Luke 5:37,38

Vers. 37, 38. The Second Parable.

The figure is taken from the Oriental custom of preserving liquids in leathern bottles, made generally of goat-skins. “No one,” says M. Pierotti, “travels in Palestine without having a leathern bottle filled with water amongst his luggage. These bottles preserve the water for drinking, without imparting any ill taste to it; also wine, oil, honey, and milk.” In this parable there is evidently an advance on the preceding, as we always find in the case of double parables. This difference of meaning, misapprehended by Neander and the greater part of interpreters, comes out more particularly from two features: 1. The opposition between the unity of the garment in the first, and the plurality of the bottles in the second; 2. The fact that, since the new wine answers to the new garment, the new bottles must represent a different and entirely new idea. In fact, Jesus here is no longer opposing the evangelical principle to the legal principle, but the representatives of the one to those of the other. Two complaints were raised against Jesus: 1 st. His negligence of the legal forms; to this accusation He has just replied. 2 d. His contempt for the representatives of legalism, and His sympathy with those who had thrown off the theocratic discipline. It is to this second charge that He now replies. Nothing can be more simple than our parable from this point of view. The new wine represents that living and healthy spirituality which flows so abundantly through the teaching of Jesus; and the bottles, the men who are to become the depositaries of this principle, and to preserve it for mankind. And whom in Israel will Jesus choose to fulfil this part? The old practitioners of legal observance? Pharisees puffed up with the idea of their own merit? Rabbis jaded with textual discussions? Such persons have nothing to learn, nothing to receive from Him! If associated with His work, they could not fail to falsify it, by mixing up with His instructions the old prejudices with which they are imbued; or even if they should yield their hearts for a moment to the lofty thought of Jesus, it would put all their religious notions and routine devotion to the rout, just as new and sparkling wine bursts a worn-out leathern bottle. Where, then, shall He choose His future instruments? Among those who have neither merit nor wisdom of their own. He needs fresh natures, souls whose only merit is their receptivity, new men in the sense of the homo novus among the Romans, fair tablets on which His hand may write the characters of divine truth, without coming across the old traces of a false human wisdom. “God, I thank Thee, because Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to these babes” (Luke 10:21). These babes will save the truth, and it will save them; this is expressed by these last words: “ and both, the wine and the bottles, are preserved.” These words are omitted in Luke by some Alex. They are suspected of having been added from Matthew, where they are not wanting in any document; Meyer's conjecture, that they have been suppressed, in accordance with Mark, is less probable.

It has been thought that the old bottles represent the unregenerate nature of man, and the new bottles, hearts renewed by the Gospel. But Jesus would not have represented the destruction of the old corrupt nature by the gospel as a result to be dreaded; and He would scarcely have compared new hearts, the works of His Holy Spirit, to bottles, the existence of which precedes that of the wine which they contain. Lange and Gess see in the old bottles a figure of the legal forms, in the new bottles the image of the evangelical forms. But Christian institutions are an emanation of the Christian spirit, while the bottles exist independently of the wine with which they are filled. And Jesus would not have attached equal importance to the preservation of the wine and of the bottles, as He does in the words: “And both are preserved.” It is a question, then, here of the preservation of the gospel, and of the salvation of the individuals who are the depositaries of it. Jesus returns here to the fact which was the occasion of the whole scene, and which had called forth the dissatisfaction of His adversaries, the call of Levi the publican. It is this bold act which He justifies in the second parable, after having vindicated, in the first, the principle on which it was based. A new system demands new persons. This same truth will be applied on a larger scale, when, through the labours of St. Paul, the gospel shall pass from the Jews to the Gentiles, who are the new men in the kingdom of God.