Jesus tells 38 parables in the bible. Most of us are familiar with some of them, but there are a few that don’t make the average person’s top ten list. I want to explore two of those now because it took me a long time to get any sense of understanding for them. These are called the “double parables” because they are two parables that are told back to back to convey the same message. The account can be found in more than one gospel. Here it is in Luke:
Luke 5:27-39
27 After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi sitting at his tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, 28 and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
29 Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. 30 But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
31 Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. 32 I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
Jesus Questioned About Fasting
33 They said to him, “John’s disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking.”
34 Jesus answered, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? 35 But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them; in those days they will fast.”
36 He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new will not match the old. 37 And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. 38 No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. 39 And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
You may have heard these parables before. What do they mean?
A large portion of the community has called these the parables of incompatibility. The old garment is symbolic of Judaism and the Law while the new garment points to Christianity and grace. People who support the Incompatibility argument say Jesus came to create a new religion, and the New Testament essentially overrules anything that is found in the Old Testament. They say the same about the wineskins, that being the “new” wine (new teaching) doesn’t go with the old skins (old ways).
This interpretation has never set well with me. I don’t find the Old Testament completely obsolete. This argument has its detractors within the scholarly community as well. One big reason is the final verse of the text, verse 39. If the “old is better” that presents a problem for the argument against the Old Testament. This was such a big problem in the past that several reprintings of the bible conveniently left out this verse. That should send up a red flag right there. If you are sure a verse is authentic, you shouldn’t simply remove it to support your interpretation of a passage.
Another big problem with the Incompatibility argument is that Jesus was a Jew. He said he would build a church, but didn’t say he would build a new religion. Jesus had a lot of problems (and rightly so) with the Jews in power, but he wanted to transform Judaism, not dismantle it.
So what do these parables really mean?
Let’s first give some more context. Levi was a tax collector whom Jesus recruited as a disciple. Before this Jesus had called others but the entire roster was not yet filled. Levi throws a party for Jesus and the Pharisees come to it. The questions from the Pharisees are not so much targeting Jesus as they are Jesus’ choice of followers. So this is really an attack on the people Jesus has chosen to follow him. When you consider what those Pharisees had to go through to get where they were you can understand why they would do this. Everyone studied the Torah until they were 12 or 13, but after that only the best students continued studying. Fisherman, tax collectors, etc. stopped at that first level. The “best of the best” students went on to study under a rabbi. So if a Jewish teacher chose you to be his disciple it meant that you were the top of your class. But this isn’t what happens with Jesus. He picked people that didn’t even make it to the second level of study to be his disciples. Are the Pharisees jealous?
We can get more insight from a Jewish document called the Pirkei Avot (translated: Chapters of the Fathers). This was a compilation of ethical teachings from rabbis. Here is an excerpt from the Pirkei Avot that sheds more light on the subject.
Elisha ben Avuyah said: “He who studies as a child, unto what can he be compared? He can be compared to ink written upon a fresh [new] sheet of paper. But he who studies as an adult, unto what can he be compared? He can be compared to ink written on a smudged [previously used and erased] sheet of paper. Rabbi Yose ben Yehudah of the city of Babylon said, “He who learns from the young, unto what can he be compared? He can be compared to one who eats unripe grapes, and drinks unfermented wine from his vat. But he who learns from the old, unto what can he be compared? He can be compared to one who eats ripe grapes, and drinks old wine. Rabbi (Meir) said: Do not pay attention to the container but pay attention to that which is in it. There is a new container full of old wine, and here is an old container which does not even contain new wine.
So from this we can see a new symbolism. The new garment refers to the previously uneducated students, and the old garments the educated students. The patch is the teaching from Jesus. Similarly, the new wineskins are the uneducated followers and the old wineskins the Pharisees who question Jesus. The new wine is the teaching from Jesus and the old wine the previous teaching. Jesus is saying that no one is going to take a lesson that is meant for new students and teach it to the old students. The old students, set in their ways, will reject the new teaching. Jesus picked the tax collectors and fishermen because they were a blank slate. They were far more open to his (sometimes radical) way of teaching than the people who had been studying all their lives.
So it all boils down to this: Jesus is telling the Pharisees “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.
Isn’t bible study interesting?
God Bless