Luke 5:39

No man also having drunk old wine. — This addition is peculiar to St. Luke, and calls accordingly for distinct notice. The interpretation of the imagery is not far to seek. The old wine is the principle — in spiritual things, the religion — that animated the man’s former life. In relation to those immediately addressed, it represented the motive-power of the Law in its rigid and Pharisaic form. The new wine, as in the Notes on the previous parables, is the freer, nobler, life-power of the gospel. It was not to be wondered at that men accustomed to the older system should be unwilling to embrace the new, as thinking it stronger and more potent than they could bear. The words are spoken in a tone of something like a tolerant pity for the prejudices of age and custom.

The old is better. — The better MSS. give simply “the old is good,” the adjective partly implying the sense of “mild.” It is not the same as the “good wine” of the miracle at Cana (John 2:10). It is doubtful, indeed, whether the Jews attached the same value that we do to the mellowed flavour given to wine by age. New or sweet wine, drunk within a year or so of fermentation, would seem to have been the favourite delicacy (Nehemiah 10:39; Proverbs 3:10; Hosea 4:11; Haggai 1:11, et al.), though men of weak constitutions might shrink from its effects, as the Pharisees were shrinking from the freedom of which our Lord set the example. Not altogether without significance, as bearing on this passage, is the fact recorded by St. Luke (Acts 2:13), that the first workings of the Pentecostal gift led men to speak of the disciples as “full of new wine.”