Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, and welcome to re:Christian, a critical and satirical reconsideration of Christianity, the Bible, and God. This is episode 22: “Wine and Coffee.”
Perhaps even those who’ve never read a word of the Bible, whether they’re Christian or not, would know what you are referring to when you mention turning water into wine. It refers of course to one of the best-known of Jesus’s miracles, and in fact what some people affirm is the first miracle ever performed by him. Here is how it is recorded in the gospel of John:
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.”
4 “Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”
5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
6 Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.
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 realize 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.”
11 What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2:1–11)
Apart from the, let’s call it a fact for now, of actually changing water into wine—a pretty useful skill, to say the least—there are a few details here that call for a little attention.
First, Jesus says to his mother when she informs him that the wine has run out: “Woman, why do you involve me? … My hour has not yet come.” I checked a biblical interpretation of this specific verse, and it clarifies that his addressing his mother as “Woman” is “a quirk of translating from one language to another,” and that he didn’t mean it rudely as it comes across today in Modern English.
The other part of his reply—“My hour has not yet come”—is even more intriguing. The same interpretation says that this could be referring to two different things: “He is constantly aware that He is on a divine schedule, and everything needs to happen at the right time. Since toasts were common at celebrations like this, it's also possible that Jesus literally meant that it was not yet His turn to offer a toast.” Those are two pretty different possibilities: one having to do with proper protocol at a wedding, and one with his grand plan for doing his ordained work on earth before being crucified and ascending to heaven.
The second thing I notice is the amount of wine Jesus produces when he does his trick. There are six jars and let’s say each holds 25 gallons. That’s 150 gallons of wine, or the equivalent today of 768 regular-sized bottles. That’s either one gigantic wedding or some guests who know how to sock it back.
And the third thing kind of makes me disappointed in humanity. “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.” Is that the way weddings are really planned? It should be the most open and celebratory day in a couple’s life, but they make sure they have things arranged so that people are so drunk on the good wine that they won’t notice when the switch to the cheap stuff happens? You plan a wedding with at least one prong of outright deception? Granted, this is low on the list of things to be disappointed in humanity for—it’s not genocide or the small-dicked authoritarian love of war (yes, I’m looking at you, Bibi and Vlad and Joey)—but still.
I don’t want to make a lot of fanfare about this, because like Jesus, my hour has not yet come, but I also performed a miracle today. And, yes, it was my first one as well. My beloved Krups 5-cup coffee maker had been showing signs of dying over the past couple of weeks. It usually brews fairly silently and doesn’t start rasping until the last of the water is being fed into the carafe. But, possessed by some demon I know must not be of this earth, lately it had been rasping right from the beginning, like Linda Blair late in the movie. It was fine for a while, but then the rasping also led to performance issues: the water would laboriously make its way into the carafe, but it didn’t interact enough with the ground beans to make a decent cup. I declared it dead yesterday until on a whim I Googled a question and it suggested a solution that was simple enough that I was willing to try it: just run one cycle of the brew with vinegar instead of water.
Well.
I did that and of course to get out the taste of vinegar you have to run a few cycles with just water. During this miracle, too, my mother was here, visiting from the west. I had run through several cycles of just water and it was her who told me that the last time, when I wasn’t paying attention, there was no rasping till the end, as it should be. “Woman,” I said to her. “Are you sure about that?” She said yes.
I paused a moment. I poured out the hot water and filled the carafe with cold. Poured it into the machine. Clicked the one button on this well-designed baby and it went orange and the water, well, the water streamed out in silence, and there was hardly even a rasping at the end.
I’m a newbie at this miracle stuff. I’m apprehensive about my coffee in the morning, when the water will also have to penetrate the ground coffee. Will that be the element added to the experiment that proves me wrong, makes me a pretender, a manqué? Will it work for a glorious ten seconds but then gasp and sputter into uselessness, now, a good two years after the warranty has expired? Am I doomed and destined to admit defeat, to declare my supernatural power no power at all, my attempt at five cups an embarrassing failure when Jesus casually produced 2,400?
I hope not, not just for the fact of it, but for that symmetry that I want. Jesus using water to make wine, and me using in effect wine to make coffee. We are all smothering in a world that seems to be falling apart in all its aspects, a world crying out for the Second Coming. Perhaps I am already here, have been here all along, but am only now arriving at any semblance of the gravity of my mission.
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. Check the show notes for a transcript, sources, and contact information. And please join me again on Thursday.
