Daily Reading

First Reading

Amos 9:11-15

On that day I will raise up
    the booth of David that is fallen,
and repair its breaches,
    and raise up its ruins,
    and rebuild it as in the days of old;
in order that they may possess the remnant of Edom
    and all the nations who are called by my name,
    says the Lord who does this.

The time is surely coming, says the Lord,
    when the one who plows shall overtake the one who reaps,
    and the treader of grapes the one who sows the seed;
the mountains shall drip sweet wine,
    and all the hills shall flow with it.
I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel,
    and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine,
    and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.
I will plant them upon their land,
    and they shall never again be plucked up
    out of the land that I have given them,
says the Lord your God.

Psalm

Psalm 85:9 and 10, 11-12, 13-14

Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him,
    that his glory may dwell in our land.
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
    righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Faithfulness will spring up from the ground,
    and righteousness will look down from the sky.
The Lord will give what is good,
    and our land will yield its increase.
Righteousness will go before him,
    and will make a path for his steps.

Gospel Reading

Matthew 9:14-17

Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, “Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?” And Jesus said to them, “The wedding guests cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast. No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak, for the patch pulls away from the cloak, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are destroyed; but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”

Reflection

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the parable of new wine and old and new wineskins.

The new wine is the good news, the incarnation, the reconciliation of the divine and the human. But this powerful elixir cannot be contained in the receptacles of the old consciousness. As long as the ego reigns in the soul, the new wine will prove too strange, too foreign, too threatening—and it will be accordingly rejected.

Before the heady wine of the gospel can be assimilated, there must be a scouring out of the spirit, a transformation of awareness and attitude, a metanoia. We should examine the stories of Jesus’s confrontations with the demons from this perspective. The demon within us realizes that he is the old wineskin that will be shredded by the inpouring of the new wine, and he consequently reacts in horror. 

It is a helpful spiritual exercise to isolate those passages from the New Testament, those sayings and actions of Jesus, that make us most uncomfortable, since they will most effectively indicate how our souls have to be transfigured. They, much more than the passages we instinctively love, will show the path that metanoia must follow.