Among the people and tribes of the East, weddings were held for a week instead of a day. During these long weekly celebrations, the guests at the wedding are served and feasted at the expense of the bridegroom and host. Hence, the host family makes great preparations to buy and store food and drinks, that they may furnish their guests for the whole week. In those days, fresh unfermented wine was the main drink used and the best wine was served first.
This was reasonable because the wine fermented over time and would surely ferment by the end of the week; at a time when man had little technology to preserve fruit juice. Serving fermented alcoholic wine will make the guests so drank that they cannot stay sober throughout the weekly celebrations. Hence, the fresh juice was served first, which inevitably became stale over time. This stale/almost fermented wine was then served last.
On the hills of Cana, close to Nazareth in Galilee, a family wedding was ongoing. Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus, were closely related to the groom. Thus, Mary was directly involved in preparing and executing the marriage ceremony. Jesus, being a family member, also graced the occasion with the first set of His disciples. Having just returned from the baptism at the Jordan and the 40-day fasting and temptation in the Wilderness, He was lean and emaciated….
Midway through the feast, the wine finished, and the organizers of the wedding were understandably alarmed and troubled. Mary, being one of the organizers, saw no other means of averting this shame and disgrace on the family than to appeal to her Son, in whom she had perfect trust and faith. Rushing to Him, she quietly whispered: “they have no wine”.
Although Jesus gave her no positive response, she went to the servers of the wine and instructed them to do whatever He told them to do. What a woman of faith! Heeding her instructions, they went to Jesus, who asked them to fill the wine drums with water and fetch from there to serve the guests. When the chairman of the wedding was served, he was surprised and exclaimed “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse: but thou hast kept the good wine until now.” The governor of the feast looked forward to the worst wine but to his great surprise, it was the best wine, and yet, it was served last!
Although Jesus told Mary that “mine hour is not yet come”, her persistent faith gave the wedding guests the best wine at the last days and saved the groom and family from disgrace. This first miracle of Jesus not only shows Him to be capable of everything but rebukes our unbelief and unnecessary worries about the circumstances of life. If we have the faith of Mary, we will realise that “with Him, all things are possible!”
As we leave 2023 behind and begin 2024, what do we see in hindsight? The earlier years were filled with stale, fermented, bitter, and no wine! It was a year of hardship, death, sorrow, unemployment, redundancy, accidents, and strange climatic events. The earlier years were also filled with a pandemic involving Delta, Omicron, and now, the Deltamicron variants of COVID-19! The years of 2019-2023 were clothed in infamy…yet, if we only go to Jesus in faith, He will turn this bitter wine into the best wine. The best wine awaits those who will believe and walk by faith…
May 2024 give us the best wine…far better than any that our forefathers have ever had …as we closely journey through February in this year, may the grace of Christ turn all our sorrows, tears, and fears into joy, with a drink of the best wine! A blissful and blessed end-of-year Sabbath to all!
