Water into wine

 Jesus at Cana

 John 2:1-11

1 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.

3 When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.”

4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”

5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

6 Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8 He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it.

9 When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

11 Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. 

Have you ever seen water turned into wine? My wife and I have, many times. When we were stationed in Germany, we lived less than an hour’s drive from the Rhine River. The central part of the Rhine is the heart of wine country in western Germany. If you drive or cruise along the river, you pass mile after mile of vineyards. Germans grade their wine according to three main categories: tafelwein, or table wine, the lowest grade; qualitätswein, the middle grade, and prädikatswein, the highest. It’s the sugar content that makes the grade. The highest grade may not have sugar added by the vintners; the lowest two grade may have added sugar. Within each category there are several grades as well – Kabinett, Auslese, Spätlese, Riesling, and so forth.

The highest-grade wine, and the rarest, is called Eiswein, which means just what it sounds like: ice wine. A good produce of ice wine comes along only about every four years, and then in small quantities. It is the sweetest wine made in Germany. The longer grapes stay on the vine, the more natural sugar they have. The growing season ends with the first overnight frost. If the first frost is too severe, grapes on the vine are ruined and must be thrown away. This happens on average three years of every four, so vintners leave relatively few grapes on the vine that late. But if the first frost is mild, the grapes just barely freeze and the next day are harvested to make ice wine, which is so intensely sweet that I couldn’t abide it. Ice wine commands high prices.

So, to drive along the Rhine is to see water, in the form of rainfall, made into wine. Rain soaks the ground, enters the vines, fills the grapes, is harvested, and made into wine. It happens all the time. We do not wonder at it. It “has lost its marvellousness by its constant recurrence” (Augustine).

A fellow officer named Ed Schmidt lived a kilometer away from us in a house he and his wife rented. They made a number of German friends in their village of Grüningen. Ed didn’t speak a word of German, but he had a German last name and looked like a poster boy for Aryan purity, so the Germans liked him. One weekend Ed and Barbara threw a wine-tasting party under a big tent on their lawn. Most of our battalion’s officers came, along with many of Ed’s German neighbors. Everyone brought at least one bottle of wine. One lieutenant had gone to the Army’s Class VI store and bought some Mad Dog 20-20 and Thunderbird, which are about the cheapest rotgut wine made in North America. Ed didn’t know what to do about the MD 20-20 and the T-Bird. He just knew that if the Germans saw the skid-row stuff surely they’d laugh at the cheap, unsophisticated American palate. So he put them behind everything else and started with the good German wine, figuring that after everyone had partaken of a number of samples of prädikatswein they’d forget about the rotgut.

But the Germans had already seen the cheap stuff and after the rest of the wine had been uncorked and passed from table to table, they asked about the Mad Dog and the Thunderbird. Reluctantly, Ed opened it – not “uncorked” it, because it was so cheap it had a screw-on top. His ego deflated, he handed the bottles to the Germans. Amazingly, the Germans loved it! The bottles never left their table. They drank every drop and complimented Eddie for leaving some good wine for the end.

We couldn’t believe it. In fact, we never did believe it. We agreed that they told each other jokes about the idiot Americans and their terrible wine for weeks afterward.

Wine is a fascinating subject. According to Guinness, the most expensive bottle of wine ever was a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite that sold in 1985 for $136,248 at auction at Sotheby’s in London. It was engraved with the initials of Thomas Jefferson. In 1986, its cork slipped, and the wine was ruined. No word on how much the empty bottle is worth.

The first mention of wine in the Bible is in the Noah story. After the flood receded, Noah planted a vineyard, made wine, and got so drunk he passed out naked.

Wine was a significant trade item in ancient Israel. Solomon traded wine for timber. Legal fines were sometimes paid with wine. The Hebrews sometimes used wine in worship, offering libations to the Lord. The offerings of first fruits required a quantity of wine, as did the sacrifice of a ram. Psalm 104 says that wine to gladden the heart of is a gift of God. People offered wine to others as gifts of honor, as when David took wine to Saul on the battlefield. Three tribes brought wine to David as gifts when he was made king. Wine was said to revive the faint in 2 Samuel and Proverbs said it was suitable as a sedative for people in distress. Jesus said the Good Samaritan poured oil and wine on the wounds of the injured traveler. Roman soldiers offered Jesus wine mixed with gall when Jesus was dying. Paul admonished Timothy not to drink only water, but to drink wine also.

Yet the Scriptures also recognize the dangers of wine. The Bible condemns drunkenness, beginning with Noah’s tale, and prophets sometimes accused national leaders of being more interested in drinking wine than tending to affairs of state. Paul cautioned the Ephesians to be filled with the Holy Spirit rather than wine. On Pentecost, the disciples glorified God and Christ so energetically that onlookers accused them of drinking “too much wine,” a charge Peter brushed off by responding that they were not drunk because it was only nine in the morning.

And of course, Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding at Cana. According to John, this miracle was the first Jesus performed. Actually, this miracle is misnamed as turning water into wine. When Jesus began, the six stone jars were empty. The servants filled them with water at Jesus’ direction. Jesus really turned emptiness into wine. He made wine out of nothing.

It is a story of extravagance. John leaves out details we would usually think important in order to emphasize the over-abundance of Christ’s work. For example, we don’t know why Jesus and his disciples and Jesus’ mother were invited. (As an aside, John never calls Mary by name – she is always called “the mother of Jesus.”) The wedding itself is never described; we don’t even know the names of the bride and groom. The bride never appears. The groom appears briefly but does not have a speaking part.

The story begins and ends with wine. There’s a wedding. The wine runs out. Mary tells Jesus, who professes not to care. He doesn’t even call his mother, “Mother,” but “woman,” as if she were some kitchen help come out to give him a message. But then again, John says Jesus called her “woman” when he hung on the cross, so it doesn’t appear to have been disrespectful.

“There’s no more wine,” Mary says. Jesus replies, What does that have to do with you and me?

Mary doesn’t say anything. She has been rebuked, however mildly, because Jesus isn’t subject to her beck and call – not hers, not anyone’s. John makes this clear throughout. Jesus acts on his own initiative, guided by the Spirit of God. Ordinary human beings can’t order him around. “Jesus’ actions will be governed by the hour set by God, not by anyone else’s time or will” (NIB).

But they can ask, and Mary does, leaving the solution up to Jesus. Mary tells the servants to do whatever Jesus says, which, Mary must have known, might have been nothing. Or Jesus might have told the servants to hightail it down to the Food Lion before it closed to pick up a few cases of Mad Dog 20-20 and Thunderbird. After all, when his disciples told him much later that a few thousand people had nothing to eat, Jesus just said, “Well, you give them something to eat.”

Instead, Jesus orders about 150 gallons of water brought in. The modern equivalent of the ancient Jewish measurement isn’t certain. It’s somewhere between twenty to thirty gallons per jar. Call it twenty-five, for a total of 150 gallons. That’s – let’s see – nineteen thousand, two hundred ounces, so if a serving was six ounces, like ours are today, that’s three thousand, two hundred cups of wine. This must have been a great party!

No matter how many guests were there, a few or many, thirty-two-hundred cups of wine is a lot of wine! Everything about this episode is overdrawn: the capacity of the jars, the amount of wine, even the number of words John spends describing the miracle. But as for the exact moment of the chemical transformation of the water into wine, there is no notice. It just happens sometime between the filling of the jars and the drawing out of a serving for the chief steward. There is an abundance of good gifts available through Jesus, but exactly how and when always remain mysterious.

The chief steward doesn’t know the wine’s source; he just assumes the bridegroom kept it back all along. “This is good stuff,” he exclaims, commending the bridegroom for continuing to serve fine wine even after the guests have had plenty to drink.

“In the Old Testament, an abundance of good wine is an eschatological symbol, a sign of the joyous arrival of God’s new age.” Both Amos and Joel used the image of the hills dripping with new wine to describe God’s favor. The miracle at Cana is more than “the first act in Jesus’ ministry. It also stands as the fulfillment of Old Testament eschatological hopes, as the inaugural act of God’s promised salvation” (NIB).

I refuse to get hung up on arguments such as whether this miracle quote-actually-unquote occurred. Discussing it on such a scientific-materialist basis robs it of its real power and meaning. Neither can we arrogantly assume that the people of the first century were so simple-minded that they easily embraced the miraculous. The steward assumes that the wine he drank, while excellent, had been obtained by the bridegroom in the usual way. What he finds unusual is the groom’s hospitality, not the wine itself.

But the servants and Jesus’ disciples know how the wine came to be. Isn’t it interesting that they don’t drink any? Maybe the wine isn’t the point after all. Maybe what the disciples see is that God’s presence is truly among them in the person of Jesus. Jesus offers a new category of understanding reality, and the disciples “believed in him.”

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin once said, “Jesus turned water into wine, but we in the Church have become very good at turning the wine back into water.” The new wine of Jesus – the fulfillment of the hopes of God’s people – is what we long for and hope for. Yet when we look about us, we can see oldness at every level. We carry old fears and anxieties despite our faith in God; we are weak stewards of God’s gifts to us; we see career-minded clergy; we are mired in bureaucratic church structures to do the church’s business. Sometimes it’s hard to see the newness of life, and like the chief steward, even when we do, we mis-attribute it to the usual sources.

Author Mary Collins wrote of attending a Catholic Mass in Bologna, Italy. The church was very poor. Instead of the usual pews, the church had only cast-off chairs from school lunchrooms. The worshipers were mostly broken down, elderly men showing signs of alcoholism and disease and poverty, plus a few poor, old women.

She wrote, “The liturgy progressed as usual. The homily proclaimed the mystery of the Trinity as a mystery of divine love so limitless it is poured out even to the poor of Bologna. Then it was time for the offering. The ushers went forward. We reached for our bundles of lire. Then the unexpected happened. The ushers also reached for stacks of bills, and they moved through the assembly making the church’s offering by giving them small amounts of money. Later, on the street, we learned that the gifts to the poor were given weekly: a token of God’s graciousness and eschatological fullness, something to celebrate the Lord’s Day. In the presence of Christ, not enough becomes plenty for all; in the presence of Christ, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary.”

If we are truly to perceive God’s abundant grace, our response must be thankfulness and generous sharing. The wedding party found itself with so much wine that all they could have done with it was just give it away. Everything we have is a gift from God. Let us believe in Christ! Let us let go of our old ways and old things. Let them go, let them vanish! The newness of life in Christ won’t come until they are gone – BUT . . . in the newness of Christ, the best is yet to come!