IT’S NOT AS MUCH of a problem anymore. But I remember the days in which you had to be more careful about how you washed and dried your clothes, lest they shrink to the point of embarrassment. Long sleeves could shrink back to above your wrists; shirts might no longer stay tucked in; pant legs would reveal your unmatched socks. And once a piece of clothing shrank, there was no going back. You might as well give it to someone shorter, or throw it in a drawer and save it for your kids.

That’s the logic behind a fairly well-known and short parable of Jesus, as found in the gospel of Mark:

No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. Otherwise, the new piece will pull away from the old, making the tear worse. (Mark 2:21, NIV)

The old garment, which has already shrunken normally with time and use, has a tear that needs to be mended. What to do? Jesus gives the conventional wisdom: you don’t patch the old garment with new cloth, or the patch may shrink and make the problem worse.

Matthew’s version of the parable is nearly identical. Luke’s, however, is a little different, and even more commonsense:

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. (Luke 5:36)

Again, an old garment needs repair. Who would rip up a new garment to use for a patch? That would ruin the new garment instead, and the patchwork on the old garment would look silly.

Which version of the parable is the correct one? We don’t necessarily have to choose. Jesus may have said more than is recorded in any single gospel; moreover, he may have told the same basic parable in different ways at different times. Either way, both can be taken as authentic sayings of Jesus, and across all three gospels, they’re given in response to the question about fasting. The Pharisees and the followers of John the Baptist do things the old way by fasting regularly; why don’t the disciples of Jesus do the same? Because, Jesus seems to be saying, he is doing something new, and on this matter, the new and the old are incompatible.

He then tells another and slightly longer parable, also drawn from everyday experience, to reinforce the point:

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. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’” (vss. 37-39)

Wineskins were typically made from hides of goats or sheep. When new, they were still soft enough to stretch as the wine fermented and gave off carbon dioxide and other gases. Old wineskins, however, were drier and more brittle. Just as in the parable of using unshrunk cloth to repair an old garment, pairing new wine with old wineskins would ruin both; the wineskin would burst from the internal pressure and the wine would be lost.

Note that Jesus doesn’t say that new garments are better than old garments, or that new wineskins are intrinsically better than old wineskins. He doesn’t criticize anyone for fasting, and indeed, as we’ve seen, says that an appropriate time for fasting will come.

Moreover, he ends the parable with another bit of common knowledge: people tend to like old wine better than the new. How much better? In 2026, a bottle of French wine with a 1945 vintage sold at an auction in New York for… wait for it… $812,500, obliterating the previous record price of $558,000, set in 2018. You don’t pay that kind of money for something off the shelf at your local supermarket.

It’s easy to read Jesus as saying that the Pharisees are just a bunch of tradition-bound fuddy-duddies who need to get with the program. And he’s not the least bit shy of calling them out for hypocrisy when it’s justified. But again, Luke’s gospel gives us a Jesus who sees his mission as fulfilling God’s ancient purposes.

People like myself who live in a technologically advanced and market-driven society are used to hearing that new is better, used to thinking that things need to be replaced, not because there’s anything intrinsically wrong with them, but because they’re last year’s model.

Not so with Jesus, nor the Old Testament prophets. They didn’t condemn religious traditions in and of themselves; they condemned traditions which had become only traditions, hypocritical habits that had no real and living connection with God.

The question for the Pharisees was whether they could continue to observe their traditions in good faith and allow that God might do something new—like come in the person of a flesh-and-blood human being who dared to touch lepers and feast with tax-gatherers.

The question for us is similar, and just as difficult. When are we unwilling to accept the new because it clashes with the old, with the way we’ve always done things? If our traditions became nothing more than traditions, would we know? It might be about the music in our worship services, the translation of Scripture we deem to be most godly, the way we think sermons should be preached, the people we allow into membership, and much, much more.

Again, “new” isn’t synonymous with “better” or “right.” But neither is “old.” God may do something to surprise us, something that knocks us off balance and challenges our assumptions. And when the new creates internal pressure, what kind of wineskin will we be like?