Hard drinking and deep inner work

A recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today’s gospel (Luke 5: 33-39) relates to us a typical exchange between Jesus and the Pharisees. It begins by the Pharisees thinking they are asking difficult questions about the shoddy religious operation run by Jesus. He brushes off their “concerns” about the apostles by saying that the latter will indeed fast one day … when the bridegroom is gone. While this mysterious reference left the Pharisees wondering why on earth He was claiming to be the bridegroom of the Song of Songs, Jesus bamboozled them further still by a well developed metaphor about new and old wine and new and old wineskins. And in their puzzlement, no doubt the tension of the moment was diffused. But what are we to make of it?

We might say that the bamboozling metaphor of the second part of this abstract is a direct rebuke to the error of the Pharisees in the first. What is their error, apart from having hearts that were largely closed to their Divine Saviour? Simply that they were all too often tricked by appearances. They could not see beyond them. Religiosity seemed to lie for them in the outward imitation of exterior habits and conforming these to the intricacies of religious observance. They never seemed to go deeper, except in trying to entrap Jesus in His words. Jesus refers to them in the end as hypocrites, which is as much as to say that they were conscious of the superficiality of their religion and were beyond caring about it.

God forbid that any one of us should be guilty of such hypocrisy, and yet we too have to resist the temptation of an exterior rehearsal of religiosity which is only skin deep. As Dickens’s Dr Jobbling in the novel Martin Chuzzlewit observes, man is an imitative biped. We learn by imitation; we acquire most of our social skills through unconsciously observing and copying our elders. We fit into new social situations in the same manner, even as adults. We are instinctively chameleons; we have a herd instinct. Yet these autonomic responses to being social animals are both a boon and a curse, especially when it comes to religion. They leave us exposed to fads and fashions, as much as to good example. If we do not think carefully, we can easily internalise the superficiality of others, and multiply it by our own. Something more is asked of us if we are to do what Jesus commands us in the gospel: to deny ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow Him.

And, we might observe, this last message is what lies beneath the metaphor of the wine and the wineskins in the second part of the gospel extract today. The new wine is that of the Holy Spirit, poured out afresh and in abundance in our baptism, in all the sacraments of the Church, and through the many inspirations of our day. The new wine is ours to be drunk on all we like, provided we do not forget the duty to weep in due season! Let’s become hard drinkers! Our fiat in joy is the spousal fiat to the bridegroom of our souls whose presence with the apostles set so different a tone from the pieties of all the Pharisees combined.

But what then are the new wineskins if not ourselves? The grace poured into our hearts is the new wine of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, but while grace heals as well as sanctifying us, it must be received truly, authentically, and interiorly; it must not simply be poured over us as if we were competitors spraying champagne on a winners’ podium. For us in COLW, this means there is deep inner work to do.

This is the work that challenges us on the inside to find the paths down, down, down to the very interior cell of our souls where we meet both our true self and the Divine Guest who dwells in us through grace. We are not who we project to the world; we are not the fine figure or the loathed creature in our imagination’s unreliable eye. We are what we are before God, and as St Catherine of Sienna discovered, that means we are those who are not, just as He is who is. Here is the renewal of our wineskins, their transformation from their old self-congratulatory or self-loathing leatheriness to a new responsive suppleness, attuned more to the aromas and inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

More particularly, it is only as we allow this transformation inside us to happen - only insofar as we walk the walk of self-knowledge, not talk the talk of pious conformism – that our wineskins can receive the sweet liquor of grace without tainting it with our own bitter acidity.

If we seek an answer to why pious people can be sometimes so off putting – why we fail to bear fruit or truly smack of Christ to others - we might find it here in this metaphor: our wineskins are old. We have failed to do the deep inner work, and are tainting the wine, almost until it is vinegar.

Jesus ends with the wry reflection that after drinking old wine, nobody wants the new. He does not approve this reaction. He is simply telling us how easy it is to be comfortable in our religion at a superficial level without ever descending to the core of who we are to meet Him.

Who will deliver me from the body of this death? Only Jesus Christ, the steward of the new wine and the master of the new wineskins.