Water into Wine

In this article I am going to discuss Jesus’ water into wine miracle. By way of introduction however, I’m going to discuss the following quote by C. S. Lewis: “Either this man (Jesus) was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse” (Mere Christianity, pg. 56). In this exceedingly reductive argument, Lewis gives us three options, and compels us to choose one. This argument is evidently fallacious as there are not three options, there are many many more. To name a few, perhaps the accounts we have of Jesus’ life are in some way inaccurate, perhaps the claims they make are for some reason overstated, perhaps the accounts are mythological in nature, or perhaps the claims that Jesus made of himself have been entirely misunderstood. When it comes to all the possible options there is also the potential of some gradation - he could be divine in nature without being God, he could be God and also be mad. What does it even mean to speak of a “madman”? Was Jesus not regarded in his day a madman?

A claim that one often hears amongst spiritually liberal people is that Jesus was not God, but merely a good man, or a moral teacher. It is clearly this kind of belief that Lewis was railing against, and I think rightly so; irrespective of the “reality”, to regard Jesus as merely a teacher requires disregarding a great deal of biblical material. But I can see why people are drawn down this line of reasoning. It plays out along similarly fallacious lines as Lewis’ false options model above: if not this, then this. It brings to mind Thomas Jefferson’s Bible in which he literally took a pair of scissors and cut out of the New Testament all its miraculous claims, leaving just Jesus’ parables and a bit of exposition. Jesus’ miracles prove a great stumbling block to liberals; the question arises in the minds of the insatiably curious… “Do I really believe Jesus did X?” And on that note let us consider his wine miracle.

The most famous of Jesus’ party tricks was the time he turned water into wine. “Alakazam!” This miracle is only to be found in the Gospel of John (John 2:1-11), and it is said to have taken place at the wedding of Cana, and according to John, it was Jesus’ first miracle. This story is entirely self-contained. It is not referenced anywhere else within John’s Gospel, and it is not referenced by any other gospel writers. So, what can be said about this miracle? Let’s begin with some reductive binaries. Jesus’ act of turning water into wine contravenes the laws of nature: as contravening the laws of nature is impossible, we must conclude that John was either tricked himself, or is seeking to trick us. Let’s take another reductive binary. The Bible is true in everything that it teaches and asserts, therefore, if John says Jesus turned water into wine, then that must have been what happened. These two binaries are equally erroneous, and your feelings regarding them say far more about your biases than the story itself. Instead of taking our suppositions to the text it is far better to consider the text for itself, what function is the story playing? There is a party going on, at least there “was” a party going on until the wine ran out. No wine, no party! That is until Jesus rectified the problem and brought forth new wine. He did so in a particular fashion. He asked some servants to fill large stone jars with water, jars that were ordinarily used for Jewish purification rites. And after doing so, these servants tasted the water and it had become wine. This story is filled with symbolism; you could even say this story contains a suspicious amount of symbolism.

Jesus was a teacher. He had two preferred modes of teaching, both of which were designed to have his listeners think for themselves. He asked provocative questions, and he told enigmatic parables. His parables deployed metaphors, they contained nouns which acted as identifiers for different ideas. Yeast, a mustard seed, a fig tree, a household owner, a shepherd, etc. Why did Jesus teach in parables? I think there are several reasons for this, but perhaps chiefly it was because parables allow us to speak in such a way that supersedes reductive binaries. What I mean by this is that it is not possible to simply convert Jesus’ parables into straightforward, ‘not that, but this’ statements. If one does do this, and simply states what a parable means, you’re almost certainly missing the point. Parables give us a sense of the truth, they are multivalent, they invoke the spirit, not the letter of the law. Despite Jesus’ ministry being so resistant to propositional, or dualistic language, Orthodox or creedal Christianity can’t get enough of it. Christians invariably ask, “what is the truth?”, but Jesus asked, “What is truth?”

So, returning to the Jesus wine miracle, part of the problem is that we are conditioned into reading it as history. As if this is simply a straightforward account of what actually happened. And if I were to jump into the proverbial time machine, and go back to whenever this was, I could have simply watched from a bush as these events unfolded. I believe, however, that this story is far closer in nature to one of Jesus’ parables. If Jesus taught in parables perhaps we should expect his students to do likewise. The term “parabolic” is a useful one, meaning it is like a parable in nature. To the originally intended audience, I think this story would have been understood as such. I’ll give you my own contemporary example. “The children dressed in blue and yellow ran westwards down the alley away from the huge brown bear!” This is evidently metaphorical, but if it were divorced from time, culture, and context, one may be tempted to read it literally. So, lets unpack some of the wine miracle’s parabolic significance. As previously stated, given the multivalent nature of parables, I don’t think it’s possible to be exhaustive here, but we can at least begin to tease out what John was driving at. In the story the party is coming to an end. Which party? Crudely put, the Jewish party. There is a sense in which (for John) the Jewish religion has become ineffectual, it has been drained of its previous dynamism, its rituals and purity laws seem to have now become obsolete. There was once this idea that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through Israel. But now Israel, and the Jewish people at large, lie in the shadows, they’ve been stripped of their dignity, and are now merely subjects to the Roman Empire. How can God’s people be indentured servants? John drives this antiquated purity laws point home by having the miracle take place in the dry water purification jars, jars that had to be filled with water! Does this not suggest that they weren’t even used for their intended purpose? The purification ritual was not adhered to. But now, Jesus has brought new life, new hope, new dynamism to the party. The fact that is it is a wedding also seems significant. Weddings are about covenants: you had the old covenant, and now Jesus represents the new. A symbol of Christ’s union with his church. And of course, there is all the significance of wine. Jesus’ ministry (in John’s Gospel) begins with him bringing forth wine, and it concludes with him drinking the sour wine on the cross. Wine represents Jesus’ blood. There’s the whole grafted into the vine idea that you find in Paul…  On and on you could go.

There is no historical reality veiled behind mythology, there is no demythologised truth that we can extract, there is the story that John is conveying, and certainly nothing less.