Neither do people pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” – Matthew 9:17

Today’s Scripture Reading (August 30, 2014): Matthew 9

Star Trek has been credited with the rethinking of technology. Examples of real life technology that came out of the Star Trek franchise include ‘communicators’ (we call them cell phones), ‘computer music storage devices’ (the ever present I-pod), the ability to read a book on a ‘tablet,’ and even the idea of a voice interface. All of this was imagined by the writers of Star Trek, and our first exposure to them came as we watched the various Captains and crews of the Enterprise (and Deep Space Nine) go about their tasks on our television screens.

But actually the idea of Science Fiction stimulating future invention is almost an expected one. The first dime store novels about trips to the Moon or Mars is almost necessary before the actual journey can be attempted. The reason why Science Fiction has such an innovative potential is simple; Science Fiction gets to reimagine the future without feeling that is tied to the past. It is freed from the old paradigms and released to imagine what the new paradigm might look like. Because of this paradigm shift it is allowed to break the rules – every one of them. Future Science Fiction restructuring will probably include a way to break the speed barrier that exists at the speed of light. As far as we know now, mass approaches the infinite as speed approaches the speed of light. The result is that the light speed barrier cannot be passed (however, at one point we also believed that the sound barrier could not be overcome.) But Science Fiction writers are already hard at work imagining how the light speed barrier might be broken by imagining a different way of travelling – a different jar to contain the ideas. Some of these ideas include mass dampeners, folding space, or even travelling outside of our dimension. These are the new containers designed to contain new ideas about the speed of space travel.

Jesus begins to teach about the things that he has been saying and one thing becomes quickly apparent; the new teachings simply will not fit in the old containers. What Jesus was teaching would ruin the sacrifice driven Laws of Moses. A new container was needed to hold the teaching. The gospel of love that Jesus was speaking of simply could not be held in the old jars. It needed a new one.

If the idea of salvation through sacrifice is the old wineskin, then the idea of salvation through the cross is the new wineskin. Jesus teaching could not be contained in anything other than his death on the cross. Only the cross was capable of holding the gospel of love of that Jesus now taught.   

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Matthew 10