Monday, May 8, 2017

Shirt

Suppose you have a favorite shirt. When you first received it as a gift you really liked it. The color for you was perfect and it had the greatest pattern to it. New shirts have such a great feel to them and you wore it often. Mostly, at first, to nicer events. It wasn't a super dressy shirt but wearing it made you feel good, not so much special but you did know you looked good and felt comfortable wearing it.

As material often does, over time it became less "new" feeling but you still wore the shirt often. Maybe you no longer wore it for semi-dressy events but you could still wear it when going out with friends for a casual meal together.  You just liked wearing it and it was hard not to reach for your favorite shirt hanging in your closet.

Other shirts came and went, cycled through your closet but you still would reach for this favorite one, even if just for wearing around the house. You knew it was looking worn and probably should be retired but you can't bring yourself to setting it aside permanently.

One day while cleaning out the garage you accidentally bump into something sharp and you feel your shirt catching and ripping a little hole in it.  In horror you realize you'd reached for your favorite shirt that morning without even realizing it and now this favorite garment has a hole. Even though it is probably ruined you can't yet part with it and it is hung in your closet one more time.

While shopping one day in Kohl's your eye spots a shirt very similar to your favorite shirt. It isn't exactly like it but the pattern is similar and the colors are very much like the one still hanging limply in your closet. You pick it up and feel it.  The material is high quality, probably better than the original shirt you can't part with. It's a bit on the expensive side but throwing caution to the wind you purchase it and rush home.

Hanging next to the old shirt, this new one really does closely resemble your favorite shirt.  You close the closet door and try to push the crazy thought out of your head. Call it crazy loyalty but you finally decide to do something almost unthinkable.

Taking both shirts out of the closet, you take a pair of scissors and cut out a small square of material out of the new shirt and sew it over the rip in the old shirt. The problem is, no matter how careful you were in sewing the patch onto the old shirt you realize too late; both shirts are now ruined.

Yes it is a crazy story and logic would keep one from actually doing such a thing, so why would Jesus offer such a similar story to his listeners? Of course it was never about the shirt or the material, something else was on His mind that day.

We would never do such a thing, would we?

He went on that day to tell about the futility of putting new wine in old wine skins. The old skins would eventually burst ruining the wine skin and wasting the wine. I love a good glass of wine and we live near hundreds of wonderful vintners so we often take an afternoon and do some wine tasting. Our modern production techniques no longer use wine skins for aging wine so the rest of Jesus' story might get lost if we don't stop to look past the burst wine skins and wasted wine of ancient wine making.

The kingdom He is illustrating in both these short stories is about newness. He didn't come to patch up the old nor would He pour the new life He offers into old wine skins. This is about redemption and transformation. We must become new creatures to contain the new life. His complete work offers not just new life but a transformation of who we are. Paul speaks of this when he tells us we are new creatures in Christ.

If this is true then why would we want to patch the old shirt with just a scrap of the new shirt? We do tend to do this, don't we?