First, the story, and what it would mean to a first century Jewish person living in high expectation that something of Old Testament proportions was about to happen:

Before Jesus garnered any sort of a following, he went to a wedding.

These were a big deal in His day, and didn’t go down without a fair amount of recreational beveraging. The modern-day, sparkling-grape-juice-Baptist-y thing would’ve been laughable to these folks.

A wedding was a huge party, in every sense imaginable, lasting multiple days.

As Jesus kicked back with a few soon-to-be OG’s, maybe thinking about all the trouble He was about to get into, His bossy mother interrupted to announce this particular celebration had drunk itself out of wine – a very real emergency, and a potential embarrassment for everyone involved – suggesting very strongly that she expected Him to do something about it.

Up to this point, the author has made clear his belief that Jesus is Messiah, prophesied about in the ancient Jewish scriptures – our “Old Testament.” Other Gospel narratives indicate that Jesus’ mother believed too. If we’ll allow a miraculous visit from an angel, a virgin birth, and whatever else His mother witnessed, we can understand why she expected a penniless handyman to somehow come up with enough wine to service the entire wedding crowd.

What happens next is something that would be highly offensive to the upper muckety-muck religious leaders of the day; they shared our modern “Christian” tendency to shun alcohol in all its forms.

Jesus somehow convinced the wedding attendants to fill 6 stone water pots, used for ritual cleansing ceremonies, in total holding about 160 gallons of water. These were holy artifacts intended exclusively for holy occasions: filling them with booze would be analagous to filling a babtistry with tequila. You can imagine what would follow.

Christian thinkers for millenia have scratched their heads, wondering how to fit this into our mainstream understanding of what God considers “clean” and “unclean.” This party was already out of wine, i.e., folk were intoxicated (unclean), shouldn’t they call it a day and head home? Why is the holiest human a religious person can fathom making another 4,000 glasses of wine?

Some have suggested that it wasn’t actually wine, or they point out the fact that, on many occasions in this culture, wine was diluted with water. But historians are quick to remind us that no self-respecting wedding feast, one of the most coveted expressions of Jewish life, would be caught watering down it’s wine.

There’s no compelling evidence to suggest that this was anything but the same stuff we drink today, maybe better.

Anyway, the servants ladeled out the newly released “Party On!” 0030 and brought some to the head attendant for a sampling. Things shifted fast from near disaster to roaring success. The wine was amazing, the wedding could move forward.

You could remove this story entirely and still have a Gospel account of the life and times of Jesus that’s just as impactful, but the author has engaged in a bit of character development, suggesting to his audience that this particular Messiah is human; He cares about something that’s purely cultural, something that most religious people would see as completely devoid of spiritual merit. To those who’ve come to believe that drinking booze is a high infraction in God’s order, or that we need to be really careful at a party: oops.

To this author, Jesus is still holy, but he’s put a bit of a wrinkle in our typical understanding of the word.

This also throws a massive wrench in our understanding of what is clean (ritual cleansing ceremonies) and what is not (booze) by throwing them together to keep a random party going.

Up to this point, and with annoying repetition afterwards, the author is also trying really hard to convince his Jewish audience of Jesus’ Messiahship. They had grown a bit tired of the influx of would-be messiahs and all the painful debunking that attended them. So, because the Old Testament Messianic prophecies foretell of one that will be marked by miraculous signs and wonders, the author focuses on the miracles of Jesus: water to wine, multiple healings, the feeding of the 5,000, walking on water, and the resurrection of a close friend, who was so dead he smelled bad.

This is one of the main reasons that the religious leaders themselves, especially those who opposed Jesus, hesitated to dismiss him.

“Then the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered a council and said, ‘What shall we do? For this Man works many signs.’ ~ John 11:47 

But enough with the story. Should we consider John’s book an accurate historical narrative, or is it merely a brilliantly crafted fairy tale?

I’ll judge nobody for believing the latter, but there are a couple of things we have to allow into the courtroom before we accuse this author of fraud.

The Science of (no) Miracles

Faith and science aren’t mutually exclusive, until the subject of miracles comes up, then the two seem to be mutually exclusive. Faith says crazy things happen all time, science says if we can’t reproduce it in a lab, it’s not real. To many, the world around us is miracle enough. No need for more.

Christian thinkers have long tried to reconcile the tension between science and miracles, positing the idea, for example, that the creation of the universe was no miracle, but merely an event that conformed to cosmological principles that exist today. When it comes to the miracles of Jesus, maybe we’ve interpreted things wrong, or the Biblical authors were exaggerating.

All of these are compelling, and point to the fact that miracles are problematic on a million different levels. But we should stop for a moment and remember science’s fundamental limitation:

Human observation.

The universe is not human, and the majority of it exists outside of our understanding. Many would say that the majority of humanity itself, as well as the created order around us, exists outside of our understanding.

Science is a tool that we use to stretch our ability to see farther than we could otherwise; a pedestal from which we might gain a better perspective. And it works. We know more than we did 50 years ago, exponentially so. But we’re too impressed with ourselves to remember – what we don’t know far outstrips what we do.

Regardless of how high, impressive, or advanced our observations might be, science will never be anything more than the cumulative, extremely limited observations of humanity. And so when we say that nothing can exist outside of this, we’re saying a lot.

But that’s a bad arugument for the veracity of Jesus’ water-to-wine episode. Saying “it could’ve happened” doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. But let’s take, for a moment, the “it could never happen” argument off the table.

No New Religions

The first century Judean region was no place to start a new thing. With few exceptions, It was homogenously Jewish, with high devotion to the practices and beliefs laid out in Torah, the historical books, psalms, prophets, etc. In multiple places throughout, these prohibit the worship of other Gods, and filled with many horrible stories of what happened to the people who did. As such, adherents to Judaism believed that devotion to other Gods and their attendent religions was tantamount to national treason.

Start a new religion in this neck of the woods and pay dearly. Ask Jesus.

In comparison, Islam was birthed in a region marked by much more syncretism; Jews, Christians, and pagans rubbing elbows in day to day life, forced to be much more open towards different beliefs and practices. Muhammad’s life wasn’t devoid of persecution by any stretch, but Mecca and Medina were much more friendly to new things than first century Israel.

America, even more so. We value tolerance, openmindedness, and best of all, Western Individualism – my truth is mine, yours is yours. We start new religions all the time, so a story about someone starting his own doesn’t strike us as odd. Happens all the time. No miracles here.

But there’s no way to waltz into the ancient Jewish context and start a very popular, fast spreading, somewhat non-Jewish religion without a lightning bolt or two to get everyone’s attention. Given the day’s Messiah fatigue, and the propensity for Jewish people to annihilate anything non-Jewish, Jesus couldn’t have garnered the following that He did without something far removed from the ordinary. In addition, whatever miracles he did manage happened to jive with the treasured ancient writings that promised thier arrival.

“Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute sing for joy. For waters break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.” ~ Isaiah 35:5-6

When John the Baptist was imprisoned, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus if He was really the promised one. Jesus quoted the above passage in response, as it was held by so many to be a prophecy about Messiah:

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them. And blessed is the one who is not offended by me” ~11:4–6

Apart from this, Jesus would’ve been a nice guy with some good things to say, but that’s about it. There were plenty of those guys around, some of whom tried to start their own thing as well, none of whom made it very far.

But in a place where no new religion could hope to make it out alive, the world’s largest religion was born.

God, Interrupted

If God’s world is one that doesn’t tolerate things like death, disease, and hunger, what happens when it bumps into ours? If I open the door to a dark room, what does the outside light do? If God’s world comes into close proximity, as it did when He became human, we can expect to see some glimpses of things that don’t exist here, a sampling of what it will be like on the day when our world is overthrown by His.

To say that miracles can’t happen is tantamount to declaring that there is no world beyond our own, much less one presided over by a deity who can do whatever it wants.

But that begs the question: why doesn’t He? If miracles are real, why don’t we see more of them? Why the restraint?

For me, that’s an easy one; as a parent I show restraint all the time. I could let my 8 year old drive the family minivan around the block but I’ll pass on that – for now. I could give my 13 year old free reign on the internet, but yeah, no thanx – for now.

With regards to unlimited miracles, maybe God has chosen to take a pass – for now. It might be that a world full of crazy magic things wouldn’t be good for us, not at this stage in humanity’s development anyway.

If you could turn water into wine, would you do it? Maybe for awhile, but over time it would become less miraculous. Better to go through the rigors of planting, cultivating, harvest, crushing, fermenting, etc. That requires a process riddled with success and failure. But the human process of procuring miracles requires one thing that God’s miracles don’t: human cooperation, the kind that results in friendship, closeness, and the brand of intimacy that God seems to want most.

I don’t have a problem with the idea that Jesus turned water into wine, but I don’t think He did it to prove something, I think He didn’t want to sit and watch what would’ve happened without the wine. He was God to be sure, but He was also a first-century Jewish human, one who understood the love and mercy of God like no one else of His day. And while He certainly showed some restraint in the way He leveraged the powers of heaven, sometimes I think He just couldn’t help it.

But why the extravagance? That’s the one that gets me. He didn’t simply make enough wine to keep the party going, He made enough for 40 weddings. I’ll leave it to you to ruminate on why He overboozed it, but I’m left struck by a God who is much more extravagant in His desire to do crazy things on our behalf than we typically give Him credit.