Relevance

Relevance

Luke 5:33-39

Rabbi Rev. Dr. Michael H. Koplitz

Luke 5:33 And they said to Him, “The disciples of John often fast and offer prayers, the disciples of the Pharisees also do 1the same, but Yours eat and drink.” 34 And Jesus said to them, “You cannot make the attendants of the bridegroom fast while the bridegroom is with them, can you? 35 “But the days will come; and when the bridegroom is taken away from them, then they will fast in those days.” 36 And He was also telling them a parable: “No one tears a piece of cloth from a new garment and puts it on an old garment; otherwise he will both tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. 37 “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled out, and the skins will be ruined. 38 “But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. 39 “And no one, after drinking old wine wishes for new; for he says, ‘The old is good enough.’”

This short narrative about questioning Jesus about eating and drinking has many Aramaic and Semitic idioms. I would like to explain some of these idioms.

The phrase, “He has eaten and drunk” means “he was fed and well taken care of.” Today, we would use the expression that a person “had three square meals a day.” People did not consume wine at meals; instead, they would drink cold water, even though it was scarce and precious.

People used wine at marriage feasts and on other occasions. Wine was seldom had during a meal. The phrase “eating and drinking” simply means a complete meal.

Some of the religious people in Jesus’s day would stay away from anything that they considered a luxury. Some of these religious people would fast from food and water. John the Baptist was of the group that believed that one should fast often. Jesus accepted invitations and lived comfortably. This means that he would eat whatever was put before him when he visited the different houses.

Jesus showed us that religious character was not by the food you ate or did not eat, but through your gracious ways of life. In Jesus’s case, he brought spirituality to people who desperately needed it but didn’t have it.

In the near East, any wine that was over six months old was called old wine. As soon as wine was produced, it was immediately consumed. People did not age their wine. They crushed the grapes in October and had the wine ready within two weeks. Rich families would have enough wine to last them for an entire year. Wine turns to vinegar when it’s kept in goatskins or earthenware. The people in Jesus’s time did not know how to make glass bottles. So, they developed special skins for the wine.

The Jewish people would devote themselves to the theology and ancient customs they had followed for years. They were very reluctant to change for new teachings. They preferred the old ways because it was better for them, and they had been drinking from their traditions and their teaching for some centuries. Thus, old wine was a metaphor for old teachings. Yes, they referred to Jesus’ teachings as new wine because they were radically different from what the Jewish people had been living under for years. Jesus said when a person can drink old wine or new wine, they want the old wine because it was still delicious to them. This tells us that the people preferred their old traditions than to the new ones that Jesus was bringing in.

Now that we’ve gone through the idioms, you can see how important this passage. The emphasis was that Jesus brought a new way of thinking. And the religious leadership did not like this new way of thinking because it really pushed them out of power. It is unfortunate for those leaders in Jesus' day it was more important to be in power than it was to be concerned about the people’s spiritual welfare. Unfortunately, this happens today in many aspects of our society.

But I don’t want to talk about that as much as I want to talk about the need for change. It is very clear to any of us who were looking at statistics that church attendance is down significantly from where it was 80 years ago. Despite the growth in our population in the United States, the percentage of church attendance has significantly decreased. We have to ask ourselves the question of what’s going on.

Unfortunately, one conclusion from the studies that I read have studied and I know some of you are going to not be happy with this, but it is that church, the organization, has become somewhat irrelevant in our society. We can go all the way back to the 1950s and prior to see that Sunday morning for Christians was the day to go to church. Clearly, in 2024 that is not the case. Attendance in church has been dropping off since 1958 in most states in the United States. So, we're looking at 66 years of declining membership and there were no significant actions taken to address it.