To embrace and be graced with what is New

September 5, 2025 – Friday of the 22^nd Week in Ordinary Time

Click here for the readings (https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/090525.cfm)

As we mature and grow older, we develop certain routine in life. We develop habits and patterns. This is manifested in the first things that we do in the morning, then, followed by our daily activities. We take comfort with what has become familiar to us. We make things like this as our way of organizing our daily activities and our minds.

Some would even get irritated when what has become familiar and routinary is being disturbed by something new. People who are highly organized would as much as possible, avoid changes in their routine.

Yet, more than our daily routinary activity in life, there are also other ways which we have become routinary to the point that we could become stagnant. We discover this when we realize that we do not want to be challenged anymore in our life. We also refuse to learn new things and new ways. We reject other ways of thinking and other perspective of looking at life. Indeed, when our mind and heart have become stubborn not wanting to move forward, to change and embrace the grace of what is new.

This is the very situation in our Gospel today. Jesus tells the Scribes and the Pharisees, “No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one. Otherwise, he will tear the new and the piece from it will not match the old cloak. Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins, and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined. Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.”

Jesus challenged them to welcome what is new and unfamiliar. He wanted them to be surprised by the challenges and the graces it brings. This is what he meant to the Scribes and Pharisees who complained about his disciples who only ate and drank with him. They wondered why Jesus disciples did not follow the customs of the Jews in fasting and offering prayers.

However, Jesus was not making an excuse for not doing the tradition. Jesus wanted them to realize that there was greater than the old customary practices. And Jesus in the one greater. He himself is that new and surprising event in the story of human salvation.

Jesus did not reject what was being taught and had been practiced for a long time. The Lord did not discard the familiar way of doing things, because Jesus is actually the “fulfillment of all those things.” This is what Paul also reminded us in this Letter to the Colossians, “For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile all things for him.”

Jesus, rather, invites us now to be more welcoming of the new things that come.  Jesus calls us to realize the fullness in him. His very person and very presence is always something new and something that everyone should capture and cherish at the very moment.

The Pharisees and Scribes refused to acknowledge the presence of God in Jesus. Their hearts and minds were to fixated with their routine. They were captured of the comforts and the familiarity that they cherished. Hopefully, our hearts may not become rigid and rejecting to what is new and is unfamiliar to us. We need to listen more and better to what the Spirit of the Lord is revealing to us in every moment of our life.

Certainly, the Spirit of God brings freshness in us. The invitations of the Lord may also become uncomfortable for us. This is because God inspires change and renewal.

And so we pray, that we may be able to embrace in humility and joy and be also graced with what is new as offered by the Lord in us today. Hinaut pa.