Last Sunday, the gospel reading had a line at the end that often makes people wonder what our Lord was talking about. After making sure that the Apostles understood the parables He had just told, He says to them:
Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.
What exactly is that "new" and "old" that Jesus speaks of here? I actually considered doing my homily last week to explain this point, but decided against it when I realized it was a bit complicated. It was not an issue of the people not being able to understand it (I have a pretty smart group of parishioners at St George), but rather that it was a more technical detail of the passage that did not work well in the homiletic context. Thus, I chose to write about it here.
In Jesus' original context, He was speaking to Jews who were experiencing the transition from the Old Covenant (which was passing away) to the New Covenant (which was coming into being). Yet, when the Old went away, it did not cease to exist. Jesus said He came "not to abolish, but to fulfill" the law. Therefore, the "law" was still going to exist, but it would only exist in a fulfilled form. It would be transformed by the Messiah and brought to its fullest form in the New Covenant (as the author of the letter to the Hebrews proves). Like a child growing to maturity: he is the same person, but is grown up.
Thus, for them Jesus was saying that the Apostles, being trained well, were going to be able to bring out the best of the Old Covenant (as God wanted) and enable it to flow into the fullness of the New Covenant ("old and new from the treasures"). A very large percentage of heresy comes from either too much Old Testament and not enough New Testament, or a total rejection of everything in the Old Testament. It should be clear from Jesus description that neither of those methodologies is right. They are both imbalanced, and only what the Apostles gave us in the Church keeps things in their right place.
More tomorrow...