CRITICAL NOTES
Luke 5:33.—St. Luke here omits the remarkable fact, noted by St. Matthew and St. Mark, that disciples of John the Baptist joined with disciples of the Pharisees in putting this question. Fast often, etc.—I.e. follow the ascetical example of their master. Make prayers.—Rather, “make supplications” (R.V.).
Luke 5:34. Children of the bride-chamber.—The groomsmen or friends of the bridegroom: they accompanied him to the house of the bride, and escorted the newly married pair to their new home. This was followed by a feast: hence fasting and mourning would be out of place. The figure is a singularly appropriate one, as the Baptist himself had spoken of Jesus as the Bridegroom (John 3:29).
Luke 5:35. Taken away.—A violent death is here hinted at, as in the earlier conversation with Nicodemus (John 3:14). Then shall they fast.—I.e, have reason for fasting and mourning: outward expressions of grief will be appropriate. Neither here nor in any other part of the New Testament is fasting prescribed.
Luke 5:36.—The R.V. is much clearer: “No man rendeth a piece from a new garment and putteth it upon an old garment; else he will rend the new, and also the piece from the new will not agree with the old.” In the parallel passages in St. Matthew and St. Mark the figure is slightly varied: in them stress is laid upon the idea of patching the old garment with a piece of new, unfulled cloth, which in course of time will shrink and do harm to the hitherto uninjured part of the old. Here a new garment is spoiled in order to get a patch for the old, which does not agree with it. The idea of this and of the following verses is that the new life of Christianity is not adapted to the old forms of Judaism: it will have its own fasts and festivals, but these will correspond to its own distinctive character.
Luke 5:37. Bottles.—I.e. wine-skins. The old skins would be rent, if filled with new fermenting wine.
Luke 5:38. New wine … new bottles.—Rather, “New wine … fresh wine-skins” (R.V.). And both are preserved.—Omitted in R.V.
Luke 5:39. Straightway.—Omit: omitted in R.V. The old is better.—Rather, “the old is good” (R.V.). This is a very kindly apology, as it were, for those who had become habituated to the old religious system and could not as yet accept and enjoy the “new wine “of Christianity. The old is not better in itself, but better in their estimation.
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Luke 5:33-39
A Lesson in Religious Liberty.—From the question here put we learn incidentally that in the matter of fasting the school of the Baptist and the sect of the Pharisees were agreed in their general practice. As Jesus told the Pharisees at a later date, John came in their own “way” of legal righteousness. But it was a case of extremes meeting; for no two religious parties could be more remote in some respects than the two just named. But the difference lay rather in the motives than in the external acts of their religious life. Both did the same things—fasted, practised ceremonial ablutions, made many prayers—only they did them with a different mind. John and his disciples performed their religious duties in simplicity, godly sincerity, and moral earnestness; the Pharisees, as a class, did all these works ostentatiously, hypocritically, and as matters of mechanical routine. Jesus made reply to the question, remarkable at once for originality, point, and pathos, setting forth in lively parabolic style the great principles by which the conduct of His disciples could be vindicated, and by which He desired the conduct of all who bore His name to be regulated. Jesus does not blame John’s disciples for fasting, but contents Himself with defending His own disciples for abstaining from fasting. He takes up the position of one who virtually says, “To fast may be right for you, the followers of John: not to fast is equally right for My followers.” In His reply He makes use of three beautiful and suggestive similitudes.
I. The children of the bride-chamber.—His reply is to this effect: “I am the Bridegroom, as John said; it is right that the children of the bride-chamber come to Me; and it is also right that, when they have come, they should adapt their mode of life to their altered circumstances. Therefore they do well not to fast, for fasting is the expression of sadness; and how should they be sad in My company! As well might men be sad at a marriage festival. The days will come when the children of the bride-chamber shall be sad, for the Bridegroom will not always be with them; and at the dark hour of His departure it will be natural and seasonable for them to fast, for then they shall be in a fasting mood—weeping, lamenting, sorrowful, and disconsolate.” The principle is that men should fast when they are sad, or in a state of mind akin to sadness—absorbed, preoccupied—as at some great solemn crisis in the life of an individual or a community, such as that in the history of Peter, when he was exercised on the great question of the admission of the Gentiles to the Church, or such as that in the history of the Christian community at Antioch, when they were about to ordain the first missionaries to the heathen world. Christ’s doctrine is that fasting in any other circumstances is forced, unnatural, unreal—a thing which men may be made to do as a matter of form, but which they do not with their heart and soul. “Can ye make the children of the bride-chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them?” He asked, virtually asserting that it was impossible.
II. The new patch on the old garment, and the new wine in old skins.—The design of these parables is much the same as that of the first part of His reply, viz. to enforce the law of congruity in relation to fasting and similar matters—that is, to show that in all voluntary religious service, where we are free to regulate our own conduct, the outward act should be made to correspond with the inward condition of mind, and that no attempt should be made to force particular acts or habits on men without reference to that correspondence. “In natural things,” He meant to say, “we observe this law of congruity. No man putteth a piece of new cloth on an old garment. Neither do men put new wine into old skins, and that not merely out of regard to propriety, but to avoid bad consequences. The good cloth would be wasted, the patchwork would be unseemly and unsatisfactory, and the old skin bottles will burst under the fermenting force of the new liquor, and the wine will be spilled and lost.” The old cloth and old bottles in these metaphors represent old ascetic fashions in religion; the new cloth and the new wine represent the new joyful life in Christ, not possessed by those who tenaciously adhered to the old fashions. The parables were applied primarily to Christ’s own age, but they admit of application to all transition epochs; indeed, they find new illustration in almost every generation. New wine is always in course of being produced by the eternal vine of truth, demanding in some particulars of belief and practice new bottles for its preservation, and receiving for answer an order to be content with the old ones. Without going the length of denunciation or direct attempt at suppression, those who stand by the old often oppose the new by the milder method of disparagement. They eulogise the venerable past, and contrast it with the present, to the disadvantage of the latter. “The old wine is vastly superior to the new: how mellow, mild, fragrant, wholesome, the one! how harsh and fiery the other!” Those who say so are not the worst of men: they are often the best; the men of taste and feeling, the gentle, the reverent, and the good, who are themselves excellent samples of the old vintage. Their opposition forms by far the most formidable obstacle to the public recognition and toleration of what is new in religious life; for it naturally creates a strong prejudice against any cause when the saintly disapprove of it. Observe, then, how Christ answers the honest admirers of the old wine. He concedes the point; He admits that their preference is natural. It is as if He had said, “I do not wonder that you love the old wine of Jewish piety, fruit of a very ancient vintage. But what then? Do men object to the existence of new wine, or refuse to have it in their possession, because the old is superior in flavour? No; they drink the old, but they carefully preserve the new, knowing that the old will get exhausted, and that the new will mend with age. Even so should you behave towards the new wine of My kingdom. You may not straightway desire it, because it is strange and novel; but surely you might deal more wisely with it than merely to spurn it, or spill and destroy it!” Too seldom for the Church’s good have lovers of old ways understood Christ’s wisdom, and lovers of new ways sympathised with His charity. When will young men and old men, liberals and conservatives, broad Christians and narrow, learn to bear with one another, yea, to recognise each in the other the necessary complement of his own one-sidedness?—Bruce.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Luke 5:33-39
Luke 5:33. “Thy disciples eat and drink.”—The second accusation is still levelled against the disciples: it is that not only do they sometimes feast with publicans, but do not observe either the Jewish fasts or those practised by the disciples of John the Baptist, and do not engage in stated actions of prayer and fasting. The form in which the objection is cast leaves the question open as to whether the disciples of Jesus were inattentive to rules they had received from Him, or acted as they did in accordance with the spirit of His teaching.
Luke 5:34-35. The Present and the Future.—The reply of Jesus is virtually that these devotional actions (though He mentions fasting only) should be spontaneous—the expression of actual feeling—and not the subjects of legislation and commandment. He does not speak of fasting as an unnecessary piece of asceticism, but as a practice inappropriate for His disciples at that stage of their religious life. While He was with them their joy was complete, and fasting would be out of place: a time would come when He would be taken away from them, and they would be in the mood for fasting. [In like manner He did not impose forms of prayer; but when the disciples, moved by His example, requested Him to teach them to pray, He at once acceded to their desire (Luke 11:1-4).] The time of mourning to which Christ refers must not be limited to the short period after His death and before His disciples were assured of His resurrection. It is to be understood of the whole period of His separation from the Church—the time during which, in the absence of the heavenly Bridegroom, the Church is exposed to trials and oppression (cf. Luke 18:7). The contrast between the thoughts of Luke 5:34 and Luke 5:35 is very striking: in the one Jesus speaks of the present time as joyous—the Bridegroom rejoicing in the bride; in the other the shadow of death falls upon the scene, and He depicts the grief of separation.
Jesus the Bridegroom.—It is worthy of being noted that Jesus compares Himself to a bridegroom. He thus takes up the representation of His relationship that was made by John himself, and not unlikely in the hearing of those very disciples who were now questioning Him (John 3:29). He also, as it were, takes home to Himself those frequent Old Testament representations which culminate in the Forty-fifth Psalm and the Song of Solomon, and which reappear so interestingly in the Epistle to the Ephesians (Luke 5:22-33) and the Book of Revelation (Luke 19:7-9; Luke 21:9). The Church is the bride of Jesus. Jesus is the Bridegroom of His believing people. The love between them is ineffable; but the holy wooing and the winning have been all on His side.—Morison.
The Messianic Consciousness of Jesus.—These verses clearly show that from the very beginning of His ministry Jesus
(1) realised the fact that He was the Messiah,
(2) that He identified His coming with that of Jehovah, the husband of Israel and of humanity (Hosea 2:19), and
(3) that even then He foresaw and announced a death by violence which He was to suffer.—Godet.
Luke 5:36-39. Garments and Wineskins.—By these illustrations our Lord conveyed a lesson on—
I. The charm of naturalness, and the law of congruity in religion.—Times of transition are critical. Jesus teaches that He had not come to patch up Pharisaism, or garnish Rabbinism, or pour His doctrines into the rigid forms of later Judaism. From Him was to date a new era.
II. A forced junction of the old and the new would be injurious to both.—The new force is disruptive of the old. Let the law of congruity be observed. The Christian life needed its own forms of development.—Fraser.
Luke 5:36. “A piece of a new garment.”—Jesus now contrasts the spirit of the old dispensation with that of the new; and suggested as the conversation had been by the feast in the house of Matthew, the figures He employs, of robes and wine, are appropriate to the occasion. The figure as St. Luke gives it is that of tearing off a piece of a new garment with which to patch an old one. The injury done is twofold:
(1) the new garment is injured, and
(2) the patch does not agree with the old garment, and gives it an odd look, so that no one would care to wear it. St. Matthew gives it under the form of the rent in the old garment which has been repaired in this way being made worse by the new “unfulled cloth” shrinking and breaking away from the material in which it has been inserted. The point of the figure is that the Jewish system was now becoming “old and ready to vanish away” (Hebrews 8:13), and Christ was about to replace it by something new. The Pharisees had multiplied fasts and ceremonies, which were like patches upon the whole system; and even John the Baptist had nothing better to suggest, but had followed the same method in his work of reformation. Christ did not purpose to repair the old garment, but to give a new one. “The whole Pauline system, what the apostle himself calls his gospel, the contrast between the two covenants, the mutual exclusion of the rule of the law and that of grace, the oldness of the letter and the newness of of the spirit (Romans 7:6), which form the substance of the Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, are here contained under the homely image of a garment patched with a piece of cloth or of another garment that is new” (Godet). There is something very wonderful in the simple way in which these new and great ideas are thrown out by Jesus—in the ease with which they are suggested—without effort, without elaboration, and yet containing an infinite depth of meaning.
Luke 5:37-38. “New wine … old bottles.”—From the difference of principle between the old dispensation and the new Jesus passes to the persons representing the two. For in these consecutive figures of the robes and of the wine and wine-skins we have, as in all the double parables, fresh ideas suggested. The robes refer to differing forms of religious life, the new wine to an inward life, and the wine-skins to the persons to whom that life is imparted. Those whom He chose to receive His teaching and to become organs of it were “new men”: they were not those who had grown old and stiff in religious ceremonialism, whose religious life had taken a definite set, and could not be disturbed without being shattered. But they were marked by great receptivity; and if they had much to learn, they had nothing to unlearn. They are indeed “babes,” but to them that is revealed which has been hidden from “the wise and prudent.” The disastrous result of putting the new wine into old bottles is illustrated in the later history of the Church, when “certain of the sect of the Pharisees who believed” (Acts 15:5) imported into the Christian society their former prejudices and practices, and attempted to compel all to conform to the ceremonial law of Moses. The history of this controversy and of the course followed by the Judaizing party are a commentary on the words, “The new wine will burst the bottles, and be spilled, and the bottles will perish.”
Luke 5:39. “No man … desireth new.”—Jesus here counsels consideration to be shown toward those who are not able instantly to appreciate the worth of the new life and principle. It may be and is better than that to which they have been accustomed, but they will need time to become acquainted with its merits. Often there is something acrid and restless in the enthusiasm of the new convert which is unwelcome to those whose minds are not like his, in a ferment with fresh ideas and emotions. Let him not count those as his enemies, and enemies to the truth, who cannot appreciate his fervour. There are always those who cling to the old ways, just as there are always those who strike out new ways. Both are needed to make up the world—the conservative and the progressive parties. After a little the new wine becomes old—it grows mellow and improved in tone, and will get full credit for the good qualities it possesses. There is a touch of bright humour in the picture of the connoisseur—“for he saith, The old is good.’ ”