JOHN111 - How Much Money Was the Water to Wine Miracle Actually Worth?

John 2:1-11

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

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Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. And last night I had a buddy over and he'd never watched Alone. Maybe you've never watched Alone. That's fine, but you should probably watch Alone. That's right. I just recommended a thing because Alone is it's a nice wholesome family show where there's also some animals get stabbed and there is animal gutting. But they bleep all the swears, even. It's pretty wholesome. They just throw people out in the wilderness, like groups of 10 people, as far out in the wilderness as they can. They're like, just don't die. See how long you can go without dying. Whoever goes the longest without dying, you win a bunch of money. And they have to film themselves out there not dying. And it's pretty fun. But if you've never watched alone and you just get dropped in cold, it's terribly disorienting. Because you probably never thought about how to not die in the wilderness or how you would stab an animal and how much, like, would you eat its brain? Well, if you watched alone a lot, you know you want those omega-3s and those fatty acids, or you're not going to be able to maintain your cognitive function under that kind of duress. So if you've never watched it, or you watch it with somebody who's never seen it before, it kind of takes a little bit of explaining. You have to be like, okay, well, pause again. All right, here's why this is a really big deal, and why he has to eat that uh has to, you know, the grouse marrow from the grouse bones. It's because he needs this thing. And it was, you know, it was a bit uh it was a bit difficult to onboard because if you're not, you know, in that vibe, then you don't know what a win looks like or how big a win it would be to catch a four-foot pike in your gill net. So we did an episode like that last night. It was very, very fun. Likewise, sometimes when we read Bible stuff, I feel like there are wins. There are things that are just really great that are in the Bible that happen in these stories, but because we don't live there and we don't think in these categories or paradigm of wealth and how you get stuff and provision and victory and what we care about is totally different or very different than the first century world. Sometimes it takes a minute to stop and think, like, how big a deal would this thing have been, and where would everybody's brains have gone? And you got you just got to put forth the effort, like on a loan, watching it with uh somebody who's new to it to get everybody on board. So we're wrapping up this whole thing with John 2 and the wedding at Cana. And I think we all agree this is very, very good. But like, how good? I mean, how cool would it be on the financial level to get that kind of wine to just show up out of nowhere? And I haven't done the math on that, but we're gonna do the math on it right now. Like just literally, how much money are we talking here in this miracle? How excited should we be over this? All right, Jesus said to the servants, fill the jars with water. So they filled them. Okay, what are the jars again? Okay, you got six stone water jars that they would have ladled clean water out of for ceremonial washing, and then they're each holding 20 to 30 gallons. Okay, I'm not gonna break this down, but since we talked a while back, I did go and really dig into what these jars were like. And I looked at the the Greek, all fancy like the language behind the language, and I came away feeling very confident that yeah, 25 gallons on average is a great guess for what we're talking about here for this amount. So let me uh just submit it. I have a button here, I can push it, and then I get a calculator. Okay, so we got six jars, 25 gallons. That's 150 gallons. It's all gonna turn into wine. And now we just gotta ask the question how much does a gallon of wine cost? So we're just gonna go over here and we're gonna search the garbagey end of that at walmart.com. How much can we get trash wine for? I'm just gonna search trash wine. Let's see if that actually does that. Nope, that didn't work. Oh, it did. I searched trash wine and it came up with something by Snoop Dogg. 19 crimes, Snoop Dogg Cali Red. All right, so you can get 750 milliliters of that for 10 bucks. I don't think, but that wouldn't be choice wine, right? But let's still let's just do the math to work this thing out. So 750 milliliters for 10 bucks. How much is that? I don't know how much 750. Um, how many milliliters in a gallon? Because we want to get it to gallons. Okay, wow, a lot. Okay, so we don't know exactly what I'm just gonna round it for the sake of easy to 4,000 milliliters per gallon. All right, so it's gonna take about five of these bottles of Snoop Dogg wine to equal a gallon, and that's 10 bucks each. So 50 bucks, and then we multiply that by 150 gallons, that's what we want to know. Okay, so if this miracle was Jesus converting the ceremonial washing water into 19 crime Snoop Dogg Cali Red, California red wine by Snoop Dogg from Walmart on sale, that would have been an $800 miracle. That doesn't move the needle for me. I think it was, I think it must, I mean it was much better wine than that. So let's let me just Google something new. Really fancy wine. Okay, I mistyped the word really. That's really Whitman. Okay, I'm going to a place. Uh oh, this one looks real fancy. Let's see how much they'll sell wine for over here. High-end wines. Whoa! Do you people know how much the fancies are paying for wine these days? I got one right here in front of me called. Oh man, that's real foreign sounding. Armand de Brignac Ace of Spades Brute Gold. That's 350 bucks. Okay, so that's gonna be different. Now let's go run the Snoop Dogg equation. I'm just gonna back that up a little bit. All right, it's the same size, right? Yep, 750 milliliters. So same math. We're just gonna go 350 times 50. No. Oh wow, no, it's even more. Wait, I'm doing it wrong. 350 times five per gallon, 1750 times 150 gallons. Oh my goodness. Okay, so if we upgrade from the Snoop Dogg wine to this other stuff, it's like a quarter of a million dollar miracle. Okay, so if we're talking best wine, that's kind of what we're getting to. We're talking about a quarter of a million dollar miracle that just happened right here. You know, none of the miracles in my life have ever probably involved a quarter of a million bucks, but I think I think everybody would know to be very excited about that. So there, sometimes when you just do the math and you put it into modern economic terms, that makes it make more sense. Now, let's just push it a little further. How fancy would a wine have to be for you to be like, wow, that was worth every penny of 350 bucks for a fifth of a gallon for one bottle for 750 milliliters. I'm not sophisticated enough to know. I have no idea what wine that good would taste like. I don't think I could identify it. But apparently the bridegroom could tell. It says then he called the bridegroom aside, and John 2.10, he 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. So this guy was more sophisticated than me. He could tell that he got the super upgraded version. Maybe you can tell, maybe you could not, but if you were a connoisseur of something and someone not only bailed you out in a pinch, breaking the laws of time and space, but did so to the tune of basically a quarter of a million dollar miracle gift. That totally sounded like cable television, like televangelist kind of thing. Your quarter of a million dollar miracle gift. That's not how I meant it. But if like that actually happened, dang. So we're trying to figure out how the original audience just would have responded to this. Like we're trying to put it in a scale that we can understand. That makes the wine miracle uh more impressive to me. I get it better. But what about the metaphor of the miracle? The save the best for last part. The last wine is better than the first wine part. How would they have understood that? Well, my guess is this. I don't think they understood it at all at this point in John 2. Maybe the disciples did, because in verse 11, right after that exchange with the bridegroom, it says, This, the first of Jesus' miraculous signs Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee, he thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him. The disciples, maybe they'd just been around enough to connect the dots with what the metaphor was, the metaphor of purification, but also the metaphor of the best for last. And so if they're hearing Jesus, or rather, they're hearing the bridegroom and they're they're seeing the metaphor of the miracle, and they're like, whoa, all the great stuff that happened with Moses and Abraham and all the amazing things God did. This is the best. Jesus is the payoff of all of that. I mean, that would have moved the needle for them as well. But I don't think the public, I don't think the guests understood the metaphor yet. It's one of those things like, you know, the usual suspects where you get to the end of the story and then you look back and everything clicks and you get it out of order. In retrospect, the point of the miracle becomes, or this additional point to the miracle becomes really evident. Jesus is the newer and better and completer and perfection of all of the best stuff about all of the history of God dealing with his people. I don't want to just say that, like, oh, the Bible says that Jesus is the best wine that came out last. What he brings is the best wine. I want to actually go and look at it because there's a pattern in the New Testament of oftentimes just explicitly the New Testament having quotes where it's like, well, Jesus is better than this guy, Jesus is better than that guy, Jesus is better than this thing. So we're actually going to go look at that tomorrow. And then we're going to move off of the wedding at Cana. So my final thoughts, a little uh recommendation roundup here on the way out the door, because I don't want there to be ambiguity or confusion. Things I recommend. One, watching alone. I think it's a nice show. I think it'll probably work for you. Two, appreciating things deeply enough that you can be a connoisseur of something in this life that you would have the distinguishing taste on something that you know well enough to know the difference between the cheap Snoop Dogg Walmart version and the really fancy nice version. You know, whether that should be wine or not, well, that gets me into my second set, which is not necessarily recommendation roundup for today. I do not necessarily recommend any of these wines because I've never had any of them, and I wouldn't know a good wine if you smash me in the face with the bottle. So I'm not somebody to take advice from in that regard. And I also do not recommend stabbing wild animals unless you are very, very hungry. Cool. I think we covered all the bases. This has been a lovely time for me. I hope it has been for you as well. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.