mattbraunlin
Member
The Finest Wine
I doubt very much that anything Jesus said or did has only one meaning or reason as its motivation. The life of our Saviour is so marvellously layered with beautiful meaning, both personal and universal, literal and metaphorical.This blurb is about one of Christ's loveliest miracles: turning water into wine. I am no scholar, and I have no doubt barely begun to understand everything there is to know about this wonderful event. But I want to explain to you what I do know, in order that you can understand a crucial component of your relationship with Jesus.
Making wine from water was Jesus' first miracle. It happened (so far as we know) only once, in the second chapter of the Gospel of John.
Jesus was at a wedding feast, and the wine supply ran dry. This was truly disastrous in this context: wine was the cornerstone of any Hebrew wedding celebration, and to run out early would have been a massive humiliation and could even have led to legal action.
At his mother's request, Jesus intervenes. He has six large stone pots filled with water, and turns it to wine.
When this miraculous drink is sampled by the unknowing master of ceremonies he famously declares in verse 10:
Every man serves the good wine first, and when the people have drunk freely, then he serves the poorer wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.
So now you know the context of this famous miracle. But why did Jesus do it? What purpose and lesson are we to take from it?
Within the context of the wedding itself, and to us reading about it two thousand years later, the lessons are one and the same:
Jesus wants us to enjoy ourselves.
The sole purpose of this wine in and of itself was helping a few dozen people have a wonderful time celebrating a wedding. That's it.
Let's examine this a bit more closely.
Now if God Himself created wine, it's a certain bet that it was the best wine on earth.
The Bible tells us that the six stone pots Jesus used held between twenty and thirty gallons.
Jesus therefore made somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of the best wine on Earth.
A quick google search informed me that the most expensive wine on earth today sells for over forty thousand dollars a bottle.
Long story short, if these numbers are valid at all, the wine Jesus created could have made him the 1st century equivalent of a multimillionaire.
Think of what our Lord could have done with that money. He could have fed the poor, funded his ministry, ended illiteracy in Israel.
But he didn't. This immeasurably valuable treasure was created to be enjoyed by a small group of people who were blessed enough to be there.
Jesus wants us to enjoy ourselves, brothers and sisters. God is not a communist, and there is nothing wrong with having stuff and enjoying it.
A good old-timey gospel group called the Stadler Brothers did a song, in which the singer asks God to help him think a little more of others, and a little less of me. This is a good philosophy to embrace.
A little less of me. Not none of me at all. God comes first, and then others, but by no means are we to be torn to shreds by guilt when we enjoy the blessings God has given us when the time is appropriate. God fully approves of fun, of pleasure, of me-time, so long as we are careful to make it our number-three priority.
God comes first. Others come second. But you are still on the podium as a very respectable third. Don't forget that.
