By Father Patrick van der Vorst
Gospel Reading: Luke 5:33-38
“At that time: The Pharisees and scribes said to him, ‘The disciples of John fast often and offer prayers, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours eat and drink.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘Can you make wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast in those days.’ He also told them a parable: ‘No one tears a piece from a new garment and puts it on an old garment. If he does, he will tear the new, and the piece from the new will not match the old. And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins.'”
Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, better known to the world as Mother Teresa. Born in 1910 in Skopje (present-day North Macedonia), she entered the Loreto Sisters in Ireland as a young woman and soon moved to India, where she taught at a girls’ school in Calcutta. In 1946, during a train journey, she experienced what she later described as a “call within a call”: the deep conviction that Jesus was asking her to leave the security of her convent and dedicate herself to serving the poorest of the poor. With nothing but a simple white sari and a heart full of faith, she began walking the streets of Calcutta, tending to the sick, abandoned, and dying.
In time, others joined her, and the Missionaries of Charity were founded, growing into a worldwide order dedicated to serving the poor, sick and vulnerable. Mother Teresa became a global symbol of compassion, not because of great speeches or grand buildings, but because of her radical closeness to those whom society had cast aside. She tended wounds, lifted dying bodies off the streets, and reminded the forgotten that they were beloved children of God. For her, each suffering person was “Jesus in a distressing disguise” as she referred to. Her life was a living testimony that holiness is not found in doing extraordinary things, but in doing ordinary things with extraordinary love to ordinary people.
The Gospel for today speaks of the “new wine” of Jesus’ teaching that cannot be contained by old wineskins. Mother Teresa’s vocation was just such a new wine. She left behind the old wineskin of convent life and poured herself completely into the new mission God gave her. Her witness reminds us that the Gospel is always fresh, always challenging, always pushing us beyond comfort and convention. Like the new wine, God’s call can burst open our old patterns, leading us into unexpected places where His love is most needed.
Our watercolour by American artist John Alan Warford is beautiful in its simplicity: a tender, intimate scene of Mother Teresa gently tending to the wounds of a sick person.
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