Redirected Vision: New Wine on New Year’s Day

“For, there is ever deepest unity and harmony in the truest life, the Life of Life.” ~Alfred Edersheim

Wine fermentation at the cellular level. Photography by Sondra Barrett. Visit her beautiful website at sondrabarrett.com

It’s New Years Day 2008 and I know well enough that resolutions are like buffing out a scratch on your car when your transmission needs replacing.

Paul, writing to the party animals in Corinth, remind them that those steeped in Christ are made a “new creation”. Elsewhere he says similarly in regards to outward circumcision, that the New Creation makes circumcision irrelevant. That is akin to saying that God’s fecundity in Christ making the New Creation makes religion the empty bottle after the wine has been drunk.

What races through the New Creation is the Living Christ who intoxicates like living wine. It is no wonder that Jesus taught this new wine would burst the “old wineskins” with it’s new fermenting and living expansion. The old skins have been expanded as far as they will go and become brittle and thin. The new wine will burst them unless fresh wineskins hold Him who is that living wine.

Yeast

The key ingredient in the production of wine and most bread is leaven or yeast. It is the living agent used to produce both abundance and fermentation. The study of Bread in the Old and New Testaments is fascinating, but reserved for tomorrow.

Let’s stick to wine. Ironically, I gave up drinking wine last year and fought to do so completely the great majority of the year. I loved the way it tasted, how is burned a bit on the way down and warmed the whole of my body. It also, in small doses calmed my active mind.

But my doctors came alongside and said it had to go or I would.

So last night was free of wine. I have to pass from the image to the Living Wine Himself. I am forced to or I will die: a fitting living metaphor. Not just a cautionary tale, but a more vivid invitation for direct contact with the One to Whom the image is meant to be a mirror reflecting back to Him.

Do you wish wine inside you? Do you want celebration and to party? Come to the Feast of the Lamb where the wine and food flow freely from the open hand of God.

In Matthew’s account the disciples of the Baptist come to Jesus and note that while they are fasting Jesus’ disciples are eating and drinking freely. Jesus reminds them that His disciples have the Bridegroom (Himself) with them. When He is taken from them for crucifixion then they will fast with a deeper longing than anything John’s disciples can understand. It is in that context that Jesus teaches them about the old and new wineskins. John is the old wineskins, as is all of Judaism. No religion can contain this new and living wine, even one sanctioned by God Himself. His disciples will be the new winseskins, as are you and I.

We can be filled up with this One Who is new wine. This happens only via the Holy Spirit. Paul understood this and simply said “don’t become intoxicated with wine but instead be so filled by the Spirit”. Just as our perceptions, speech and interactions can be informed by wine/spirits, so can they be by the Holy Spirit of God which is elsewhere called the Spirit of Christ.

This is the true intoxication leading to the true celebration. The Baptist understood this. The very same disciples came to him with the question they posed to Jesus about fasting and wine drinking. Without consulting each other (John is in prison and the recounting of this is from John 2, not the synoptic Gospels) John uses the same metaphor of bride and bridegroom that Jesus uses. “I am not the Christ but I have been sent before Him. He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. And so this joy of mine has been made full.” Then he ends it withe the infamous words “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

Cana

Both incidents came after the wedding at Cana where Jesus, in the middle of the feast when the “wine had failed” had the servants fill the six stone waterpots reserved for the Jewish rite of purification then draw some for the headwaiter who thought it magnanimous that the bridegroom should save the best wine for last when most of the guests were already drunk and their palates most undiscerning.

Well, that whole last paragraph of events can be mined or mulled depending on your fancy. But the overarching meaning of the story John states clearly: “This beginning of His signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and showed His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.”

Turning the waters of stone vessels meant for purification into the finest wine for a wedding feast is the first sign of His glory and the New Life found in Him this new year. He Himself is our wine; He Himself our purification working new life within our stony and hollow vessels. The sign points to something beyond itself…the mirrored image reflecting to the True Image.

When that wedding feast was done (itself just a snapshot of the True Wedding Feast to come) they porobably took the leftover wine from those six stone waterpots and placed them in fresh wineskins for they were still close enough to the miracle to be alive and expanding.