5:39, I started wondering if maybe Luke was doing something a little different than Mark.

“And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”

Why is Jesus saying that the “old is better”? Plenty of commentaries answered this question by saying that Jesus is being a bit tongue-in-cheek here and saying that the Pharisees would never embrace his new wine while they were obsessed with their old wine. And that very well could be accurate, but I’m not convinced. Old wine really is better. And I think Jesus knows his wine. But even more than that I think Jesus knows his Old Testament.

I think we’ve made a slight misstep here in the way we interpret this passage—or rather how we paint the backdrop to this passage. We tell the story as if the Pharisees are faithful followers of the OT and the OT system and that Jesus is doing something entirely different and blowing up that whole way of thinking. But this is really problematic for Luke because he is all about showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the OT hope and promises. He doesn’t want to blow it up—he wants to fulfill it.

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