Friday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time (September 7, 2018): New wine, new ways

As today’s Gospel passage explains, Jesus is like a groom at a wedding feast. We are his bride.

During the celebration, the fun is grand. However, this groom is going to have to die for his bride. When that happens, everything changes. Everything! What was good in the marriage becomes even better, because the love — now sacrificial — has been raised to its highest level. And what had been bad about our pre-married (unconverted) life is transformed, redeemed from the grip of evil, because nothing is stronger than the power of holy love.

Sometimes, though, we try to mix our pre-married ways with our new, redeemed life.

Have you heard Christ’s proposal of marriage? What changed after you said yes? The old cloak that dressed up your self-image is no longer needed, because Jesus enthusiastically appreciates all that is good in you. The old holes in your self-esteem cannot even be patched, for the new cloth of God’s unconditional love pulls away from the fabric of your self-doubt.

What’s different in you because of your love relationship with Jesus and your commitment to remain with him always? How has his commitment to you affected your life?

From the old wineskin, you used to drink up the limited ability of others to make you happy, and it was never totally satisfying. Are you still carrying this around? It cannot hold the new wine of Christ’s unconditional, completely thirst-quenching love; if you think it can, it will burst and spill gooey mess all over you.

When we try to pour our marriage to Christ into an old way of coping with unmet needs, it backfires. What once seemed to protect us now fits like a coat we’ve outgrown, because we’re not the persons we used to be. For example, trying to make others love us the way we want to be loved only stirs up bigger troubles, because whatever they do is never good enough compared to God’s love, since he’s the only one capable of meeting all of our needs.

Our old lives were filled with so many holes, why do we even want to patch them? Sewing Christ onto our worn-out habits and dissatisfying lifestyle tears us apart, and painfully so. Our compromises between the world’s ways and God’s ways lead to disaster. The problem is we do this so often we think this is normal.

To find the peace we’re seeking, we have to fully pour ourselves into the King of Peace and let him completely fill our lives.

Any time our way of handling life makes us feel uncomfortable, unhappy and dissatisfied, there’s something old we need to throw out. We have to look for the new way, Christ’s way. As our Beloved Spouse, he’s busy praying for us while hand-holding us toward healing, love, and every good gift from heaven.

© 2018 by Terry A. Modica