New wine. Old wineskins.
Religion attempts conformity. The Gospel enacts transformation.
10/13/20267 min read
New Wine, New Wineskins: When Jesus Cleaned House
Luke 5:37–38 and Luke 6:1–5
The year is 1997. Titanic dominates theaters. Google.com is registered for the first time. And Apple Computers sits ninety days from bankruptcy.
Bloated product lines. Confused strategy. Weak leadership. After buying NeXT, Steve Jobs returns as an advisor. By September, he is CEO. He immediately cleans house: axes roughly 70 percent of the products, fires executives, overhauls the board, lays off staff, and narrows everything to a few essentials done with excellence. The move is painful and controversial. Employees and fans protest the cancellations. Yet it restores focus, frees resources for quality work, and puts Apple’s best people on fewer things. The company swings from a roughly $1 billion loss to profitability the next year. That streamlined foundation makes possible the iMac, then the iPod, iTunes, and ultimately the iPhone. Jobs brings a new way of thinking and transforms a failing business into one of the most valuable companies in the world.
New wine requires new wineskins. The old structures—with their lazy leadership and splintered focus—could never handle what was coming. A sweeping change was necessary.
Jesus makes the same point at the end of Luke 5. “And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; or else the new wine will burst the wineskins and be spilled, and the wineskins will be ruined. But new wine must be put into new wineskins” (Luke 5:37–38). The end of chapter 5 is often skipped or treated as secondary, yet it functions as the ultimatum. The entrenched religious leaders are slated for removal. A changing of the guard is coming. Everything that follows proves the need for Jesus to clean house and start from scratch.
If you have not already, turn to Luke 6.
The Immediate Clash
As the chapter opens, the Pharisees and their scribes find fault with Jesus’ disciples over how they eat lunch. This is further proof that, like Apple in 1997, they have lost the plot entirely. The new wine of truth cannot be poured into these old wineskins of leadership. That reality drives Jesus to call His apostles from the most unlikely—and even scandalous—levels of their culture.
Luke 6:1–5 records the confrontation:
> Now it happened on the second Sabbath after the first that He went through the grainfields. And His disciples plucked the heads of grain and ate them, rubbing them in their hands. And some of the Pharisees said to them, “Why are you doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” But Jesus answering them said, “Have you not even read this, what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he went into the house of God, took and ate the showbread, and also gave some to those with him, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat?” And He said to them, “The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.”
What Is the Sabbath?
After six days of forming the world and everything in it, God rested on the seventh and declared it very good. He blessed that first Saturday and later codified it in the Law given to Moses as a day of rest. Exodus 20:8–10 commands, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall do no work.”
You would think this is enough: take a break; do not work. In Mark’s parallel account, Jesus states the purpose clearly: “The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). The seventh day was meant as a blessing—a clear reminder of the Creator’s love and concern for us. (Significant spiritual realities tied to Sabbath rest appear later in Hebrews 4; we will leave those for another time.)
By the time we reach Luke 6, so much bloat and excessive minutiae had been added that what God designed as a blessing had become an unbearable burden.
The Pharisees’ Problem: Religion Gone Wrong
In a word, their problem was religion—not pure religion, but their own corrupt version of it. Religion can mean belief in God and desire to worship Him, an obligation to do or not do certain things, or a system of faith that includes liturgy, orthodoxy, community, and boundaries. James cuts through the complexity: “Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world” (James 1:27). If your religion does not move you to help others and become more like God, you may be in the same boat as the antagonists in this story.
God instituted a day of rest so people would not work 24/7/365. Over the centuries, the religious leaders added layer upon layer until the original intent was almost unrecognizable. A few examples illustrate the point:
- Healing was classified as work. If someone was injured on the Sabbath, you could bandage a wound or do the bare minimum to keep the person from dying—but you could not pour in oil or apply salve, because that would make the person better and therefore constitute work.
- Spitting in the dirt was forbidden; it would make mud, and making mud was work.
- You were allowed to eat grain from anyone’s field sufficient for yourself, but on the Sabbath you were not allowed to prepare it, because preparation was work.
The Talmud makes the restrictions explicit. Rolling wheat to remove husks was sifting. Rubbing the heads of wheat was threshing. Cleaning side-adherences was sifting. Bruising the ears was grinding. Throwing them up in the hand was winnowing (Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah).
The issue in Luke 6 is not the eating itself. It is the final phrase of verse 1: the disciples “plucked the heads of grain and ate them, rubbing them in their hands.” God’s law was given for the blessing of man. By tradition, man added to God’s law and made it a burden. Then man reprimanded the Son of God for violating their traditions.
How Jesus Answers
Jesus replies, “Have you not even read this, what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him: how he went into the house of God, took and ate the showbread, and also gave some to those with him, which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat?” (Luke 6:3–4).
The incident comes from 1 Samuel 21. David and his men are fleeing the mad king Saul. They arrive at the house of God with no food and no weapons. David asks Ahimelech the priest for bread. The priest answers that there is no common bread, only holy bread—the showbread, or bread of the Presence: twelve loaves set before the Lord each Sabbath, replaced the following Sabbath, and then eaten by the priests. Leviticus 24 restricted it to the priests alone.
Jesus does not deny that David and his men technically broke the Law; He uses the fact as His main counterpoint. Every Jew knew God highly favored David and later made him king. So is God playing favorites? Is it sometimes acceptable to break the Law? Is Jesus simply a rebel fighting the system?
Matthew’s longer account adds further light. Jesus notes that the temple priests themselves “break” the Sabbath every Saturday by performing the sacrifices the Law required twice a day, every day. Then He declares, “In this place there is One greater than the temple,” and quotes Hosea 6:6: “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless” (Matthew 12:7).
The context flowing through these verses is dense, but the core truth is simple: God’s law was given for the benefit of man, not the other way around. God needs nothing—not us, not this world, not the angels. He is high, holy, and reigning over every reality. The religious leaders had created additional requirements because the extra rules made them feel more holy and appeared to do God a favor. In essence they said, “God, You said this, but we go further. Look how much better we are!” They tithed mint and cumin, fasted twice a week, prayed publicly, and kept a thousand minute regulations. Meanwhile, as Amos 5 and Isaiah 1 declare, God hated their works because the outward show of holiness masked an inward indifference to their fellow human beings.
The disciples were hungry. Religion said, “They cannot rub grain in their hands.” Jesus said, “Give them mercy.”
Three Truths About God
This incident and Jesus’ response teach us three things:
1. God loves us. From the very sealing of creation He provided rest from labor.
2. God’s Law was made for man, not man for the Law. It was intended as a benefit. Because of human sinfulness, people rejected it and recreated it in their own image.
3. Mercy is a higher priority than sacrifice. Religion demands rigid adherence, excludes outcasts, and rewards outward conformity. Mercy seeks to heal, feed, bind up, help, teach, and love. And love is the supreme law.
David and his men were in desperate need. Religion would have told them to starve. The priest asked God what to do, and God said feed them. These disciples had left everything to follow Jesus and were hungry. Religion said let them starve. The law of love—God’s concern for humankind—said give them mercy.
If that were not enough, Jesus drops the final statement: “The Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath” (Luke 6:5). He is in charge. He had already told them they would not be able to handle what was coming. New wine is flowing out of Him, and the old wineskins are already bursting. The rest of the chapter will simply continue the demonstration. Jesus is doing exactly what John the Baptist predicted in Luke 3: He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor. Leadership has lost the plot. The nation wanders like sheep without a shepherd. There is no way to reform the system; it is time for transformation.
The Call Today
New wine still requires new wineskins. Whenever religious systems, traditions, or personal practices become more important than the people they were meant to serve—or more important than the Lord of the Sabbath Himself—they must be cleaned out. The goal is never mere demolition; it is the creation of space for the life, mercy, and love that only Jesus can pour in.
The same Lord who walked through the grainfields still walks with us. He remains Lord of the Sabbath and Lord of every day. He still prioritizes mercy over sacrifice. And He still calls unlikely people—hungry, ordinary, sometimes scandalous people—to follow Him and carry the new wine into a world that desperately needs it.
The question is whether we will cling to the old skins or allow Him to pour the new wine into vessels ready to hold it.