Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the
Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.
There’s an intriguing detail
in the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana in
Galilee, one which I hadn’t really pondered before. It is that detail of what
the water was stored in. Stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification.
It’s very specific.
Purification rites were very
important in the Jewish law, as they still are. You had to be clean before you
came to God, and this was symbolised by ritual washing.
It wasn’t about hygiene – ancient
people didn’t know anything about germs. It was about ritual uncleanness, which
you could contract in all sorts of ways – contact with unclean animals or dead
bodies for example. So at home you’d have to wash before prayer, before Sabbath
meals, before breaking bread. It’s no accident, either, that this water is held
in stone jars. Pottery jars were thought to be able to pick up uncleanness,
while stone didn’t – they were more porous, I suppose. Ritual washing water
stored in contaminated pottery might become contaminated itself. So stone jars
had to be used to store the water you’d use at home.
And look how much of it
there was. Somewhere between 120 and 180
gallons. That’s a lot of water. The kind of ritual you would do at home
consisted simply of pouring a cupful of water over your hands. How much of that
did they think they were going to have to do? Six huge stone jars full of water
borders on the obsessional.
The family hosting this
wedding strike me as being a very pious and careful lot. They were very well
prepared, religiously speaking. There was no way they were going to be caught
out without water to purify themselves. If cleanliness is next to godliness, as
they say, then this was a very godly family.
They were ready to do whatever was in their power in order to keep
themselves in a right relationship with God.
I don’t doubt that they’d
been equally careful in the way they had prepared for this family wedding. I am
sure they had laid in wine in large quantities. Wedding parties could go on for
up to a week, and even for poor families – perhaps especially for poor families
- they had to be as lavish as possible. Your family honour depended on it. So
running out of wine wasn’t a trivial matter. It was a source of deep shame,
which would have lasted for many years. Your neighbours would never forget that
yours was the wedding where everyone had to go home early, disappointingly
sober!
But all their efforts to get
it right hadn’t been enough on this occasion. The wine was running out, and
there was no possibility of getting more. Even if they could afford to buy it,
I don’t suppose you could just pop down to the off licence for another bottle
or two. It is Jesus’ mother who realised what was going on, maybe she was among
the women who were actually preparing the refreshments. And she knew, somehow, that her boy would
help . And that’s what he did –
eventually!
I expect there was other
water around, water for cooking, maybe even a well close by, but that’s not
where Jesus directs the servants to go. The Gospel story is very specific about
it. It is this water for purification that he uses. That matters, it seems to me,
because John’s Gospel is always very precise in what it says.
This little detail is a
reminder of what Jesus’ ministry, his life, his death, and his resurrection
will do for people. Jesus’ actions here proclaim that God wants us to have more
than ritual purity, more than that rather cold and grudging sense that we can
creep into God’s presence, provided everything in our lives is sorted out and
ship-shape. No, said Jesus, what God wants is for us to have lives that
overflow with joy, hearts that sing, life “in all its fullness”, as Jesus puts
it later in the Gospel.
And this is a gift, a
surprise, not something we create through our own frantic effort, but something
God gives. All we have to do, like the servants in the story, is to be open to
its possibility, to be be prepared to scoop it up and pour it out, to have our
eyes open to see God at work in our lives and in the lives of those around us.
This morning, at our all age
worship, I asked people what joys they had had over this past week – the moments,
usually unplanned and unforeseen, when their hearts had been lifted. The smile
of a grandchild, the sight of the first snowdrops, something going well that they’d
expected would be a struggle, unexpected help turning up in the nick of time;
these were some of the answers people
shared. But perhaps if I hadn’t asked,
they might not have thought of these things. The moments when water had been
turned to wine in their lives, when God had turned up to bless them, might have
gone by unnoticed.
Tonight, in the silence, then,
let’s think of our own moments of joy, the water that God has turned to wine in
our lives, and let’s thank God for those moments, and ask for grace to taste
his goodness, the rich wine of his love, in the coming week too.
Amen
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