Mat 9:17 Neither do men put new wine into old wineskins: else the wineskines break, and the wine runs out, and the wineskins perish: but they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.

The Greek word translated as "new" in this verse, neos, actually does mean "new," unlike the word translated as "new" in the last verse which meant "unfinished," BUT "new wine" is a parallel to the "patch of unfinished remnant" in the last verse. When wine is new, it is not very good, in many cases, not even drinkable. Wine must age to become good. Again, John the Baptist's teaching is not to just something new but something unfinished.

The term for "old" is palaios, meaning "old," "ancient," or "worn," which is the same term used to describe the mantle in the last verse. The term for "wineskins" is askos, which were the leather containers for wine used in Christ's time. This is again, a metaphor for Judaism and the practice of fasting. In this version, however, the holes are not just made worse by the unfinished material, but the wineskins "burst" (rhegnumi, "break forth") and "perish" (apollumi, "to destroy").

The solution to preserving the new (neos) wine is not just "new" wineskins. The term used to describe the wineskins is not neos. It is kainos, which means "newly made" and "fresh" but goes further meaning "of a new kind," "unheard of," "uncommon," and "novel." The choice of words here clearly is not an accident.

What Christ is saying is that John's teaching was incomplete and that it was never meant for the reformation of Judaism. Judaism was too old and worn and the teaching itself was too unfinished.

To finish John the Baptist's teaching about the coming of the kingdom of heaven, a new and novel container was required. That new and novel container was the new framework or context of Christ's teachings.

What was Christ saying to us, now? This verse and the previous are metaphors for how the newness of Christ's teaching helps us. We cannot just take part of what Christ says and patch up our lives. The old habits just don't fit. Instead, we must exchange our old lives for new ones to hold Christ's teachings, otherwise, Christ's teaching will destroy us.