21 January 2019 - all together now

Saint Agnes

Today's Readings

(Audio)

Jesus doesn't offer us a patch for our old lives.

No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak.
If he does, its fullness pulls away,
the new from the old, and the tear gets worse.

He doesn't just offer more wine for the wineskins we already have.

Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins,
and both the wine and the skins are ruined.

What Jesus offers us is newness of life. He makes us a new creation. He himself is the one who makes all things new. But we are often content to fit him in where he fits and to use religion as seems convenient to us. We have many areas of our lives where we don't invite Jesus in. These are often torn and at the point of bursting, but we fail to notice. Jesus wants to be the new framework on which we depend entirely. He wants to do life together with us. He doesn't want us to keep anything back for ourselves. If it matters enough for us to do it at all it matters enough to do it with Jesus.

Jesus is a high priest who can sympathize with us. He too was tempted to act apart from the plans of the Father, to keep parts of his life back from total self-offering. But he refused. And he can help us refuse whenever we rely on him.

Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.

We sometimes don't even seem realize we're being disobedient until it is too late and something has gone off the rails because we didn't involve Jesus at the start. He wants to be the source of our salvation, not just at the hour of our death, but now as well. Let us receive the new wine of joy he longs to give us.

"Yours is princely power in the day of your birth, in holy splendor;
before the daystar, like the dew, I have begotten you."