They have no wine... Do whatever He tells you. — John 2:3, 5. (Mary, the mother of Jesus, at the wedding feast in Cana)
In the gospel of John, Jesus’ public ministry begins when Jesus, His mother, Mary, and His disciples attend a Jewish wedding in a small town called Cana. Feasts and celebrations were an important part of the religious and cultural context in which Jesus grew up, so perhaps it is not surprising that Jesus’ first miracle happened at such a festivity. It was Jesus’ mother who noticed that the hosts had run out of wine and saw the need. Mary encouraged Jesus to step in and save the day, expectant that He would be able to intervene.
- Jesus, by turning water into wine, made up for what was lacking, turned scarcity into abundance, and protected the host from embarrassment and shame.
This story is familiar and beloved to many within the church. What we often don’t think about is how important the food and the wine were in creating such joyous occasions. We often don’t think that wine, in addition to being the primary drink at the time, also had significant spiritual meaning.
Have you ever wondered what Jesus, His family, and His followers would drink? Given Mary’s great concern about the lack of wine at the wedding, perhaps she was involved in growing vines and making wine for her own meals and family celebrations. Would Jesus and His family have been treading grapes in the community winepress just outside of Nazareth, the one that you can still see today? Would they have had a cellar beneath their house with leather skins full of wine stacked away in the dark and cool? Jesus’ familiarity with wineskins (Matthew 9:17; Mark 2:22; Luke 5:37–38) certainly suggests so. What would their family celebrations have been like? And do these seemingly quotidian details of Jesus’ life tell us something about God and our relationship with Him?
Stepping back into biblical times takes an act of the imagination. Most of us are so far removed from the world of the Bible and the agrarian life that it represents. It is hard to envision the farms and fruit orchards, the village wells and sheep herds, the olive groves and vineyards that Jesus would have walked by every day. Most of us live in cities and suburban neighborhoods, fenced in by garage doors and streets made of asphalt, surrounded by shopping malls, grocery stores, and golf courses. We hop into our cars and watch the world race by from the confines of our car windows, never smelling the manure on the fields and the fermenting fruit wafting from the cellars below. Jesus’ life was vastly different from ours.
Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a village nestled in the fertile hill country of southern Galilee, with wonderful views of the surrounding countryside and the Sea of Galilee below in the far distance, about fifteen miles to the east. It was an agrarian community, and most villagers, including Mary and Joseph, would have grown at least some of their own food and made their own small batches of wine. The remnants of thousands of winepresses all over Canaan attest to the widespread production of wine to serve the daily needs of its inhabitants.1 You might be surprised to read that wine became the primary drink of the Israelites. In places where fresh and clean water was at times scarce and the risk of contamination real, wine became an important source of safe fluids that could be stored in wineskins and sealed stone vessels for long periods of time.
First-century Jewish historian Josephus, a near contemporary of Jesus, tells us that the people of Galilee cultivated every inch of their soil and grew all kinds of lovely and edible things there. Olive groves, pomegranate trees, and vines grew along the surrounding hills and terraces, sprawling down into the valleys below.2 Jesus and His family would have eaten olives, fresh bread dipped in olive oil, and vinegar, honey, lamb meat, fish from the Sea of Galilee — and yes, they would have enjoyed wine on a regular basis, like most Jewish families at that time.
Wine was a staple in their diet and a safe source of liquid because the alcohol in the wine would have killed most bacteria. Water wasn’t always safe to drink, and the danger of water contamination was a very real threat. The global pandemic of COVID-19 gave the twenty-first-century world a new awareness of how important it must have been back then to keep things clean and sanitized. Wine wasn’t just drunk to quench one’s thirst safely and to enhance celebrations. It was also used to disinfect wounds (think of the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25–37) and as a general healing agent (think of Timothy’s stomachaches in 1 Timothy 5:23). In those times wine was a multipurpose remedy.
It’s hard for us to imagine this. We think of wine as something we enjoy with a nice meal cooked at home or when going out for a special dinner at a restaurant. We might still wonder whether we should or want to drink wine at all. But Jesus grew up in a time and culture where growing vines and crafting wine was one of the major industries in Galilee and in Jewish culture. It was an all-prevalent reality seeping into every aspect of life: the home, the garden, the marketplace, family and village celebrations small and great, and — perhaps most important — worship at the temple and religious practices. Crafting wine was an ancient tradition that the Jewish people inherited from the Canaanites. The world’s oldest and largest wine cellar belonging to a royal Canaanite palace was found in Tel Kabri, a day’s walk from where Jesus grew up.3 The wines of Canaan were so famous that the upper class of Egypt imported them into their royal wine cellars.
The Son of God grew up in a famous wine region. Who would have thought?
I often wonder what kind of wine they would have made in the first century. Certainly a range of red wines, but perhaps those cooler climates of the elevated hillsides would also have been good for growing certain white wine varieties. Pliny the Elder, a first-century Roman naturalist, devoted a whole volume to wine and mentions nearly two hundred grape varieties, mostly reds, but also some whites.4 The vines growing along the rocky hillsides made primarily of limestone would have been more stressed than vines growing on flat land within easier reach of water. Some say that makes for a better vintage. We do know that the good water drainage of the hillsides, the higher elevation, the cooler climate, and the longer sun exposure surely would have contributed to a later harvest and a more interesting vintage, probably more complex than those wines from the valleys where the blazing sun would have driven lots of sweetness into the grapes but perhaps less variation and complexity.
Though Jesus is seemingly hesitant to make this wedding the beginning of His public ministry, He gives in to His mother’s persistent pleas and moves to action. He directs the servants to fill six large stone jars with water, jars usually reserved for rites of purification customary at the time.
- Somewhere in between the jars being filled with water and the servants bringing a sample of the “water” to the sommelier at the wedding, the water becomes wine, miraculously. Scarcity is turned into an abundance of choice wine.
The wine in those six stone jars would have amounted to somewhere between 640 to 960 bottles of excellent wine.
It is a lavish and quiet miracle. Only a few even notice it — maybe just Jesus’ mother, Mary, the servants, and the disciples. The sommelier at the wedding tastes the wine and exclaims in astonishment,
Everyone serves the good wine first and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now. — John 2:10
He does not seem to have noticed that the host had run out of wine and is puzzled. It’s counter to common sense to bring out the best wine last when people don’t pay attention to the quality anymore. Perhaps he never learned of the miraculous provision of wine. Mary, some of the servants, and Jesus’ disciples were “in the know,” but they might never have made it public because this would have brought great shame and embarrassment to the host, who should not have run out of wine in the first place.
The wedding feast of Cana happened not too far from where Jesus grew up, and the sommelier would have known how to distinguish between a choice wine and a mediocre wine. Growing up and living in a famous wine region, quite a few of the Jews of Jesus’ time would have known how to distinguish a good wine from a bad one. But their talk about wine would have been nothing like the kind of wine talk we hear today. They would have talked about where the wine was from, perhaps the vintage and what was added to the wine (herbs, grape must, honey, etc.). They might have remembered the harvest of that particular year and who was involved in treading the grapes and making it.
Today, because most of us have no connection to the places and the people who make wine, wine writers and wine critics have taken that place in society, and they have made it their job to enlighten us and help us connect with the wine and where it came from. While that comes in handy if you are a wine enthusiast, for the ordinary wine drinker this can quickly become intimidating, daunting, and patronizing. Too many still think that wine is an elitist drink reserved for the well-to-do and educated.5 Who can remember the names of all those grape varieties and exotic and hard-to- pronounce places in France, Italy, and New Zealand? I hope you will be relieved to know that this kind of talk about wine hasn’t been around for too long: perhaps fifty years or so. Before wine globalization, most folks would have enjoyed their local wines and focused more on how the wine helped with their conversations, convivial celebrations, and creativity, knowing that a good wine can lift a simple meal to another sphere and strengthen the bonds of kinship and community.
Certainly Jesus wasn’t an elitist snob, creating an atmosphere of superiority around His miracle-working wine soiree. On the contrary, He remained in the background, diverting attention away from Himself. He loved the people around Him and wanted to deepen their sense of joy and convivial celebration. He stepped back so that the gifts of God could touch people’s lives and lift their spirits up to their benevolent Creator.
In Jesus’ time, wine was first of all a spiritual reality: a gift from God, grown on God’s promised land and sacred soil, made to grow by God Himself, who causes the sun to shine, rain to fall, and plants to grow (Psalm 104; Job 36:27–33).
The harvest would have been a religious event with prayers and blessings said and the drinking of wine and the eating of food a sacred act done with due reverence and gratitude. The farmers would have proudly brought an offering of the first vintage of the year to the temple just as God commanded in Leviticus 23. Offering up the firstfruits to God was how they remembered over and over again that all that the earth brings forth is a gift from God and has spiritual meaning. What wisdom lay in these temple rituals that we so often look down on as archaic remnants of the past.
Just outside the town of Nazareth, you can still visit the grape-processing facility hewn into rock that they would have used to crush the grapes with their feet. Have you ever imagined Jesus stomping grapes, cheering and celebrating with his family, relatives, friends, and townspeople, and giving thanks to God for a successful harvest?
After crushing the grapes, they would have gathered up the grape juice as it flowed down from the main basin into the lower basin. Perhaps Jesus’ family used wineskins rather than stone vessels to collect the grape juice, since Jesus was so familiar with them and how they were used. In Jesus’ teaching, these wineskins become holy ground for exploring the dynamics of the Kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 9:17).
- Megan Broshi, Bread, Wine, Walls, and Scrolls, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series 36 (New York: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001), 147–48.
- Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, book 3, chap. 3.
- See Biblical Archaeology Society Staff, “One of Civilization’s Oldest Wine Cellars?” Biblical Archaeology Society, November 22, 2013, www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/tel-kabri/one-of-civilizations-oldest-wine-cellars/.
- Pliny, Natural History, vol. 4, trans. H. Rackham, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968).
- See my chapter “From Intimidation to Appreciation” in Gisela Kreglinger, The Soul of Wine (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2019).
Excerpted with permission from Cup Overflowing by Gisela H. Kreglinger, copyright Gisela H. Kreglinger.
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Your Turn
Does it shock you to think of Jesus growing up in a wine region with a family that likely made their own supply? How does the miracle of the wine at the wedding of Cana change how you think of Jesus and His miraculous abundance? ~ Devotionals Daily