Sermon: The Best Wine

Text: You have kept the best wine until now!

John 2.10

It has to be said: In order fully to appreciate the metaphor of wine in the New Testament, you need a teetotal upbringing. Only then can you recall the first sip, the sense of the forbidden, of an element of the naughty, and thus the paradox of what is truly human: namely, transgression and the possibility of change. For wine is itself the product of change, the agent of change, the symbol of change and the symbol of the permanence of change.

I should say that I heard of a couple who went away for a long weekend leaving their young adult family at home for a well-organized party. On their return the parents asked the young people how things had gone and were told, O yes, very well. We had a good time. You told us we could help ourselves to whatever we wanted, so we looked at the wine in the cellar and remembered that you always told us, whenever it comes to preparing meals, to use up the oldest first....

That's part of the problem, I admit, in the analogy of new wine; but the point is the newness of the experience, the newness of what is promised, the newness of the age that is now just dawning. And for that, you have to come to it new - and the best vintage tastes of the age to come.

Wine is the product of change, in that embodies the life of the grape, fed by the rain, ripened by the sun, harvested by the devotee, coaxed into maturation by the connoisseur, bottled by those with the patience of Job and enjoyed by those who are prepared to be transformed.

It is the agent of change, in that it lifts the dreariest of meetings into a wisdom way beyond the measure of the glass - truth peeps o'er the glass's rim - somebody has said. And - if I may betray a trade secret - it helped even the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England to produce its Report a year or two ago: just enough to drink with the meal to enable people to speak honestly without lapsing into avoidance or insult; and all with such a level of bonhomie, at times it was a proper symposium (look it up!).

And it is the symbol of change here in the Gospel. You have kept the best wine until now! For this is the first of the signs. The others will have to do with making the lame walk, letting the blind see and the deaf hear; the dead will be resurrected and the poor will hear good news. This is the kingdom of God!

As soon as you see in John's Gospel any reference to Jesus showing his glory, you know that John is dealing with what in the other three Gospels is the transfiguration, the story of Jesus being changed, in the presence of the disciples, into the embodiment of glory. And that is another way of saying that the glory of God is shown chiefly in the capacity of Christ to bring about human transformation.

You've been through this story before. Do the three days stand for the three days of resurrection? the water pots for Jewish rites of purification the inadequacy of the old covenant? the fact that there are six that what is lacking is the seventh, the perfect, number, the sabbath, the day of the coming of the kingdom?

The point is that Jesus brings about change! Change from death, in resurrection; change from purification rituals, into purity of life; change from the covenant of old, restricted as it was to the physical children of Abraham, to the new covenant, which embraces the whole of humanity; change from the lack-lustre monotony of the everyday into the glory of the now of Jesus Christ. You have kept the best wine until now indicates that all yesterdays - dusty and deathly as they are - are superseded in what is taking place at this moment.

And if water is changed into wine, then creation is changed into sacrament; and the ordinary, the natural, is changed from the glorious into the mind-blowing.

The glory is in the change - because the kingdom of God is, as we might say, metamorphic. Not in the sense of metamorphic rock, which might just about remember undergoing change a few millennia ago and has no need of it any more: rather, the principle is that change - metamorphosis - is characteristic of the life of God which is active within, and now shared with, the human race.

And that is how wine is, fourthly, the symbol of the permanence of change. For this supply of wine is more than can be drunk at one wedding reception. Six stone jars of water, for purification, are for bathing in, not for drinking. This is a boundless salvation, a deep ocean of love, a fullness of mercy, a blessing from the opened windows of heaven that neither the human world nor the human spirit can contain. And if the supply of this wine is eternal, then change is the order, not just of the day, but of the new age.

In 1 Corinthians Paul is more personal than metaphorical, and there is a shift in perspective here. He is more concerned with resurrection than transfiguration, more event than imagination, for he harks back to what he can only speak of as a meeting - with the risen Lord.

So he comments how, as he sees it Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, and his perspective is shifted on to the character of Jesus Christ himself, whose life-blood believers drink as they share in the wine of the heavenly banquet. The cup of blessing which we bless is - indeed! - a sharing in the blood of Christ.
But the point is parallel, if not exactly the same. As far as Paul is concerned, the change that Jesus Christ makes is the change from worrying about whether he can produce the right credentials, or can be understood from a solely logical, philosophical point of view. He supersedes such petty distinctions.

There is a new 'wisdom' to be found in Christ, because it is Christ who was raised from the dead; it is Christ who confounds the demands for proof and the requirements of the limited reasoning that Paul's opponents demand; it is Christ who calls all people, regardless of their social standing, into membership of God's people; and it is Christ who meets needs far deeper than the evidence of the eyes or the satisfaction of a syllogism.

As far as Paul is concerned, Jesus Christ is life. He is the Wisdom of God - from Jewish tradition, now, not simply Greek - the Wisdom of God who is the agent in creation, as he will spell out later in Colossians. And that means that Christ is is, for Paul, (a) righteousness, that is, our standing before God as righteous; (b) sanctification, that is, our growth in that righteousness as holy people; and (c) redemption, that is, the ultimate, the final, purchase of the human from the grip of evil and death.

And for both Paul and John, you don't need anything else; and there is a particular reason for that, which, again, they both share. For Paul it is the centrality of what he says a little later in 1 Corinthians 2.2: For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. For John, it is the awareness that the glory of Jesus Christ is the glory of the crucifixion. Father, ... I have glorified you on earth by finishing the work that you gave me to do. So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed. And that is the glory of the cross; accepted - not reversed, but vindicated - in the resurrection.

A little more than seven years ago, on 19 October 1997, I stood in this pulpit at Matins and said that, earlier in the week, I had had a conversation with my son. Well, he had said, your first sermon as a Canon of Durham Cathedral. What are you going to tell 'em? I replied that I was going to tell 'em about Jesus. And his response was, O, that's novel!

I have not spoken to him this week about my last sermon as a Canon of Durham Cathedral, but I would say the same. I would say again that I will tell 'em about Jesus,

Happy, if with my latest breath
I may but gasp his name, Preach him to all and cry in death:
Behold, behold the Lamb!

No, it wasn't novel then, seven years ago; and it isn't novel now. Just new every moment. You have kept the best wine until now!