26th February, 2006

A NEW VINTAGE

You might say it was a kind of ‘foody’ week! Having spent the early part of the week in negotiations with regard to finding someone to replace our week-end cook, who has left France, (no – not rather than cook for us!) we were let down by a change of mind at the last minute, and so it’s back to the drawing-board. Meantime we were in a nearby restaurant. Both our attentions were caught by a young girl, I would guess maybe 3 or 4 years old, at a table close nearby – it was one of those places where you’re almost invited to sit in each others laps.

She had come in some time earlier with her mother, who clearly was not in the best of moods. For the most part there had been very little interaction between them, and while one should never judge a book by its cover, the mother looked like she was very angry with someone, not necessarily the child. But very few people at nearby tables could ignore entirely the occasional scream of reprimand she directed at the child – usually over something relatively trivial, like dropping a spoon.

Unfortunately the child seemed to take it all in her stride, and didn’t seem in the slightest upset by these occasional outbursts – I say ‘unfortunately’, because it seemed to indicate that this was a fairly normal mode of behaviour on the part of the mother. Eventually the child got bored, and took from the pocket of her coat her imitation mobile phone. I watched in awe and admiration as her thumb whizzed over the numbers, and, satisfied that she had dialled correctly, she put it to her ear and addressed ‘Papa’. As one who has to hold the phone in one hand while I laboriously pick out the numbers with the index finger of my other, I couldn’t but admire the dexterity of her thumb-dialling.

It was a different kind of dexterity that the Lord was required to exhibit in our Gospel today. It all began with a question of fasting, (food again!), trying to trap him into conceding that He and His disciples were as lax in this regard as He was in regard to mixing with sinners, or keeping the Sabbath laws. But, as usual, Jesus takes their fairly superficial question and leads them into much deeper matters. He compares Himself with a bridegroom – an image they would have been familiar with as representing God’s relationship with His people – as we see in the first reading.

But He goes further. Out of the blue, as it were, He starts talking about mixing the old with the new; about cloth and wineskins. And they would have had to be rather dim not to have understood what He was implying – the old ways couldn’t just be patched up, there was need for a radical new beginning, a new vintage entirely. A little tweak here, and some fine-tuning there, was no longer going to improve the lines of communication with God. No more eating of reheated leftovers – time to come in and share in the wedding banquet He was offering.

As we begin Lent, we might well ask ourselves if it’s time for throwing out some of those old cloaks and wineskins that we so love to hang on to, and to be truly renewed.