Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast, and we're gonna do an exercise. We're gonna team building the interactive get to know. We're gonna have fun. We're gonna do an exercise to start today. And this exercise, I got a name for it. It's gonna be called, Would you drink out of it? The way it works is I say a thing, and then you, regardless of social context, where you're listening to the thing, shriek at the top of your lungs your answer to the question of would you drink out of it? Yes or no. Don't you dare shriek, maybe. That is not one of the it's not how the game works. Quit messing with the game. All right. Thing number one. Let's start with an easy one. A cup. That's right. You would drink out of it. That was the correct answer. Okay. A five-gallon bucket from Home Depot. Would you drink out of it? Right? That would it it's still clean water. We're presupposing these are all clean, by the way. It just feels weird. It's still water. It's the same thing, but it just it's not really what that vessel is for. And some of you are like, I totally see what you're doing. I know where this is. This is all just a this is all just to get us back to John 2, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. What are you gonna do? We're not done with the exercise. We're gonna keep going. Even if you do understand where this is going, we're gonna keep going. All right, how about this? Assuming clean, like right off the shelf or right out of the box. How about a toilet? Would you drink out of a toilet if there was just clean, fresh water in there and had never been used? But you know, it's a toilet. Yes or no? Okay, interesting. Different answers floating around. Okay. How about a filled to the max, freshly installed, very clean baptismal at your church? Would you just walk up to the edge of that, get down on all fours, or maybe if it's one that's up high, just stick your face in there and slurp baptismal water? Would you do that? Maybe it depends on your tradition. Let's assume the water is unblessed. Would you do that? It's kind of a funny question, right? Because it's all I mean, we're assuming it's clean water, there's nothing to be worried about here. It's just that I don't know, stuff means stuff. And certain things are meant to accomplish different things, and even if it's not entirely rational, no, there are just certain things I don't want to drink out of. I I don't know why. It doesn't have to make sense. Certainly, water drunk from a baptismal, even in a low church context, would like that would mean something. It's like performance art. You would feel like somebody was making a point if they did that or proposed that we should all do that. Well, look, whenever we read the Bible or think about things from distant times in the past, it's very easy to imagine that they are just dumber and worse than us, and that the things they believed that didn't make sense were nonsensical superstitions, and the things that we believe that don't make sense, our little taboos and habits and cultural norms and all of that are perfectly enlightened. The reality is we're all kind of the same. Like these habits of mind and culture should be something that we celebrate across time and across cultures. Like, hey, we're all weird. And so we get this situation in John chapter 2, where Jesus' mom proposes that he solve the solution of there not being wine. And so we have two dynamics going on. One, we've explored quite a bit, the relationship between Jesus and Mary. Looks like he's not gonna do it. Dear woman, why do you involve me? Jesus replied, My time has not yet come. But then apparently that's like insider code between Jesus and his mom to be like, I'm totally gonna do it. So his mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells you. So here's the scene. You got this big fancy wedding. We're in Cana, which is near Nazareth. So we're saying you're kind of west of the Sea of Galilee. Jesus is a relative unknown. There are rumblings. John the Baptist has been pointing to him. If John's timeline is to be taken very precisely and literally, then maybe John the Baptist hasn't been talking about him that long. And Jesus is on the very, very front end of anybody really knowing who he is or what he's about. And you got a room full of people who believe things. They believe in God. There's a lot of people in this room who are probably really familiar with the scriptures. Probably everybody in this room has memorized a bunch of what you and I would call the Old Testament at this point. And they're also steeped in, you know, ancient Near Eastern cultural, familial tradition, about how weddings work and families work and all of this. There are certain expectations in place. One of those expectations is that you're supposed to wash up before you banquet. You need to purify yourself before you can engage in this kind of celebration. Now, the theme of celebration and feasting is going to come up a lot in John. Maybe right now you might be tempted to look at this and be like, uh, I'm not sure it really matters so much that this is a wedding, but I'm telling you, as we work through John, we're going to look back on this wedding at Cana thing, this water and wine miracle. And I think we're all going to agree, oh no, John was definitely doing something there. The point of Jesus going to all these different feasts and things happening around the festal or festive rhythm, the calendar of the year that had been passed down from generations past in the Old Testament to these people at this time. It's all there. And John is making theological points by highlighting the miracles, the miraculous signs that Jesus does around these weddings. Also, we got a very human situation unfolding here in front of us. This is supposed to be a celebration. This is supposed to be a launch of a new generation of the family, a melding of two families. They thought about that differently back then. New families, they weren't quite as independent of the launching families of the previous generation as they are now. There's just a ton at stake. The wine is gone. This is shocking. This is a big deal. And Jesus is in a position to do something about it, and it looks like he's going to. Verse 6: nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from 20 to 30 gallons. Now I've been driving at this for a few days, but I'll say it again. I think the important thing to note here is that the vessels full of water that are going to be turned into wine are these stone jars. So the jars apparently are empty or mostly empty, because in the next verse it says, Jesus said to the servants, fill the jars with water. So they filled them to the brim. Where did they get that water? I would assume from a well. This is water that was used for a light ceremonial washing when people came in. So if the water smells like butt, it's not really going to get the job done. It's got to be, it's got to be fresh, clean water. Jesus actually ran afoul of the religious leaders on more than one occasion because they felt he wasn't washing properly or that his disciples weren't washing properly. And so why are these jars partially empty? Well, these jars are meant for washing. They're not meant for drinking. And so they're partially empty because a ton of people are at this feast and they've you know all made a big show of look, I've washed my hands properly. This is a sanitary issue, but it is also an extended, expanded universe, expanded Old Testament law issue. Now it's very fashionable on the internet to make fun of the hygiene laws from the Old Testament, but in a lot of ways, I think you could make the case that those laws are what kept the Jewish people from dying, like so many other nomadic people groups did. People who just wandered around in the relatively dirty ancient world, had short lifespans, and a lot of times, you know, a disease, plague, something like that would just catch up with a small group of people and they just go away and be forgotten to history. Most people groups who were are no longer known, but the Jewish people have persisted very well. So we can make fun of those laws as much as we want, but I see the provision of God in those hygienic laws written back then. But also it's worth noting for the purposes of our conversation today, here in John chapter 2, that those laws bloat. God doesn't bloat them, God's followers bloat them. There are a series of reforms right at the end of the Old Testament led by Ezra and Nehemiah during the Persian age, during the reign of Artaxerxes I. And these reforms are meant to get crap together. No more doing bad stuff, no more breaking God's laws, no more marrying pagans from next door and a little bit worshiping their gods and a little bit worshiping the real God, Ezra and Nehemiah, they clean that up and they kind of set the tone for better and for worse, I think with the best of intentions, for the next few hundred years leading up to John chapter two in the time of Christ. And during this time, a lot of those hygiene laws from the Old Testament get expanded beyond anything that God specifically ordained and into bonus rules on top of bonus rules to create a boundary so people wouldn't accidentally violate the actual rules. And Jesus, you know, he runs up against this mentality constantly in the Gospels of the religious leaders still trying to really see through the vision of Ezra and Nehemiah, I think in a misguided sense, to get to a place where finally the Jewish people will behave so well that God will restore Israel. Well, Jesus comes along and there's a different plan and rationale and approach to God restoring Israel, and that's the redeeming work of Christ, doing something that we could not do ourselves through our own self-discipline. Obviously, there'll be a lot more of that as we're working through the rest of the Gospel of John. Well, in this situation, then you've got these stone jars, and they would have had two sets of connotations for the original audience. One is hygienic. We clean because we live in a dusty, dirty place in the ancient world. And so you come in, like, come on, we want you to look sharp for a wedding. I've told you before that one of the practices for weddings at this time was they would provide clean clothes. So you travel all that distance, you come in, you know, off the street, and it's like, well, it get cleaned up before you come into the banquet. So you look sharp and you feel fresh and you feel clean. The other would have been theological because the washing kind of meant something. It was a nod to or an evolution out of Old Testament law that is born from the idea of ritual purity, being in a place where you are presentable before God or presentably ritually cleaned for an activity. Now, this clean and unclean thing also had two levels. There is the presence of God kind of ritual cleansing, like I need to be tidied up in this way to do the religious rhythms of the season, of the week, whatever it might be. But then there's also this idea of ritual cleansing that comes after you've been sick or after you've been dirty, not even because you did anything bad, just because you're we're around death or uncleanness or whatever. So these two ideas were very closely integrated in the mind of the original audience. Now let's go all the way back to the thing we were talking about at the beginning with like buckets and pails and toilets and stuff. You and I think we're above that. We think we're very different than that. And it's very easy to look at these wedding guests and think, oh, they're being terribly silly and superstitious about this stuff, but you don't want to drink out of a toilet. So, hey, we've all got our thing, and stuff means stuff. And for these people, the washing jars would have meant one, hygiene, one and a half, a public display of hygiene, like kind of like performatively squirting the uh the sanitizing goo on hands before you go and greet people after church or whatever. But two, it would have had undertones of ritual or religious cleansing. So a wedding certainly has a religious element to it. Point is this those jars just aren't meant for drinking out of. And it takes a little bit of effort for you and me to understand why. From a distance, just nobody, it wouldn't occur to anybody to drink out of that. Yet what happens next is Jesus says 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, and they did so. And then the master of the banquet takes a drink of this water, but it's not water anymore. It's wine. Where did the transformation happen? What does it mean? How would it make sense for a steward or the other people there who are figuring out what happened to respond to this? We'll just keep going on and we'll think about that tomorrow. In the meantime, here is my word of wisdom and commissioning to all of you. I wouldn't drink out of full baptismals, nor would I drink out of toilets, but ultimately, that's between you and the Lord, I guess. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.