Pastor Tom Johnson, January 20, 2013
It was the third day of wedding festivities—three days of celebrating the union of two people. “For this reason,” Scripture says, “a person leaves their father and mother and are united as one.” Jesus would later say, “What God has brought together, let no one separate.”
Jesus, his mother Mary, and his disciples were all invited to this wedding that lasted—not hours—but days. And in certain parts of the world, they still set aside days to celebrate what God brings together. The unthinkable happens—their adult beverage runs dry. The fruit of the vine dies. On the third day, they run out of wine. Even in those days, weddings and wine had an inseparable union. How else can you explain the urgency of the situation? Mary tells Jesus. And Jesus asks what she thinks he can do about it. “Now is not the time to take the cup,” he says. “It is not yet time to pour out my life for the sin of the world.” Mary seems to ignore Jesus’ eccentric reply. She turns to the caterers and tells them, “Just do what my son tells you to do.” And Jesus points to six huge jugs—each one requiring at least two strong men to carry them from here to there. And Jesus tells the caterers to take all six of them and fill them completely with water. This is a pretty labor intensive project. 20-30 gallons of water is heavy. A gallon of water weighs over 8 lbs. Each container would weigh about 160 lbs PLUS the weight of the stone jar itself.
Winemakers normally can only handle about five or six gallons of juice at a time which is still about 40-60 lbs of juice and heavy enough. And this would be after stomping or pressing the juice out of grapes, which is a lot of work already. But to make good wine, it requires patience. No matter how much urgency Mary and the rest of the wedding guests felt—no matter how much they thirsted for their first century hooch—you cannot speed up the winemaking process. Grape juice needs to be inoculated with microbes called yeast. They infect the grape juice and consume most of the sugars. They produce two byproducts: carbon dioxide and alcohol—transforming sugary juice into intoxicating wine. This is called fermentation. And the average time it takes for these microscopic winemakers to do their magic is three weeks. There is another powerful, invisible force that starts to work on the wine: gravity. Gravity pulls all the extra particles and waste to the bottom of the vessel creating a noxious layer of sediment also called the dregs. You’ve heard the phrase, “Drinking the dregs” or referring to people as the “dregs of society.” It is pretty nasty stuff. At the end of three months, a year, or even longer, the wine maker carefully pours the wine off the dregs into a clean vessel. The more time one allows, the more aged and refined it will be. Patience is a virtue; it also pays high dividends to the palette.
Jesus pulls a fast one on the wedding coordinator. He sends these huge jars of water to him. These are ridiculously huge vessels for ritual bathing. Sometime, somehow, during the whole process, Jesus skips the grape squeezing, fermentation process, and aging and delivers some of the finest wine ever to come to market. The “chief steward” whose job was to oversee and manage the wedding party, its food, and its beverage does not know what happened. He is clueless that they ran out of wine in the first place. He is even more confused by the quality of the wine. “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk.” Did you catch that? He betrays his plan of deception. He was expecting drunkenness and hoping it would mask the poor quality of the wine he would later serve. And isn’t this like the deceitfulness of sin, our broken world, and the evil one…to hook us with the good stuff first to later unload their worthless wares later…to trick us into thinking that we are receiving the best the world has to offer?
This wine blessed by the Word of Jesus is the first of his miracles during his earthly ministry. And wine blessed by the Word of Jesus will be the last. He takes up the cup and says, “This cup is the new testament in my blood which is shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins.” He prays that cup will pass but embraces his Father’s will. He pours out his blood on the cross to release us from the power, deception, and condemnation of our sin. And on the third day, the tomb, which was like a wine cellar whose wine had run dry, bursts open with new, life-enriching wine.
Like the water into wine, our Groom makes us his Bride by the water and his commanding Word. He prepares the marriage supper of the Lamb, which has no end. He is the Lord of hosts in Isaiah 25 who “will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines well refined.” In the meantime, he does not deaden our senses so that we can’t detect the lack of quality. Instead, he fills us with the Spirit and his own Body and Blood so that we taste and see that the Lord is good. He warms our hearts in friendship, family, and love. God brings us into a union with his Son that no one can separate and a marriage feast in his Kingdom which will have no end.
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