(Originally posted on Facebook.)
No one sews a new, unwashed piece of cloth to patch up a hole on a garment. When it is washed, the new fabric would shrink and tear the old even worse than before.
Neither does anyone pour new wine into old wineskins. As the wine fermented, the dry, brittle leather would crack and burst, spoiling the whole batch of lovely drink. No, a winemaker pours the new wine in new skins, preserving both together.
Luke 5:36-37 (my paraphrase)
I’ve been surrounded by fabrics for most of my life—I sew, knit, weave, dye, and will try anything that can be done with cloth and thread at least once. This entire business in Jesus’ parable of shrinking cloth is completely familiar territory. Sewing up an unwashed piece of cotton or linen (especially handwoven as it would have been in Jesus’ time) is just asking for trouble. Seams wind up distorted, a garment doesn’t fit the way I hoped, or dye bleeds unexpectedly. Unfortunately, this is the stuff one learns the hard way, and after working with yarn, cloth and thread for over twenty years I have some intuition about what not to do!
The same goes with winemakers.
But even though the plain sense here just makes, um, sense, I admit I’ve often missed its deeper meaning.
How often have you heard a good preach about the need for new wineskins or new wine? We need a drink, a revival! We need fresh forms! This new wine we’re drinking has got to find a place to go!
These kind of meanings have some truth to them in that we do need fresh language to speak about old things, and an openness to revelation that we have lost. And in discovering that revelation, new forms of expressing and gathering around it have always been a part of the business and community of Christian life.
But, but, but. Jesus wasn’t giving a tidy analogy for ecclesiology and revivalism. He was talking about the need for a new kind of human, a new creation. He was talking about himself.
The winemaker pours new wine into new skins, preserving both together.
That strikes me as one of the loveliest descriptions of the hypostatic union. And it has massive implications for what—or who—we are too, not in some distant future but today.
In the hypostatic union, the full life of the Trinity incarnated in a full human being. Jesus was not just a suit, not just a mirage. He was fully God, fully human.
In the hypostatic union, the full life of the Trinity—their knowledge, their desires, their emotions, their joy together—dwelt in a human being.
Paul wrote in Colossians 2:9-10, “The entire fullness of the Godhead (the Trinity) dwells in Christ, and you are filled in Christ.”
The Greek word translated as “fullness” is “pleroma.” It means fullness to the brim, filling up to the maximum possible measure. The best image I have to capture its meaning is that of me getting a glass of water in the morning when my brain cells haven’t experienced coffee—I always fill it past the brim and spill on my pjs. That’s pleroma.
Likewise, we are “filled in Him,” with that same absolute fullness of the Godhead. Same word but the verb version. We’ve been pleromatized!
This is all a long way of saying this:
We don’t need more new wine, we don’t need to “find” it, we don’t need to create it. We already have the new wine in our new wineskins, because we are filled with the fullness of the One who was and is the new wine in the new wineskin of humanity.
Note
Both those ideas—divinity disguised in a “skin suit” and Jesus-as-a-mirage—were early church heresies about Christ and denials of the complete hypostatic union. “New wine in new skin” shouldn’t be taken to mean a mere “skin suit”!
Image credit: Boy with a Glass and a Lute, Franz Halz (Wikipedia)
