Jesus provides six kegs for a drunken party.

John 2.6-11.

Continuing the story from yesterday. Yes, I’m aware this article has a provocative title. But read verse 10: The wedding planner pointed out you don’t serve wine like this when the guests are good and drunk, because they wouldn’t appreciate it. Indicating they were good and drunk.

Every time I’ve written about or taught on this passage, I run into someone who insists Jesus did not make wine. There’s a popular claim among Christian churches which don’t drink alcohol (and I’m part of the Assemblies of God, which is a whole denomination which doesn’t approve of alcohol) that Jesus actually made “new wine.” Because it’s new, they say, it hasn’t had the chance to be fermented. Ergo it’s actually grape juice.

If you’ve never heard that interpretation before, great! Me, I didn’t hear it till adulthood, and I’ve found it’s all over the place. It’s even wormed its way into children’s books.

From a children’s book in which Jesus turns water into “juice.”

This spin on the story makes no logical sense—for two reasons.

First, if the guests had only been drinking grape juice this whole time, how would they be insensible to how good Jesus’s “juice” is? Wouldn’t they easily be able to tell? I mean, if I’ve been drinking one of those 10-percent-juice drinks which are mostly pear juice with grape flavor added, and you swap it with 100-percent-grape-juice Welch’s, I’m gonna know. Even though I’m no grape-juice connoisseur.

Second, the bible brings up “new wine” multiple times, and in no way is it a reference to grape juice.

Hosea 4.11 KJV

Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart.

By “heart,” Hosea meant the part of us we think with; really the mind. Now, in what way does grape juice dull the mind? True, it’s full of sugar, and it’s a little hard to focus when you’re full of sugar… but one’s mind isn’t gone in the same way as when horniness or alcohol seize a person.

Matthew 9.17 KJV

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.

If you’ve ever made wine, you probably know wine bottles don’t break in the fermentation process, which is precisely why winemakers use ’em. The translators of the KJV apparently didn’t know squat about winemaking, and ἀσκοὺς/askús actually means “wineskins,” not “bottles.” And old wineskins could burst when wine fermented further. But they’d need to be somewhat fermented in the first place… i.e. they’d need to be wine, not grape juice. Jesus also points out the old wine is better than the new stuff, Lk 5.39 indicating he and the people of his culture preferred the fermented stuff. Which ain’t grape juice.

Acts 2.13 KJV

Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.

In context this verse is about the apostles speaking in tongues on the first Pentecost. Some recognized the tongues as their own foreign languages, and some mocked and said the apostles must’ve been drinking. Drinkng grape juice? Clearly not, and Simon Peter points out it’s too early in the morning for anyone to be drunk Ac 2.15 —and how can you be drunk on grape juice?

Nah. As the children’s book makes clear, some Christians have been indoctrinated with this “Jesus made juice” idea for as long as they can remember, and think it’s true because of course they would. How often do people seriously question something they’ve heard all their lives? (Not enough, obviously!)

Likewise there’s a popular interpretation that first-century Jews watered down their wine: They didn’t drink pure wine, but a mixture of 50 percent water and 50 percent wine. Or 90 percent water and 10 percent wine; just enough wine to kill bacteria, because you couldn’t trust water back then. Watering down wine in order to party longer was a pagan Greek practice, and these folks assume Jews did it too. But nope; it’s also rubbish. Partly because these wedding guests in this story got drunk; plus there are all those admonitions in the bible to watch out for wine because it’ll get you drunk, so there was clearly something which required people to watch out!

Jesus made actual wine. Stuff just as fermented, just as strong, as the stuff Jews regularly drank at parties. Better quality of course; betcha it didn’t taste like feet at all. (Hey, no feet had ever touched it!) When God provides, he doesn’t provide inferior stuff or pathetic substitutes. We do that; we get stingy, and figure people don’t deserve the best… and should be happy to get anything, including inferior substitutes. God doesn’t think that way at all, and neither should his kids.

The story.

Whenever I debate those folks who insist Jesus didn’t make literal wine, I get accused of trying to justify drinking. As politicians regularly demonstrate, if you can’t defend your position, why not try some personal attacks against your opponents? It’s usefully distracting.

That doesn’t really work on me either, ’cause I don’t drink. Never have. Way too many alcoholics in the family for me to pull on that thread. I’m not defending drinking; I’m defending the text. If the apostle John says Jesus made wine, I believe John. If you wanna bend the bible to suit your personal antipathy towards alcohol… well, there are much better bible verses to quote. This ain’t one of them.

Shall we get to it?

John 2.6-11 KWL

6 Six stone barrels are there, set up for cleaning the Judeans,

each capable of holding two or three buckets.

7 Jesus tells the servers, “Fill the barrels with water.”

The servers fill them to the point of overflow.

8 Jesus tells the servers, “Now ladle out some liquid

and bring it to the wedding-planner.”

They bring it.

9 When the wedding planner tastes the water,

it had become wine.

He didn’t know where it came from.

The servers who ladled it knew.

The wedding-planner calls the groom

10 and tells him, “Every person first puts out the good wine.

Once people get drunk, they put out the lesser wine.

You kept the good wine till now?”

11 Jesus did this, the first of his milestones, in Cana, Galilee.

He reveals his glory, and his students believe in him.

In ancient middle eastern weddings, the bridegroom hosted it. But he was usually too busy making merry, so running the party fell to the wedding-planner, the ἀρχιτρίκλινος/arhitríklinos. The KJV translates it “ruler of the feast” and “governor of the feast” in the very same verse, v9. The word literally means “head of three couches”—the triclinium, “three couches,” being what you’d find round three sides of the dinner table in a Roman house. Romans ate lying down, and at this point in history, so did Jews. The wedding-planner basically made sure everybody had enough food and drink. It was considered a position of respect and responsibility. Si 32.1-2 NABRE Part best man, part butler.

I’ve no idea whether the wedding-planner at this particular wedding had fumbled the wine, or the groom had. Didn’t matter: They were short on wine, and the groom was too busy to deal with it. Really the wedding-planner, not so much the groom, was the person Mary and Jesus were bailing out.

As one entered the courtyard of one of the bigger Jewish homes, they’d see these ὑδρίαι/ydríhi, “water contianers,” near the entry. The word tends to be translated “jars” or “pots,” but that doesn’t give you a proper idea of how big they were: These suckers were the size of trash cans. They were stone because ancient Israelis made darn near everything of either stone or pottery, and you try making a barrel on a pottery wheel. They held two or three μετρητὰς/metritás, “meters,” which I translated “buckets,” and the KJV “firkins.” John doesn’t provide a precise measurement, but we can roughly figure they held 20 to 30 gallons. Say 25.

The purpose of the barrels was ritual washing. When a person entered a house, it was figured their hands were dirty—and likely they were. But Pharisees were far more concerned with whether they were ritually dirty—had they touched someone or something ritually unclean? Like a leper or bleeder? Like something a leper or bleeder had touched? Or someone who’d touched anything dead? Pharisees were trying to stay ritually clean as often as possible; to a lesser degree, literally clean. So they washed a lot.

So if you’re a guest at a Pharisee’s house (assuming you’re not gentile, right?) before you touch anyone or anything, Pharisees would demand you baptize your hands: Draw up your sleeves, immerse your forearms into a barrel of water, bring them out, and shake them off. There. Clean.

Nope, this custom doesn’t come from bible. It’s why Jesus tended to ignore it. Lk 11.38 And it’s not wholly necessary. Ancient middle eastern custom was to keep your right hand clean at all times, and touch nothing but food with it. The left hand was for touching anything icky.

Since the servers had to fill the barrels for Jesus, they must’ve been empty: The guests were already in the house, and had already washed, and all their dust had necessitated the barrels being rinsed out, so this was likely done hours before. Jesus ordered them all refilled.

So if each barrel held 25 gallons, that’d be about 150 gallons, or 570 liters. And Jesus turned all that to wine—about 425 bottles’ worth. Of the good stuff.

I’m actually being conservative here: Six barrels was enough to keep the party going another two days. This way the wine could be two days late; this way the wedding-planner, and the groom, could save face. When God provides, he doesn’t skimp.

Jesus’s first sign.

Various Christians claim this is Jesus’s first miracle. I would point out Jesus’s word-of-knowledge bit with Nathanael is just as much a miracle. I would also point out if Jesus had never performed a miracle before, why on earth did Mary come to him in the first place?

Instead the gospel describes it as the first of his σημείων/simeíon, “milestone.” We don’t use stones for this anymore, but you know what a highway mile marker is. It’s a metaphor for what Jesus is doing here: These are recognizable public indicators that God’s with him, and is empowering him. It’s not just any miracle; it’s not one of the regular things he’s gonna do like impossibly knowing stuff. This is a story people could testify about: “Dude, I was at a wedding and Jesus the Nazarene turned water into wine. I was there! I drank the stuff; it was the best! I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before. No prophet in the bible, no pagan hero; nobody!” It implies this guy is worth paying attention to.

It got his students to trust they were following the right guy. If they weren’t certain before, despite John pointing him out, Jn 1.35-36 or Jesus “reading Nathanael’s mail,” Jn 1.47-48 pulling an Elijah-level miracle of making something out of nothing proved Jesus has God’s ear. Only later would it sink in Jesus is God. But first it needed to be established Jesus has God.

Y’know, too often we don’t bother to ask God for miracles till they’re life-and-death situations. (Or feel like one.) I’ve heard many testimonies where God came through for people in minor situations. For the most part, people don’t doubt he can do it, or does it. Yet they just don’t ask. It’s like they’re saving up their heavenly skee-ball tickets for when they want to collect a big prize.

Yet here, Jesus provides the wine for a wedding. Frivolous? Entirely. Yet Jesus came through for Mary, the wedding-planner, and the groom. So why don’t we expect God to come through for us unless we’re dealing with a “big deal”? He’s not a karmic bank: He’s not gonna turn us down for big miracles because we used up all his power on small stuff.

Nope; God grants requests because we have faith. How’d we get the faith? We grew it by asking him for small stuff. He came through for us in little things; we trust he’ll come through for us in big things. Unless we never sought his help in little things, so he never did come through. We denied him the opportunity to be our provision in every way. Instead of growing faith, we grew a warped view of how God provides.

So call upon God in every circumstance. Even if it’s ’cause your party just ran out of beer. Hey, he’s done it before.