Matthew 9:16-17
Jesus was perfectly conscious that he came to men and women with new ideas and with a new conception of the truth, and he was well aware how difficult it is to get a new idea into people's minds. So he used two pictures which any Jew would understand.
"No one," he said, "takes a piece of new and unshrunken cloth to patch an old garment. If that happens, on the first occasion that the garment becomes wet, the new patch shrinks, and as it shrinks, it tears the cloth apart, and the rent in the garment gapes wider than ever."
The Jews were passionately attached to things as they were. It was the avowed object of the scribes and Pharisees 'to build a fence around the law'. To them, a new idea was not so much a mistake as a sin.
That spirit is by no means dead. Very often in a church, if a new idea or a new method or any change is suggested, the objection is promptly raised: "We never did that before." I once heard two theologians talking together. One was a younger man who was intensely interested in all that the new thinkers have to say; the other was an older man of a rigid and conventional orthodoxy. The older man heard the younger man with a kind of half-contemptuous tolerance, and finally closed the conversation by saying, "The old is better."
Throughout all its history, the Church has clung to the old. What Jesus is saying is that there comes a time when patching is folly, and when the only thing to do is to scrap something entirely and to begin again. There are forms of church government, there are forms of church service, there are forms of words expressing our beliefs, which we so often try to adjust and tinker with in order to bring them up to date; we try to patch them.
No one would willingly, or recklessly, or callously abandon what has stood the test of time of the years and in which former generations have four their comfort and put their trust; and there comes a time when patches are useless, and when individuals and churches have to accept the adventure of the new, or withdraw into the backwater, where they worship not God, but the past.
Jesus was perfectly conscious that he came to men and women with new ideas and with a new conception of the truth, and he was well aware how difficult it is to get a new idea into people's minds. So he used two pictures which any Jew would understand.
"No one," he said, "takes a piece of new and unshrunken cloth to patch an old garment. If that happens, on the first occasion that the garment becomes wet, the new patch shrinks, and as it shrinks, it tears the cloth apart, and the rent in the garment gapes wider than ever."
The Jews were passionately attached to things as they were. It was the avowed object of the scribes and Pharisees 'to build a fence around the law'. To them, a new idea was not so much a mistake as a sin.
That spirit is by no means dead. Very often in a church, if a new idea or a new method or any change is suggested, the objection is promptly raised: "We never did that before." I once heard two theologians talking together. One was a younger man who was intensely interested in all that the new thinkers have to say; the other was an older man of a rigid and conventional orthodoxy. The older man heard the younger man with a kind of half-contemptuous tolerance, and finally closed the conversation by saying, "The old is better."
Throughout all its history, the Church has clung to the old. What Jesus is saying is that there comes a time when patching is folly, and when the only thing to do is to scrap something entirely and to begin again. There are forms of church government, there are forms of church service, there are forms of words expressing our beliefs, which we so often try to adjust and tinker with in order to bring them up to date; we try to patch them.
No one would willingly, or recklessly, or callously abandon what has stood the test of time of the years and in which former generations have four their comfort and put their trust; and there comes a time when patches are useless, and when individuals and churches have to accept the adventure of the new, or withdraw into the backwater, where they worship not God, but the past.
