The Parable of the New Cloth and New Wineskins

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The disciples of John came to Jesus with a question about fasting. "Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not?"¹ Both John's followers and the Pharisees kept regular fasts as marks of piety, and the absence of that practice among the disciples of Jesus needed an explanation. Jesus answered first with a picture of a wedding. "Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast."² Mourning while the bridegroom is present makes no sense. A different season is coming, and it will have its own fitting practice. From that answer Jesus moved directly to two further images, cloth and wine, that explain why His arrival cannot simply be added to what already existed.

The Cloth That Cannot Patch

"No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse."³ Unshrunken cloth sewn onto a worn garment will contract the first time it is washed, and in contracting it pulls against the old fabric around it. The patch meant to mend the tear enlarges it instead. Mark records the same saying with the same outcome, "the rent is made worse,"⁴ and Luke adds a detail neither of the others gives: "No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old."⁵ In Luke's version the new garment itself is cut up to supply the patch, so the loss falls on both sides at once. The new is ruined making the repair, and the old is torn worse for having received it.

The saying does not describe a failure of skill. A more careful seamstress gains nothing, because the incompatibility is in the materials themselves, not in the sewing. What Jesus brought could not be stitched onto the old order as one more requirement added to the rest. The two were not made to fit together at all.

Garments carry this kind of weight elsewhere in Scripture. Isaiah writes of one clothed by God himself: "I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my soul shall be joyful in my God; for he hath clothed me with the garments of salvation, he hath covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decketh himself with ornaments, and as a bride adorneth herself with her jewels."⁶ John later gives the same image to the bride prepared for the Lamb, "arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints."⁷ A garment given in this way is not received a patch at a time. It is put on whole, in exchange for what was worn before, which is the same thing the parable had already shown at the level of an ordinary coat.

New Wine and New Wineskins

The second image carries the same point further. "Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved."⁸ The bottles in view were skins, not glass, and a skin that had already stretched to its limit holding a first batch of wine had no give left in it. New wine continues to work as it ages, and the pressure of that ongoing fermentation demands a container still able to expand. Mark's account states the outcome for the old skin plainly, "the new wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred,"⁹ and Luke's account closes on the one arrangement that loses nothing: "But new wine must be put into new bottles; and both are preserved."¹⁰

Two things are lost when new wine is forced into an old skin: the wine, spilled and wasted, and the skin, split beyond repair. Nothing is saved by caution here. The only arrangement in which both survive is the new wine and the new container together, made for one another from the start rather than adjusted to fit at the last moment.

The Old Is Better

Luke alone records a further remark, spoken as an observation on how people generally judge such things. "No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better."¹¹ The sentence records what is commonly said rather than a verdict from Jesus on the relative merits of old and new wine. What it exposes is a habit of preference that has nothing to do with which wine is actually superior. A man who has grown used to what he already has will reach for it again, regardless of what has since been offered him. The saying explains, without arguing the point further, why the arrival of something genuinely new meets resistance from people comfortable with what came before it. The Pharisees who questioned the disciples about fasting were exactly such men, measuring a new thing by the taste of the old.

Fasting Postponed, Not Abolished

The question that opened the exchange concerned fasting, and Jesus had already answered it before He spoke of cloth or wine at all: mourning belongs to the days after the bridegroom is taken away, not to the days of His presence. That later day came, and the practice returned with it. When the church at Antioch set apart two men for the work God had called them to, it did so "as they ministered to the Lord, and fasted."¹² Paul and Barnabas likewise, on their return through the churches they had founded, "ordained them elders in every church, and had prayed with fasting."¹³ The absence of fasting during Christ's earthly ministry was not its abolition. It answered to one season, and gave way to a different practice once that season had passed.

This answers the question the parables were told in response to. The point was never that everything belonging to the old order was worthless and everything new automatically superior. The point was timing and fit: a particular practice suited a particular season, and the arrival of Christ could not be treated as one more item folded into practices built for a different time.

What the New Requires

Paul states the same principle in its fullest form. "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."¹⁴ The change described is not an addition to what stood before but a passing away of it, matching exactly what the cloth and the wine had already shown: the old does not receive an increment from the new, it gives way to it. Isaiah had already promised a work of this kind long before Christ came. "Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert."¹⁵ Paul names the manner of the new life in the same terms Jesus used for the wineskin, describing believers as those who "should serve in newness of spirit, and not in the oldness of the letter."¹⁶ And the writer to the Hebrews states directly what has become of the covenant the new one supersedes: "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away."¹⁷

None of this treats the old covenant as worthless in its time. The garment was a garment, and the wine that filled the first skins was genuine wine. What the parable insists on is that a genuine old thing and a genuine new thing are not interchangeable parts, and an attempt to graft the second onto the first destroys some measure of both. Christ did not come to add a further requirement to what the law and the prophets had already established. He came bearing new wine, the teaching of the kingdom. The old wineskins were the old religious system, hardened past stretching, which could not receive new truth and would have burst had it tried. The Pharisees could not receive the religion of the kingdom. The same was true at the Reformation, when the Roman church could not receive the teaching of Luther.