Christ talks about new wine and old bottles

No man also seweth a piece of new cloth on an old garment: else the new piece that filled it up taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse.
And no man putteth new wine into old bottles, and the wine doth burst the bottles, and the wine is spilled, and the bottles will be marred: but new wine must be put into new bottles. (Mark 2:21-22)

I’ve always thought that this was talking about how the people of Christ’s day were so wrapped up in the Law of Moses that they didn’t want to change to the higher law that He wanted to teach them. I guess I based this on one of the other versions of these verses that appears in Luke in which there is this bit that follows after:

No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new: for he saith, The old is better. (Luke 5:39)

Today I saw these verses in a different way. I saw that fairly close contextually to these verses, Jesus was telling the Pharisees that He had come not to call the righteous, but the sinners to repentance and that the sick needed the physician, and not the healthy.

It seems to me that Jesus was using the wine bottles (back then they were bags of animal skin) as a comparison to show how it was necessary to be born again. (After all, what are we but bags of skin holding red blood instead of red wine?)

Jesus was trying to say that if He tried to fill us up with the higher law and teach us His ways, if we weren’t born again, there’d be such a disconnect between what we knew we should do and what we wanted to do (because of our carnal fallen natures) that we wouldn’t be able to take it and we’d explode and discard everything we learned, just like new wine in old bottles would burst the bottles and the wine would be spilled and the bottles would be marred.

So we have to repent and be baptized (be born of water and of the spirit) in order to receive Christ’s teachings. It will make us into new creatures with no desire to sin and new desires to serve God.