For all time
John Povey
January 24, 2020
Add to Favourites
Listen to this daily worship
John 2: 1-3, 6-10 (NIVUK)
1 On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, 2 and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’
6 Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from eighty to a hundred and twenty litres.
7 Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’; so they filled them to the brim.
8 Then he told them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.’
They did so, 9 and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realise where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside 10 and said, ‘Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.’
“I hover over the expensive Scotch and then the Armagnac, but finally settle on a glass of rich red claret. I put it near my nose and nearly pass out. It smells of old houses and aged wood and dark secrets, but also of hard, hot sunshine through ancient shutters and long, wicked afternoons in a four-poster bed. It's not a wine, it's a life, right there in the glass.” - Nick Harkaway, ‘The Gone-Away World’, 2008.
Some wines are so expensive that most of us would never dream of purchasing a bottle for ourselves, let alone giving one away. The wine changed from water at the wedding in Cana was, by all accounts, the best wine served that day. It was so good that it astounded the chief steward who knew that it was customary for the quality to decrease over the course of a day. He was not expecting the twist: wine that just got better and better! Lavish generosity indeed. A symbol of the new covenant, sealed by the blood of Christ. It is new, because it involves the greatest cost of all — a sacrifice which brings people together in joyful reconciliation. The miracle of Cana is for all time.
PRAYER:
Lord, I thank you that you enter into every place in my life — the joyful, the painful, the trivial — that I may be transformed, renewed, refreshed, and sustained. Amen.
Login to comment.