Luke 5:36 - Exposition

And he spake also a parable unto them; No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old . Oriental teaching has ever delighted in using these vivid and picturesque metaphors and parables taken from the everyday life of the people; here the reference is, of course, to the question put by the. Pharisees and John's disciples respecting fasting. This and the following little parable, and the curious simile which he added directly after, is part of the Lord's answer to his questioners. They charged him in their query with throwing (by the neglect of fasting) a slur on the time-honoured practices and observances of the most religious men of Israel. His reply acknowledged that, as far as he was concerned, they were right. He had quietly put aside the rigidly appointed fasts and other ceremonial rites by means of which the great Jewish teachers—to use their own expression—had put a hedge about the Law. They were right, too, in the conclusion they had come to, implied but not expressed, in their evidently hostile questioning. His was a totally new form of the old Hebrew' religon—new altogether in the grandeur of its conception and in the breadth of its influence. His was a totally new garment that he was about to offer to the people; now to patch up the beautiful new work with the old one would be surely to mar both. In the older authorities the text is slightly longer and more vivid than the text from which our own more corrupt Authorized Version was translated. It would run thus: "No one rending a patch from a new garment putteth it upon an old garment."