OUR FATHER WHOSE ONLY BEGOTTEN SON WAS GIVEN AS A SACRIFICE TO REDEEM US INTO A NEW AND BETTER COVENANT

Matthew chapter 9 verses 14 - 17 captures a meeting between John the Baptist's followers and the Lord Jesus.

John the Baptist, having been prophetically tasked with identifying the promised Messiah to the world, had, during baptism in the River Jordan, pointed Jesus out as the One who was to come according to prophecy.

Subsequent to that time, John and his followers had been keeping abreast of the activities of Jesus and His followers and were trying to make sense of the difference between what they had expected would occur and what they were hearing was actually occurring.

14 Then the disciples of John came to Him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but Your disciples do not fast?”

15 And Jesus said to them, “Can the friends of the bridegroom mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom will be taken away from them, and then they will fast. 16 No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. 17 Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”

John the Baptist and his followers lived austere lives of deprivation as did the religious leaders of Israel at that time. They had noticed that Jesus' disciples were not fasting and they asked Jesus why this was the case.

Jesus, making clear that fasting is an act of mourning, explained to those questioning Him that while His followers were with Him, they were in celebration mode because they were like a groom's friends while the groom was with them.

Jesus assured John's followers that just as a groom's friends would mourn when the groom was taken away from them, Jesus' disciples would fast when He was taken away from them in the approaching days.

The Lord then told them a parable of the unshrunk cloth and a parable of the new and old wineskins.

If an old garment had a tear, it would be counter-productive to patch the tear with new fabric because the old cloth had already shrunk during the many cycles of washing and drying it had been through. 

Conversely, the patch of new cloth, having not done its shrinking yet, would undergo the shrinking process while attached the old garment and the differential would cause the new patch to tear out the stitching and the original tear would be made worse.

The patch of new cloth could be read to be the new culture and new covenant that Jesus was ushering in. 

The old garment would then be the established culture and the old covenant that John and his followers as well as the religious leaders were adhering to at that time.

Jesus explained that the new covenant could not be meshed into the  fabric of the old because the disperate age and exposure would cause them to differentially react and they would rip apart from each other and make the old covenant's insufficiencies even worse.

Similarly, if new wine is placed into old wineskins, the old wineskins burst because, being pre-used, have already stretched to their maximum extent and have lost their elasticity due to aging.

The new wine, when sealed in these old wineskins, begins the fermenting process and the great pressure generated by the gas production then exeeds the old wineskins' ability to contain it and they explode and dump the wine and ruin the old  skins which would otherwise have been useful for storing non-fermenting liquids like water.

The new covenant, if poured into the infrastructure of the old covenant, would expand beyond the capabilities of the old structure and it would have been damaged by the pressures and demands of the new. The old covenant, damaged in this way, would lose its utility of preserving traditions and historic references and fulfilling its ultimate destiny.

In this way, Jesus revealed to John and his followers why the disciples of the new covenant could not stay in lockstep  with the  prevailing culture of the old covenant and the new culture would seem peculiar and out of step to those ensconced in the old culture.

Amen.

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