JOHN109 - You Can’t Hurry Love, Wine, or Brisket

John 2:1-11

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And do you like brisket? I do. I don't think anybody likes brisket more than my wife, though. I'll tell you what, we travel anywhere south of our line of latitude in Rapid City, South Dakota. And she just starts asking about barbecue places. Like, I wonder if they have any Texas style brisket. She's a big fan. My buddy made some brisket the other day for us. It was great. This is the finest brisket he's ever made. Great crust on there. I got the burnt ends. It made me very, very happy. But if you've ever eaten brisket or ribs or any kind of barbecue, like legit barbecue, you know that those kind of establishments, when they're out, they're out. You can't just make more ribs or more brisket real quick. It has to smoke. It's a process. There is no shortcut. You can't fastify it by nature. Definitionally, barbecue is slow, and you can't just make it real quick if you need more. Likewise, wine, by definition, is slow. If you run out of wine, you can't just run outside and grab some grapes off of vines and be like, there, that ought to do it. Just uh whip uh whip up some wine real quick. Food like brisket and a beverage like wine, part of the meaning and the richness of them, and why, well, some cultures have discovered brisket, but all cultures discovered wine, is because it takes forethought. It takes planning. And wine is kind of a metaphor for a provision that is a result of forethought and thoughtfulness and care. You have to interact with your environment. You you have to think about allowing enough time to pass for this thing to uh to mature. There we go. That's what I was searching for, to mature into its final form, something that is beneficial to the person who consumes it, something that is pure. You can make wine from not great water, and it will purify that water over the course of time. Well, again, can't just purify that water real quick. If you're in the ancient world at least, that isn't how it works. It would take time and forethought, again, to turn it into wine, to accomplish these things. You get the idea. I'm saying it too long. The miracle in John chapter 2 is all the more awesome. The sign is all the more telling because something that requires forethought and can't be done quickly gets done instantly. It flips, you know, maybe while it's in the servant's cup, as they take it to the master of the banquet in John 2, 9. That's incredible. It's a very subtle touch that Jesus demonstrates here, but it shows not just power over the molecular, not just power over liquid. He's going to demonstrate power over water and liquid many times, but it demonstrates power over time and purification as well. There's so many more levels of authority baked into this particular sign that without thinking about it carefully, we uh we just might miss. Now, okay, let's think about this. What if the miracle was Jesus turned water into Kool-Aid? Okay, that that seems that has super culty overtones. Idiot Whitman, what are you doing? Okay, well, that's what I went with. Kool-Aid, just forget the cult thing. It wouldn't be that impressive a miracle because you'd be like, well, I can turn water into Kool-Aid pretty quickly. I mean, just a spoon, a pitcher, and a thing of Kool-Aid and some sugar, or I just get one of those packs where I don't even have to mess with all just dump the pack in and the sugar's already in there. You just stir it. You don't need forethought to make Kool-Aid, you need forethought to make wine. Also, if Jesus had turned water into Kool-Aid, well, guess what? If the water was gonna kill you because it was only, it was non, it's not potable water, it's only good for washing your hands, it's still gonna kill you or wreck your digestive system and your outhouse for a few weeks if you make it into Kool-Aid and then drink it. Kool-Aid has no purifying qualities, but the the time is what purifies. So Jesus' authority, this is the first. Well, this is really the second hint in John at Jesus' authority beyond time. The first hint is the whole in the beginning, everything was made through him, and then having that in the beginning in John 1-1 kind of you know be a throwback to the idea of, you know, a week, and then we talked about the days of the week thing that seems to be present from the middle of John 1 to the beginning of John 2. There's hints that he's master of time, that somehow he maybe even operates outside of it if he wants to, but now we're seeing it. This isn't just a substance miracle, this is a time miracle and a purifying miracle. Now, the purifying thing, we've talked about it a bunch over the years. I'm not going to get all the way down into it, but a lot of the weirdest laws I was referencing the other day back in deep in the Old Testament, like Leviticus, and you see some in Deuteronomy and Exodus as well. A lot of those laws seem kind of laughable to us today. They get made fun of on the internet, they're you know, good for memeing and stuff. But when you go and look at them, you understand that there's a lot of levels to God calling things pure or impure. I don't totally know why some things are pure and some things are unpure, but I do know this. Some things are pure and some things are unpure because God is pure, and he wanted to introduce the idea to his people that some things are of God and are pure and some things are not. And that if you want to approach a holy God, well, in the natural state of humanity, we are in a broken, unclean state. So there are steps that God provides deep in the Old Testament to enter into a clean state. That clean and unclean list became exaggerated over the centuries. Again, in that era between the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah in the 400s BC up to the time of Jesus. It seems like there was kind of an expansion, uh, an even larger emphasis on clean and unclean and on being ritually pure. That is, in a state relative to sin and behavior, or relative to bodily functions and stages in life that would make one fit to enter into the assembly and participate in the religious life of the community. There were things that are, you know, some things that were no fault of your own, like just the regular rhythm of a woman's life, the things that a young man can't control in his dreams when he's very young that would make somebody unclean. Okay, well, then there'd be steps, not horrible steps, but steps that you would take to enter back into a state of ritual cleanliness so that you could come into the presence of God. Well, this doesn't make a ton of sense to us. We don't think in these categories, but to John's original audience, they would have very much thought in those categories. And those stone jars that the water, which got turned into wine, were in, that water was part of this thinking about purification and cleanliness and all of this stuff. Lots of little details and nitpicky things and keeping track of stuff and remembering, did I do this? You know, at one point, I think we've talked here about the idea of um straining out a gnat, like any water you're going to drink. You, you know, some of the expectation was that you would pour it through a very narrow filter because bugs were unclean or certain bugs, and you wouldn't want to consume one, but you can't see gnats because they're too small. You know, these practices had just become ludicrously elaborate to try to, you know, keep up this man-made purification thing. Well, then along comes Jesus, and he demonstrates himself to be Lord over that which is pure and impure. Let me give you an example from each of the Gospels. In Matthew chapter eight, one of my favorite stories, Jesus comes down off of the Sermon on the Mount. It's the first big public speech, the first of the five speeches around which the book of Matthew is structured, and everybody's blown away. Jesus describes what the values of the kingdom are and where you fit, and that it makes sense to believe. And there's a mixed audience there, people who like him, people who don't, people who are indifferent. And the final commentary that we get from Matthew on this Sermon on the Mount is when Jesus had finished saying these things, the crowds were amazed at his teaching because he taught as one who had authority and not as their teachers of the law. And then the very next thing that happens, like what's your question there? Here's my question. Well, okay, the teaching sounds authoritative. It doesn't sound like a bunch of guessing and speculation. It sounds like he just knows these things to be true, but can you back it all up? These are big claims, these are big teachings. Can you what authority do you have to say things so authoritatively? Well, the answer comes in the very next, you know, 10 or 20 verses with two miracles. When he came down from the mountainside, large crowds followed him. A man with leprosy came and knelt before him and said, Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. Well, leprosy was like the most unclean thing you could have. I mean, the guy's not a leper because he's a bad person. He's just happened clean and unclean. Remember, he's not the same as naughty and nice. It can overlap, but it's not the same, right? So this guy's unclean. He can't go be around people, he can't touch people. There were all kinds of rules, some biblical, some just cultural, about what you do. Everybody had to contend with what do you do with the lepers, right? Well, this guy would, I mean, this is maximum ceremonially and hygienically unclean. And he comes right up to Jesus. That's a gesture of faith. Lord, if you're willing, you can make me clean. Notice he doesn't even say like you can cure my leprosy. His greater concern, based on the way this is phrased, was not, I have this disease and I want it to go away. His greater concern was this stupid disease effectively cuts me off from the religious life of the community. Surely in the grace of God, there were provisions for all of that. But he wants to be clean. He wants to be able to participate in the sacrificial system and all of this other stuff. Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man. Unthinkable. Unthinkable. And he says, I am willing, be clean. Immediately, the man was cured of his leprosy. Then Jesus said to him, See that you don't tell anyone, but go show yourself to the priest and offer the gift Moses commanded as a testimony to them. You see what he's doing there? He's like, just go do the ceremonial washing. He's referencing a whole set of expectations for if you have leprosy, you're supposed to go to a priest, you're supposed to be scrutinized, if you're better, he'll be like, All right, uh, you're better. You're readmitted into the community and the religious life of the community. So he tells the guy to follow that very real biblical law from the middle of Leviticus chapter 14. Well, it says it here. Yeah, Leviticus 14, Leviticus 17. And then immediately after that, there's another miracle that you know deals with time and space where Jesus heals somebody by distance, but I won't read that one to you right now. So in the early going of John, John 2, we are getting the impression that Jesus is master not just over time and preparation and the master of the party, but he is greater than the purifying system. He's greater than all of these purification rites and rituals that have existed for so long. It's just a hint in John 2. It's a stronger hint early in Jesus' ministry here in Matthew chapter 8. But this theme is repeated all over the place. And speaking of that theme, I had all sorts of ambitions to go and show you all in one day. Like, look, this power over impurity thing appears not just in John 2, but also in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. I'm not making it up, and we're going to do it all in one day. You know what happens when I think things like that or do things like that, though. It just never works out because we just get to go and it takes a minute. So tomorrow we're going to look at two dramatic miracles that are always linked together in Mark and in Luke, and see Jesus demonstrating his authority over clean and unclean in all kinds of different scenarios. This is a very intentional theme. And in order to fully appreciate the water to wine miracle, we got to unpack it a little bit more. So we'll do that tomorrow and we'll pick up with getting right into Mark V and the example from there. Okay, cool. Seems like a good place to stop. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.