The Hospitable Leader DevotionalSample

The ministry of Jesus started with a peculiar and unexpected marvel: turning water into wine. Up until this point in Jesus’ life, he had grown up as an unusually well-versed child in the Scriptures of Israel (the Old Testament) but had yet to enter into the fullness of his ministry and teaching. He had been baptized by John the Baptist and had called disciples to follow him, but had yet to publicly show his divinity. That is, until he went to a wedding where more wine was needed. 

As we read in the gospel of John, Jesus’ mother, Mary, approached her son and said that they had run out of wine. (We have to wonder what Mary knew of Jesus that made her assume Jesus would fix this issue!) Jesus replies with polite distance toward his mother (“woman,” in their context, was a polite but rebuffing way to address a woman, and not a sign of under-appreciation), but she seems to know he will do the right thing.  She signals the servants to do whatever her son asks. He has them fill about 150 gallons’ worth of wine jars (1,245 pounds of wine!), and they take it to the leader of the feast, who exclaims that the wine is good! Usually the worst wine was saved for last, when people’s taste buds weren’t as sharp, but Jesus had made better wine than they had even started with! 

So why did Christ start his world-changing mission with this miraculous sign? Wine, in Israel, was a sign of joy and God’s blessing. Thus, the lack of wine at the wedding may have been a sign of the “spiritual barrenness” of the Jewish people.  Simply put, this was not the way things were supposed to be. The Jewish people were the people of God, intended to feast in the delights of the Lord, yet they were “out of wine,” both in this specific wedding context and generally as a nation; they were broken. By making more wine, Jesus was showing that feasting in the eyes of the Lord was how things were supposed to be, and he was coming to make things how they were supposed to be again! In our contemporary world, we think of miracles as something out of the ordinary breaking into the natural world, or something that’s not supposed to happen here that God allows every once in a while. However, for Jesus and his contemporaries, miracles like this one were a sign of making things return to how God wanted them to be forever: A miracle was an extraordinary sign not of the unusual things God can do, but of how God always wants things to be in this natural world.

Joyful feasting is not superfluous or overindulgent, but essential to how God wants the world to be all the time. As Terry A. Smith says in The Hospitable Leader, “Hospitality provided a pathway for Jesus to move His mission forward, and to offer the people more than they had ever dreamed of.” Christ started his ministry with a sign of the feast to come, a feast that we can participate in if we join him in his mission. What would happen if we all viewed our lives as creating extraordinary moments of feasting, symbolizing the way things are supposed to be?