The
King James Version calls them “firkins.” I’ve always gotten a kick out of that.
We
don’t use firkins much anymore but it works out to about thirty gallons per
barrel for a total of one hundred and eight gallons. Calvin Miller says that
Jesus sets up a six-kegger wedding.
John
makes this story do a lot of work: Jesus attends a wedding, a ceremony that has
all kinds of implications for the great heavenly nuptials of Revelation 21.2.
There are six vessels (the number of humanity, one shy of the divine seven), for ritual purification (the Law), and Jesus stokes ‘em up to the
brim: Law has reached its limit and must yield to divine grace. Wine replaces water as a tip-off that the
blood of Christ will conclude the work for which religion was only a
place-marker.
John
knows what he’s doing when he calls this the “beginning of His signs.”
But
there’s a homier side to the story, one that nestles nicely, even seamlessly,
alongside all that exalted theology. Running out of wine constituted a major
social disaster. One imagines Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes and the rest of the
downstairs crew at Downton Abbey in such a fix. Somebody messed up – big time.
This
wasn’t Jesus’ deal. His rude reply to his mother is something along the lines
of, “What’s your problem?” (Judges 11.12) His “hour has not yet come;” a side-job as a wedding caterer would amount to moonlighting from His Father’s agenda. But he steps in: because
his mother asked him to, because some family of nobodies from nowhere had
engineered their own embarrassment. Jesus, it seems, cares about that kind of
stuff. And he doesn’t just slap a patch on the situation: He conjures some
high-voltage vintage vino and sloshes it out by the firkin-full.
“You
might want,” observes N. T. Wright in commenting on this tale, “to pray through
this story with your own failures and disappointments in mind – remembering
that transformation only came when someone took Mary’s words seriously: ‘Do
whatever he tells you.’” Jesus, John indicates, came for the mighty work of
salvation, but Our Lord can multitask: He can work off the clock to solve your
private crisis and do so in a way that proclaims that He is the Christ.
Cheers!
Doug
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