Jesus Wine

My mother loved to entertain, to invite people into our home, to cook, and to put out a spread. Well beyond anything normal. She had the ability, somehow, to find hidden food in the freezer and fridge, sidestepping from pot to bowl to plate, and within a few minutes filling a table with food for all. More than enough for all, in fact. Always more than enough.

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When my parents decided to make Apple Butter the old-fashioned way, they rented a massive copper pot with wooden paddles that we used to stir the cooking, boiling, brewing apples. Under the pot my father had built a log fire. When the day was done and we had wiped the smoke from our eyes, my mom and dad canned enough apple butter to last us, and now my memory runs out, for more than a year. Once my parents did the same for peach preserves they had purchased. The peaches were white inside with a pinkish pit stain, and the preserves became pink – the preserves were incredibly tasty. They lasted us, so it at least seems to me now, for years.

Perhaps they arrived at such a habit because they grew up in the Depression. My father, so he told us, at times had to hunt rabbits, squirrel, and quail for dinner. In summers he fished for bass and my father never did give up his love for fishing. However one explains their custom of providing, what I experienced was that my mom never cooked an amount that would give us what we needed. She put on the table more than we needed. We always had leftovers. Leftovers of meat, potatoes, vegetables and desserts. We didn’t have just a refrigerator with a small freezer. We had a huge freezer in the basement, from which my mom could swoop down and pull out fresh foods, both old and new. There was always more than enough.

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Jesus’s mother one time evidently was in charge of a wedding. Maybe she invited everyone to come to a home where the wedding and its celebration would be held. John 2 does not tell us she was invited. It tells us that “Jesus and the disciples were invited.” Maybe she worked it out so they could be there. She probably didn’t care so much about the disciples. Confident that he could make something happen, she wanted her son, Jesus, to be in attendance.

As the story is told, they ran out of wine. There’s nothing as embarrassing for a host than not having enough food and drink for your guests. With wine as a symbol for celebration, for obvious reasons, it was grievous to her that the wine tank moved closer and closer and then just beyond the letter “E” (for empty). She informed Jesus of the situation.

Jesus’s response was like a brushback pitch, “rattling plates in the kitchen” as the baseball lingo goes: “Woman,” which was not a rude label, “what concern is that to me and to you.” Well, I’m sure Mary muttered Well, son, it may not be to you but it is to me. Jesus was not done. He added an abstract in-need-of-interpretation clarification: “My hour has not yet come.” We who read the Gospel of John know this means the hour of glorification, which is John’s paradoxical language for a crucifixion that leads to ascension, but there’s no way in Cana that Mary knew what he meant.

Perhaps then out of incomprehension she turns it over to Jesus by saying to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” In logic, that’s a non sequitur but readers familiar with the Gospel of John know hidden secrets are to be discovered in what we might call logical jumps and leaps and quick switchings of lanes.

John describes the setting: six huge cavernous “water jars” are standing there. They were used for “Jewish rites of purification.” Galilee, scholarship of the last generation has made clear, was into purity laws. There were mikvehs, or stepped pools for purity, and stone vessels, which did not contract impurities, and handwashing rites. From some source of more than enough water the servants were expected to make sure those water jars brimmed with water.

A logical jump occurs again: Jesus instructs the servants to “draw some out, and take it to the person in charge of the banquet.” What Jesus was up to now becomes clear: the one in charge tasted the water-become-wine and advised the bridegroom people don’t save Chianti valley reds until the end of the party. Instead, the custom is to serve the best wine first and let the numbed drinkers finish off with the cheap wine from Michigan. You might be asking me how I know it was red wine. Because it’s better.

That ends the wedding.

But it does not end the pondering.

My parents’ theory for living was not to provide for themselves, though that was part of the mix. They produced food to give to others. So much so that at times my father would fill the trunk of our car with bushel baskets of freshly picked sweet corn or green beans, and on a Sunday he would give away bags of garden produce. A backyard garden was not enough for my dad. He was given a sizable plot, which I say was an acre but that’s probably an exaggeration, on a farm for his garden. Man, did we have lots of corn and green beans and carrots and tomatoes. Most was given to others. The trunk of our car at times looked a bit like tailgating at a football game.

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What needs to be pondered about Jesus and the good wine was the abundance. I calculated long ago that the wine in those six large jars amounted to something like 907 standard bottles of wine. That’s a lot. You could invite everyone from Nazareth and Cana, assuming everyone would come–they wouldn’t, and you would have way more than enough. 907 bottles of wine borders on the extravagant, even ridiculous. It would be like my mother and father purchasing and filling a grocery store for their canning. Our family did not need an entire aisle at Mariano’s for Apple Butter. Not even our Baptist church would need that much. Besides, I’m told, some people don’t even like Apple Butter. It’s a pity.

Apple Butter is not wine, and it’s surely not good wine.

Wine is the symbol of joy, of celebration, and of the future banquet of the kingdom of God. The abundance of Jesus wine was created to spread the joy. Joy overflowing. Uber-joy and uber-celebration. Like when the Cubs finally won the World Series. Or, if you are old enough, when the Bears won the Super Bowl. The wine at Cana was absurdly extravagant. Within a decade or two everyone was claiming there were there when it happened.

John closes down this short Wedding story by telling us that this was Jesus’s first sign. In the Synoptic Gospels Jesus does miracles but the Gospel of John deepens miracles by labeling them signs. Most think there are seven signs in John’s Gospel.

A sign is a public deed performed by Jesus that reveals who he is but requires faith in order to perceive its truthfulness.

As such, then, a sign is an act that, upon pondering and imagining, continues to reveal the true identity of Jesus, but only for those with faith. As God became the embodied Logos in Jesus (1:14), so God can reveal the depths of God-ness in wine. The depths of God’s joy shared with all creation. Signs are then iconic moments in physical realities. The act of turning water into more than an abundance of wine iconically reveals the identity of Jesus and his abounding joy that can spread throughout the entire wedding celebration.

Jennifer Strawbridge, in her book Love Makes No Sense, said this of Jesus: “Through the Son, the invisible God is made visible. Through the Son, the unknowable God is made known. Through the Son, the incomprehensible love of God is made tangible.”

The signs of Jesus were tangible. Wine was visible, knowable, tangible.

Eugene Peterson once wrote “When God chose to reveal himself to us completely, he didn't do it in words or ideas. He became flesh and lived in the neighborhood with us. Which means that our bodies are capable of receiving God and participating in God, not just with our minds or our emotions or our ‘hearts’ as we sometimes say, but with these actual flesh-and-blood, skin-and-muscle bodies.”

The signs of Jesus were then not just tangible, but those around Jesus participated in that more-than-enough Jesus wine in tangible ways, with their bodies, with their noses and lips and tongues.

We are invited today to taste Jesus wine.

Jesus wine is wine poured out for others at the table. I’m thinking Jesus’s face as filled with joy as he watched others enjoy this visible, tangible Jesus wine.

Jesus wine has the power to turn political heartache into the joy of God for who we are, who Jesus is, and how good God is.

Jesus wine turns us into joyous instruments of justice and peace, providing food to those who need it in visible, knowable, and tangible ways.

Jesus wine empowers us to look at destructive earth-degrading policies and to fight for stewarding what God has created.

Jesus wine has the ability to turn the fiery devastations in LA into opportunities for visible, knowable, and tangible giving – so that the new Pacific Palisades becomes uber-joyous.

Jesus wine has the capacity to face with a joyous faith our sicknesses, our diseases, and even our deaths. For those who love us to become visible, knowable, tangible presences of Jesus wine.

Most of all, the Jesus wine exhorts us to become celebrants, to become instruments of joy in our world, and to relish each day as opportunities to walk with God in visible, knowable, tangible expressions of love.

Take drink, Peter once said, because the Lord is “gracious” and delicious (1 Peter 2). Those who taste Jesus wine cannot but pass it on.