Holy Kegger

Some of my favourite friends are the ones who constantly surprise me. Even after living with the guy for a year in college, my friend Chef Hanssen still manages to pleasantly surprise me every time I have the opportunity to talk with him on the phone, or better yet, to hang out. Reading the Bible is often like hanging out with Chef for me, constantly being surprised by a Father God and Christ who consistently refuse to stay in the boxes that we’ve furiously constructed for them to inhabit.

Most recently, I have been taken a bit aback by John 2. Many of yall know the story: Jesus is invited to a poorly planned wedding, gets goaded by his mother, and bails out the party host by coming up with some wine. There’s a lot more to the story, however, than the felt-board narrative I remember from Sunday school. The jars that Christ uses to perform His miracle are ceremonial cleansing jars, and I don’t know enough about Jewish culture to know what the significance of using them is, let alone filling them with wine. Was this an act of convenience or was there a deeper significance to the jars?

Perhaps most shocking, however, is what happens after Christ selects his vessels. A far cry from what we would expect from the pious figure cross-legged in the lotus position, Christ commands that six ceremonial jars, each containing 20-30 gallons each, be filled with water which is subsequently transubstantiated into wine. For those of you doing the math at home, that’s about 150 gallons of wine. Crunching a few more figures, we discover that such a volume of wine would fill over 750 standard wine bottles or nearly 300 two-litre bottles. That is a lot of wine. Furthermore, Jesus broke out this wine after everyone had already drunk through the previous supply and were well on their way to significant headaches the next morning. What does this tell us, if anything, about Christ’s ethics of alcohol? What he did for a good time? This is the stuff I wonder about sometimes.