Even though the Old Testament is the Word of the Heavenly Father addressed to mankind, particularly the dialogue with his chosen people, our Lord Jesus preached with unwavering clarity that attempting to preserve new wine in old wineskins would result in its bursting and the loss of both the wine and the old wineskin. (Matthew 9.17)
To preserve the honor and role of the Old Testament, the New People of God must keep our Father’s Word and His Blood of the New Covenant in new wineskins, reflecting our new nature.
We embark on the path of conversion and the way of life through the sacrament of Baptism. If we infuse this understanding into the Old Testament wineskin, it will lose its genuine and new meaning, which revolves around living a life of penance prompted by divine grace. This penance doesn’t necessarily involve committing sin—that’s the understanding of the old wineskin—but rather living under the threat of committing one or possessing the capacity to resist God, a capacity that the new wineskin embodies.
In the logic of the old wineskin, conversion often leads us to times when we extend our arms to harvest forbidden fruit, eat it, and then feel remorseful. We sit paralyzed by the pool, waiting for someone to push us into the healing waters churned by the Angel of Mercy.
However, the logic of the new wineskin invites us to stand up, take our mattress, and return home to proclaim the coming of the Father’s Kingdom and the Gospel of the remission of our sins. Just as the Apostle Paul, every baptized person carries in their physical body, in their human nature, the sufferings of Christ (Galatians 6.17), and spreads through the power of such communion the abundant mercy of the Heavenly Father. This mercy offers us a sweet and powerful wine, overflowing with eternal life.
Gregory of Narek warns that our salvation is at risk if we rely solely on the logic of the old wineskin. This approach squanders the generosity of the gift and, as the saint said, evaporates the wonderful illumination brought by the abundant flow of grace (Prayer 5.3). In contrast, the new wineskin logic of conversion offers a ray of hope that announces the good news of Christ. It proclaims that where there is abundance of sin, there exists conversion, grace against debt, renewal against demise, remission against lawlessness, healing against wound, peace against risk, forgiveness against punishment, calm against war, rain against fire, largesse against retribution, favor against expectation of killing, and freedom of life against the gallows of death (Prayer 33.2).
This description vividly portrays the two paths: the wide one that leads to despair and the narrow one that leads from the physical life to the transfiguration of supernatural life. It contrasts the Old and the New, the measure of human wisdom and power against the stupidity and weakness of God (1 Corinthians 1.25). This new way of pilgrimage leads us directly to the promised land of the Father’s eternal kingdom of goodness, not to a land abundant with wealth and limited by death, but to the new land that is God’s own soil, from which we are created anew to bloom in the eternal perfection of divine grace.
