By Robert Schwartz
“Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” Matthew 9:17
I came down with a bad cold on the December 22nd and sniveled, snuffled and wheezed my way through family gatherings over Christmas. I was sleeping on the couch so as not to disturb my wife at night and even stayed home from church on Christmas Eve. As my body recovers from this cold I feel wrung out, depleted; like an old wine skin in Matthew 9. I am looking forward to enjoying the next week off with my family but in the back of my mind there are deadlines looming at work and I am wondering how much I will really be able to relax.
Today is December 26, Boxing Day; a traditional holiday in much of the world, the origins of which are not clear. I always thought it was the day you were supposed to box up all of the Christmas decorations, sort of a Christmas buzz-kill developed by Ebenezer Scrooge designed to get people back to work. Whatever the true origins of Boxing Day are, it is good to pause on the day after Christmas and ask “What Next?”
What is next for me? Is my life just a series of deadlines, family gatherings, sickness, health, joys and disappointments flowing in seeming random order? If it is, then the preacher in Ecclesiastes was right and life is just “Smoke, nothing but smoke…There’s nothing to anything—it’s all smoke” (Eccl 1:2, The Message). But Jesus gives us something larger, something greater. Jesus tells us that He will pour “new wine into new wineskins;” new life into new creations.
The question to me is the same one that Jesus poses to the two blind men later on in Matthew 9 “Do you believe that I am able to do this.” Do I believe that Jesus can take me out of my modern, materialistic, smoke filled box I call my life and give me a new life filled with a new spirit? This is the power of Christmas lived out. God came down to us, into our messy world, into our messy, boxed-in, lives and brings “good news of a great joy…for today… there has been for you a Savior, who is Christ the Lord…” I want to respond to Jesus question the same way as those two blind men did: “’Yes, Lord.’ Then He touched their eyes saying, ‘Be it done to you according to your faith.’ And their eyes were opened”
O Father – Help us to pause to hear the voice of Jesus calling to us to a deeper faith, a deeper obedience, a deeper living. Help us to respond to his voice and to know His touch that would open our eyes, open the box of our lives, to live out the new creation You have prepared for us.
