Water into wine

A word for the week

Jesus's first miracle was not a healing, or a rescue, or a dramatic display of power. It was making more wine for a party. Take in how strange and how lovely that is. Of all the ways he could have opened his public life, the very first sign John records is this: at a village wedding in Cana, the wine ran out, and Jesus quietly turned water into more of it, gallons and gallons, so the celebration would not stop. That tells you something about him before he says a word about himself.

Here is the scene. There is a wedding, and in that world a wedding feast could last for days, and running out of wine partway through was not a small thing. It was a humiliation for the family, a failure of hospitality people would remember. Jesus's mother notices, and comes to him with just four words: they have no wine. She does not tell him what to do. She simply brings the need to him and then turns to the servants and says the wisest sentence in the whole story: whatever he tells you, do it. That is faith in one line. She does not know how he will act. She just knows to bring him the problem and then do what he says.

There are six great stone jars there, the kind used for the ritual washing that religion required, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Fill them with water, Jesus says. And they fill them to the brim. Then, draw some out and take it to the master of the feast. And somewhere between the jar and the cup, the water has become wine, and not just any wine. The master of the feast, who does not know where it came from, is amazed: everyone serves the good wine first, he says, and the cheap stuff once the guests are too far gone to notice, but you have saved the best for last. Jesus did not just replace what ran out. He gave better than what they started with, and more of it than they could possibly need.

Notice what this says about the God Jesus reveals. His first act is not to condemn the party, or to lecture, or to display raw power to frighten people into belief. His first act is generosity, at a celebration, to spare an ordinary family embarrassment and keep the joy going. This is a God who loves a feast, who blesses the good and human things, marriage, friendship, wine, gladness, and pours himself into them without stint. The One who made the world is not stingy or sour about its joys. He is the one who keeps the wine flowing when it would otherwise fail.

And there is a quiet promise folded into it, for anyone whose joy has run dry. The wine gives out at some point in every life, the gladness thins, the celebration stalls, and you are left staring at empty jars. Jesus's answer to the empty jar is not a scolding but a filling, and the new wine is better than the old. He takes the plain water of an ordinary, depleted life, and when he is invited into it, he turns it into something richer than it was before. Whatever he tells you, do it. Fill the jars. And watch what he does with water.