JOHN098 - Potentially Family Future-Altering Wedding Disaster Inbound

John 2:1-8

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and I would like for you to picture your worst ever party faux pas. You know what it is. You know what it is immediately. You don't even have to think about it. In fact, if you're listening to this with someone who loves you and has known you for a long time, they're looking at you right now, indicating that they know what it is. Everybody has a party faux pas. Party faux pas are what keep us awake at night and cause us to feel deep regret. Whisper things to ourselves that are hearts, you idiot, stupid. I can't believe you did that. I got a bunch of them, and I'm not going to tell you about all of them because I want to retain some shred of dignity in this relationship. But I will tell you about one. Maybe those of you who are old timers have been around here for forever, maybe you've heard this one before. I can't remember if I told you or not. When I was real little, I think it was at my dad's seminary, maybe. I mean, we're talking earliest fuzzy memories here. So, you know, you can't hold me to the details, but I think we were at some sort of ball or dance. Maybe it was a wedding dance or something. It seems to me that maybe it was a wedding dance. And my little sister was a toddler, and I was just a tiny bit older than her. And she was out there and we were dancing together, and it was like, Oh, that's so cute. And I was like, This is annoying. And I'm like, I'm just gonna pick her up and dump her over. So I gave her kind of a bear hug and then just let her go, and she flopped down on her little diapered butt. And I remember the room disapproving. And I think it's the first time I remember a whole bunch of people disapproving of me at once because it was a massive party faux pas. I think everybody noticed there was a big gasp. And look, I'm not even kidding here. I don't do a lot of, you know, like lay on the couch, psychoanalysis therapy stuff. Like I it's totally cool if that's what you're into. It just hasn't like I haven't done a lot of that. But I wonder if I sat down with one of those people and they were like, let's talk, like, how are you? What's your weird stuff? And I was like, I got these weird things. I wonder if they would say it was the dropping your sister thing and everybody guffawing all at once. That's uh what we call in the biz casually a core memory that really shaped you. Party faux pas are tough, right? Because it's a mistake that you don't just make in front of a lot of people, but you make a party faux pas in front of a lot of people, and it's supposed to be a nice time for everybody. So it's very, very humiliating when that goes wrong. And like I said, I've got many more that I'm not gonna tell you, and I bet you do too. And we can all just sit here and stew and brine it and feel weird about it. Okay, now that we've got the stage set and we all feel properly agitated by remembering our worst party faux pas, maybe that will help us better appreciate the pressure that the host of this wedding in John chapter 2 was under when they run out of wine prematurely at this wedding. So we got a situation. Uh John 2.1. On the third day, a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, They have no more wine. Dear woman, why do you involve me? Jesus replied, My time is not yet come. His mother said to the servants, Do whatever he tells you. Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, Fill the jars with water. So they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet. They did so. And then something happened. And we're going to talk about what happened in a minute. But everybody's heard the phrase turning water into wine. So I think you know what's going to happen. It doesn't seem like that big a deal. Like a lot of things in the Bible, right? When we're cruising through the stories and stuff and the narrative parts of the Bible, it just doesn't seem like that big a deal. My story about dropping my sister on the floor when I was little and she was a toddler. I mean, it doesn't sound good, but it doesn't sound like that. It's like not a core memory for you because I told you about it. It's not gonna stick with you like that. But when you're in the moment, these are huge things. Now, I have never lived in the first century AD. I've never been Jewish, not even for like you know, six or eight months when things were screwed up at 23 in me. I was four percent African American for a while, right there. They said I was maybe a little bit from Morocco. So, like for a little while, that was me, but then it just wore off. It just I relogged in. I was like, no, I'm telling you, I'm 4% African. And then it was just gone. I was like, I promise it was there. I got a screen cap, I can prove it. But what I'm saying is I've never, even for a minute, been even a little bit Jewish, never lived in the first century. I got no Middle Eastern heritage, nothing, right? So I can't relate to these pressures at all. I don't understand how they did what I like, I don't feel any of this. But let me tell you, when I talk to people who are from this part of the world, even today, they feel this passage harder than you and me because there is this thing about Middle Eastern hospitality and the expectations that go with it. And it's it's a very old set of expectations. It goes beyond Judaism, even. I got all kinds of theories for maybe why this is the case. Uh, I don't know, the world is hostile and inhospitable in the ages before travel in a part of the world that could be pretty harsh. You know, uh hospitality probably mattered that much more. You can also go back to these ancient clans and tribes and maintaining peace between them with intermarriage, maintaining political peace within a society by having a nice wedding where we take a member of my family, a member of your family, put them together, and we get along. Also, I think a lot of these feasts were a really big deal and lasted a really long time because it was just an opportunity for people to get together. I mean, you get the religious festivals and you celebrate a certain way at the religious festivals, but then you've got, you know, once or twice a year, somebody's going to get married and it's like a week of vacation. Part of what I think is kind of fun about the way they would do these weddings back then is that it kind of put who paid to host it on a rotating basis. You know, maybe if you have four or five kids and they get married four or five times, you host the big party for the area. And then, you know, everybody else has kids, they host big parties as well. Also, I think these were a big deal and lasted for a long time because you got to travel a long ways to go to these weddings. You know, we today I live in Rapid City, and uh, as I'm recording this, it's Father's Day, so I'm a little bit ahead of you if you're live here because I got a tiny bit of travel coming up. And so for Father's Day, we just zipped up to Spearfish and Spearfish Canyon. If you've been to the Black Hills, you know what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you don't, but it's this beautiful canyon up there. It's really not very far in the grand scheme of things from our house. We can do a nice little afternoon drive and go see a bunch of the northern Black Hills stuff, and it's just great. But what if we were settlers on, you know, like the Oregon Trail? And we're not on the Oregon Trail, but what if we were on the Oregon Trail? That's days and days of travel, and somebody's getting dysentery along the way. No sane person would do that overland trek without a car up to spearfish and just stay for two hours and be like, oh, we need to make an appearance at this wedding. Oh, we dropped in. Okay, we had a nice time. No, everybody's doing all this travel. They're being asked to come a long way for these weddings, like this one that's taking place in Cana. And so it's going to be a multi-day experience, just like one day bleeds into the next. Also, as we'll talk about, I don't know, maybe tomorrow, the rhythm of these weddings, it was different than ours. Our weddings are kind of centered around a ceremony that, you know, everybody sits in. And well, you know what our weddings are like. I think these weddings worked a little bit differently, and we have some clues in other passages that we can look at to get a little fuller sense. But when you think about how they did weddings back then, too, like just the ceremonial stuff, it kind of makes sense timing-wise that why this would be a multiple-night, overnight kind of event. And so it's not just a wedding, right? Like this is your turn in the rotation to host the thing that brings everybody together and keeps stability in the community. And you don't want to look like an idiot. You don't want to have a party faux pas, because you're gonna wear that like an albatross until the end of your days if you screw this thing up. Also, what if you have like one daughter or one son and you're hosting this thing, and you only get one crack at it, and you do something stupid and it ruins everything and it's embarrassment. We joke, right? But that could be the kind of thing that would become a nickname or a stain on your family name for generations to come. So you and I, ah, I bumped the microphone. You and I look at this story and we're like, oh no, somebody ran out of wine. Hee hee hee. Like this. So uh the stakes were very big. And I think the original audience John is writing to would have gasped in horror the way the people did at whatever that event was at the beginning of the fuzzy part of my memory. When I dropped my sister and everybody gaffawed in horror at that event, I think the original audience would have been like, oh wow, that's a real problem. You're only on the third day of a wedding and you're out of wine. Oh no, you didn't count the cost very well, brother. Oh no, people are gonna sober up or just get annoyed. They're gonna leave. This is not going to be the kind of thing that sows peace. Also, like, think about this. I mean, back then you gave like money and dowries and big gifts to each other between families. Like when weddings happened, there was significant exchange of wealth to set the next generation on the right course. And maybe certain contractual promises are even made about like what kind of wealth each party is bringing to the table here. And if you run out of wine on the third day, that would make it look like maybe you exaggerated a little bit or cooked your books, and maybe you can't follow through on your promises. Like, maybe what are we doing here with this whole wedding? The point is, I think the stakes were very, very high here. And I think as readers, we are supposed to discover that the wine ran out on the third day and put our hands on our head, like the surrender cobra pose, and be like, oh no, that poor family. Oh no, that poor host. Oh, that poor couple. Oh, your reputation is shot. This is supposed to be the happiest day, and it's just gonna be a complete disaster. We're supposed to feel like a great thing was happening, but now it's about to swing to total disaster. And now we're hoping against hope that maybe Jesus can swoop in and salvage this thing because it's about more than people getting liquored up and hammered to their heart's content. There's way more on the line here. I think we just got to do a little extra effort to put ourselves in the shoes of the original audience, and hopefully we're well on our way in that regard. Okay, more stuff about this wedding at Cana tomorrow. Real quick, I need to say thank you again because I went over to Amazon.com, a place where you can buy anything, and I checked on my book. I try not to check on it very much, but I, you know, I kind of hope people will buy it and maybe like it. And dang, a bunch of you have given this five stars, and the reviews that you've written are ludicrously nice. And I I just want to say thank you again for liking the book, for making an effort with the book, and for writing nice things about the book. If you're new here, I wrote a book. You were probably figuring that out. It's called The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. It's like the really fast version, really fast version comparatively, of what we're doing here. Thank you so much to everybody. You've all been so supportive about that. And you putting your name next to my name by writing a review is a much bigger deal than you probably think. Thank you so much for doing that. More on the wedding, Kana, tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.