Reflections from The Hill – Wine and Time – John 2.1-11

It’s been said that while I mightn’t have learned a lot of theology in the seminary, I did graduate with a prodigious knowledge of red wine. I dispute that, of course: it took me another 4 years just to pass my final exam.

My tutors each said, in an attempt to pacify me: “That’s OK; you’re just a late bloomer. Your time will come.”

I’m not often likened to the Messiah but, honestly, it’s not difficult to miss the connection. Either that or I’m sillier than I thought.

Stories about grog being in short supply at weddings abound, at least in the community, where turning water into grappa – and walking on water – is part of the vernacular. While I might wonder about the truthfulness of such accounts, it’d be fair to say that there’s a fair bit of hyperbole at play here.

Truth is, most of the stories I’ve heard about weddings are about the quantities of alcohol that get consumed by the guests. (By far the best is the one about the mob who drank 21 bottles of cognac in one sitting. Even Napoleon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.)

Spare a thought for the wait-staff, though, those who had to clean up the empties and vacuum up the crumbs under the tables and dispatch the linen to the laundry. Spare a thought for those who were privy to what was a miracle of abundance, who actually saw it with their peepers, and probably didn’t even get as much as a sip.

Can you imagine the story that was told by the servants in their living rooms when they got home after work? Can you imagine the dawning understanding that they, unseen by most, were/are the ones for whom God’s abundance was especially meant?

Can you imagine that it was in the simple act of rescuing the reputation of the host of a wedding that the world itself was about to change, if only you had eyes to see? John is trumpeting it for us in today’s Gospel: this is just the first sign.

Knowing just this much makes a huge difference. Mary testifies to that simplicity: every moment we live in Jesus, she says, has the capacity to tell us something about The Big Fella. Bread, wine, water, even a hug – given at the right time – can convey something spectacularly supernatural.

It’s a curious thing, then, that the world seems to be drowning in a sea of Seiko and Citizen yet people never seem to have enough time. We might have lots of watches but time is of the essence.

Here’s the thing, when Jesus turns up, it’s always at the right time. However, what we’ve done is teach our young that time equals 5pm on a Friday, after which it’s our own; or it’s 8am on a Monday and it’s time to begin sorting through those invoices again. Everything between those two points is off-limits.

There is a time like this, make no mistake: a time that gets measured in minutes and seconds, weeks, months and years. It’s the sort of time that gets spent in lines at the supermarket or while idling the car at the stoplight. It’s the kind that relentlessly beats until our eyes close and there is no more.

Somewhere deep down, however, is another sort of time, the kind that displaces predictability with possibility. This is the sort that The Bloke talks about when he says that his hour hasn’t come yet.

Through and in the ordinariness of a wedding (and all that entails, as we have read), we hear The Bloke talking, not about dates on calendars, but about The Big Fella revealing something special.

We see him showing the wedding guests, in the utter ordinariness of it all, something about the way The Big Fella will be understood in future: through ordinary things like water and wine, crosses and death.

Whatever time we might think it is, it is also God’s time. When The Bloke turns up, so does The Big Fella – accessible and available to everyone. That’s the time when everything becomes possible.