Jesus Makes the Best Wine for Drunk People to Drink

and we somehow manage to turn it back into ordinary, tasteless water

The assigned Gospel passage for the Second Sunday after Epiphany is John 2.1-11.

Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons.

Six stone jars.

Let's round to the middle, say 25 gallons. Unlike my boy's homework, this is the sort of math I know how to do.

Back in middle school, I was the doogie-houser of home economics. My Italian grandma was a chef. I've got knife skills. I've got all the mother sauces memorized. I'm a pretty good cook. So that's four quarts to a gallon. One quart equals, roughly, six glasses.

Cabernet glasses, and that gives you a minimum grand total of 2,160 glasses of wine that had been watered. That's a lot of wine. Even if I’m coming to your party, that's a lot of wine.

And Jesus makes not three buck chuck. Jesus transforms water into top shelf pinot. Pretty impressive party trick, Jesus. But not to be outdone.

Not to be outdone. Jesus' friends— you and me— the church, we've somehow managed to pull off the even more difficult feat of transforming gold metal wine of grace into the tasteless, odorless, joyless, everyday water of the law.

We've turned the gospel into Iocane powder.

Jesus kicks off the salvation of the world by turning water into wine, but we've pulled off the even more impossible trick of turning his wine back into water.