“New Wine”: New Bags, Anticipated Judgment, and Mary Full of Grace

“Thus should man regard us as ministers of Christ and dispensers of the mysteries of God. […]. But the new wine must be put into new wineskins.”

(1 Corinthians 4:1 and Luke 5:38)

Friday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time joins two warnings about the same temptation: to reduce God to what we already know about God. Paul defines the apostle as a “manager of mysteries” and refuses to be judged before time, either by the Corinthians or by himself. Jesus answers the objection about fasting with three images, the present bridegroom, the new patch, and the new wine, and concludes with the most disconcerting phrase in the passage: “the old is good” (v.39). The novelty of grace does not fit into previous forms, and most people prefer the previous forms.

I. The first reading: 1Cor 4,1-5

The definition of ministry that Paul proposes is of a sobriety that time has not worn away. The apostle is the hypéretes, the subordinate who executes orders from another, and is a “manager of God’s mysteries” (v.1). Neither of the two words allows for ownership. The manager manages what does not belong to him, and the only thing required of him is fidelity: “what is required of managers is that they be faithful” (v.2). Not success, not approval, not measurable results.

From there comes the strange freedom of the following statement. Paul declares that he is indifferent to being judged by the Corinthians or by a human court, and adds something that often goes unnoticed, “nor do I judge myself” (v.3). He distrusts both the foreign court and his own. And he explains why with a precision that has permeated all grace theology: “my conscience has no accusations against me, but that does not make me righteous” (v.4). A clear conscience is not proof of innocence, because the final criterion lies within us. The Judge is the Lord, and his judgment awaits the hour when the hidden will be illuminated.

II. The gospel: Lk 5,33-39

The objection of the Pharisees is reasonable and therefore dangerous. The disciples of John fast, the disciples of Jesus do not, and Jesus’s disciples eat and drink. The response shifts the question from the level of discipline to the level of Christology: “do you want to make the disciples of John fast while the bridegroom is with them?” (v.34). The criterion for fasting is not a fixed rule, it is the presence or absence of the bridegroom. And Jesus adds, with a serenity that already contains the Passion, “days will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them” (v.35).

The two following parables convey the same message through domestic images. The new patch of cloth ruins both pieces. The wine still fermenting tears the old skin that has already lost its elasticity. In both cases, the problem is not the new or the old in itself, it is the attempt to fit one into the other without anything changing. The final phrase is the psychological portrait of those who resist: “whoever drinks the old wine does not want the new, for he says, ‘the old is good’” (v.39). It is not a matter of bad will.

It is a formed palate, and the formed palate is the most difficult resistance to overcome because it does not present itself as resistance.

III. The premature judgment and the hardened jar

The two readings converge on a point that particularly concerns those who serve in the Church. Judging before time, which Paul forbids, and preferring the old wine, which Jesus diagnoses, are the same operation viewed from two angles. In both cases, the issue is closed before God has closed it. Whoever already knows what God is going to do does not need to wait for God.

The hardened jar is an image of a heart that has been definitively shaped around a form of piety and no longer allows grace to manifest itself in another way. This can happen with good practices, and that is the subtlety of the parable. The fasting of the Pharisees was not bad. It was authentic, demanding, costly. They simply made it a criterion, and that’s where the danger lies. All spiritual life knows this risk of taking the means for the end, and the only defense is that which Paul indicates: delay judgment and remain faithful in the administration of what is not ours.

IV. Mary, the new jar

If new wine requires new jars, then Mariology here has one of its densest affirmations. What God wanted to give the world could not be deposited in any previous form, and so he prepared a new capacity. Mary is, in the order of grace, the jar that God made for the wine he was going to pour out. She did not receive the Son despite being a creature like the others, she received him in a condition prepared for that.

This is the meaning of the name the angel gives her before any other, *kecharitoméne*, «*full of grace*» (Lk 1:28). The participle does not describe a state of spirit at that moment, it describes a work already accomplished in her. The Council affirms that Mary was enriched from the first instant of her conception with the splendor of a sanctity absolutely unique (LG 56). The flexibility that was lacking in the old jars was given to her in advance.

And there is the note of the bridegroom, which in Luke is said in reference to fasting and which Marian tradition has always read in two directions. Mary is the one who had the bridegroom with her for thirty years of hidden life, and she is also the one to whom the bridegroom was taken, standing by the cross (Jn 19:25). She knew both of the hours that Jesus speaks of and did not confuse one with the other. She adjusted to God’s hour rather than imposing her hour on God, and that is how the Church recognizes in her its own type in the order of faith (LG 63).

The Friday of the 22nd Week leaves a question that is not to be answered quickly. When new wine appears, what do we do with it? Or, put another way, how many times have we said «the old is good» about something that God was just beginning.

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