Change and progress is never easy for some. Some people generally prefer to remain as they are, keeping the status quo, doing as they have been doing for donkey years, sticking to what is familiar. Such people view new insights or new teaching with much suspicion, and they would often put up their defence mechanism to protect their old ways. The problem is, such people may have become so set in their old ways, that they have become a hindrance to allowing God’s voice to be heard and for true conversion of heart to take place.
That is why, in today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks about not putting a new cloak to patch an old cloak, and using only new skins to store new wine. Jesus is telling us to move on from old ways to new and better ways of growing in relationship with God. He is telling us not to be too focused in only meticulously observing the law, as the scribes and Pharisees do, but to refocus in the law of loving God and loving neighbour, which was the whole idea and purpose of the law in the first place. The scribes and the Pharisees had taken what was supposed to be quite a simple law, and transformed it into lots of rituals and practices, which cause people to be bogged down in mere external practices. But Jesus, like new wineskin and new wine, was showing them and all of us too, a new and better way of living, by living the way of love.
Sometimes we too could be guilty in following the ways of the scribes and the Pharisees in what we do and how we behave towards others. Some of us are so focused in prayers and practices, which are like the old ways of the scribes and the Pharisees, instead of focusing in the new way of Christ, the way of loving all, just as God loves all. May we be humble and willing to change, so that we would be free to listen to God’s voice again, and grow deeper in relationship with Him.