In the Gospel we heard this past Monday, Jesus responds to those who objected to his disciples not fasting like those of John the Baptist and the Pharisees, saying: “no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the skins are ruined. Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins” (Mark 2:22).

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., preached on this passage in a sermon he delivered to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in 1954. In his sermon, he related the text to those historical moments when “new and creative” ideas were not accepted and when the “historical atmosphere at that time was not sufficiently new and strong to contain them.” He specifically referenced Henry Wallace’s vision of racial equality as being ahead of its time, in a historical and cultural context that was not ready to receive it.

In the second part of his sermon, he applied the text to human behavior. Especially when someone tries to cultivate a certain virtue or break free of a vice, but neglects all the other factors that contribute, for better or worse, to either the building up the virtue or breaking away from the vice. The wise Reverend Doctor said it this way:

“We often attempt to get rid of bad habits. Here is a man who has a new and fresh desire to stop drinking, to be more honest etc, but in a few days he is doing the same thing. The real problem lies in the fact that this new fresh resolution is not coupled with a change in one general or overall structure of life. He has a new and fresh desire to change one segment of his life, but this new desire is placed in the same old worn out general structure. We concentrate on changing this one bad habit, forgetting that this one bad habit infiltrates the whole personality, and to change this habit means changing the whole habit structure, the whole general make-up. The fresh new desire for changing is poured back into the same old general framework.

To put this new life into the old patterns of thinking [is] like putting fresh flowing wine in a dry and rotten bottle. It is inevitable that the bottle will break and the wine will run out. The old will not hold the new. We must teach people that when they get new wine to get a bottle strong and new enough to contain it. Within this text is the ultimate meaning of Jesus’s answer to Nicodemus. To partake of the new moving that comes as a result of salvation, you've got to be born anew. You must be born all over.”

I imagine that many of us probably kicked off the New Year, and are entering into this new semester, with the best of intentions. Maybe we made New Year’s resolutions, most of which the “experts” say, we will break in the first twelve days. (Here we are, nineteen days in to 2023, how’re we doing?). As an inflexible distance runner for over twenty-seven years, who now with an achy body, I promised myself that I would stretch more. Finding those extra five or ten minutes, however, has been a real challenge. That fresh, new healthy thing that I was going to do for my body is little more than a good intention—I still have yet to totally follow-through on implementing it into my routine. But I, we, mustn’t give up. We must keep resolving to resolve. Whether we are trying to cut down on a bad habit or implement a new one in our lives, we must submit to be born anew—“[we] must be born all over.”