Introduction

This is a blog to occasionally have a grump, as well as share some thoughts on faith and the world. So why New Whine? Well, it has struck me that the name is wrong - the reference I know is to Mt 9 and parallels, where Jesus talks about putting wine into wineskins. But the new wine is tasteless, unpalatable and possibly dangerous.

The wine that was put into the winskins was not nice. It needed some time to ferment in the skin, expand ( which is why they had to be new and unstretched skins ), and get its flavour. What you would want is the old wine, not the new wine. You want the matured wine, the wine with flavour and some age, not the new wine. In Cana, the guest commented that "often people start with the best wine, and then move onto the cheap stuff when everyone is drunk" - the cheap stuff would be the new wine, the unfermented stuff, and they would start with the best wine, and move towards the newer stuff.

And the New Wine event in the Summer seems to me to also produce people who do not have the maturity that they should have. There is still a lot of bubble and fizzle, and not a lot of maturity. We need maturity and the oddities that that produces.