Luke 5:38

καὶ�. ACD; omitted in אBL, Copt.

38. οἶνον νέον εἰς�. ‘New wine into fresh wineskins.’ The new spirit requires fresh forms for its expression and preservation; the vigour of youth cannot be bound in the swaddling-bands of infancy. It is impossible to be both ‘under the Law’ and ‘under grace.’ The Hebraising Christians against whom St Paul had to wage his lifelong battle—those Judaisers who tried to ruin his work in Galatia, Corinth, and Rome—had failed to grasp the meaning of precisely these truths. It is astonishing—if anything in Biblical exegesis could be astonishing—that Wetstein should suppose the new wine to be a metaphor for ‘Pharisaic austerity,’ or that any commentators should suppose that by ‘new wine’ Christ meant austerity at all (comp. Matthew 26:29). The meaning is perfectly clear, the fruit of the Christian Vine is not to be stored in the old, seamy, and corrupted wineskins of an abrogated legalism, any more than the old garment of the Levitic system is to be patched by pieces cut out of the Gospel. The incongruity of the old and the new is illustrated by both suppositions. Godet well points out how our Lord infuses into these few words the essence of the Pauline Gospel which is so elaborately developed in the Epistles to the Romans and Galatians.