Water into Wine, and a Hole in the Roof

The first of all his signs — the very first wonder he ever did — happened at a wedding. Not long after his first followers had begun to go about with him, there was a wedding in a village called Cana, up in the hills of Galilee, a morning’s walk from Nazareth where he had grown up. His mother was there, and Jesus and his followers had been invited too. In those days a village wedding was not over in an afternoon. It went on for days, with music and dancing and long tables, and the whole village came. And the one thing that must never happen was for the family to run out of food or drink in front of everybody. And in the middle of the feast, the wine ran out. And his mother came to Jesus and told him: “They have no wine.” And he said to her, “What is that between you and me, woman? My hour has not come yet.” His mother did not say anything more to him. She turned to the servants who were waiting at the tables and said, “Whatever he tells you — do it.” Now standing there were six big stone water jars. They were kept for washing, because the Jews washed their hands, and their cups and their pitchers, with great care before they ate, and a house with a feast in it needed a great deal of water. Each of those jars held twelve to eighteen gallons. And Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” So they filled them, every one of the six, right up to the brim. And he said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the head steward.” And they took it. The head steward was the man in charge of the feast. He tasted what they brought him — and it was not water any more. It was wine. He did not know where it had come from; but the servants who had drawn the water knew, and they were standing right there. And the head steward called the bridegroom over and said to him, “Everybody puts out the good wine first, and then, when the guests have had plenty to drink, he brings out the cheaper wine. But you — you have kept the good wine until now!” Six stone jars, filled to the brim — seventy gallons at the very least, and perhaps more than a hundred. And what was drawn from them was the best wine of the whole feast. That was the beginning of his signs, there in Cana of Galilee. In it he showed his glory, and his followers saw it, and they trusted him. After the wedding he went down to Capernaum, the fishing town on the shore of the lake, and his mother and his brothers and his followers went with him, and they stayed there a few days. It is downhill all the way from Cana, because the lake lies far down in a deep hollow between the hills.

Then it was nearly time for the Passover. That was the great feast in the spring, when the people remembered the night God brought them out of Egypt, and they came to Jerusalem from all over the country and from far beyond it, until the city was so full there was hardly anywhere left to sleep. And Jesus went up to Jerusalem too. The temple stood at the top of the city on a great stone platform, with walls and gates and courtyards one inside another, and the holy house itself in the middle of it all, built of white stone and gold. King Herod had begun rebuilding it many years before, and the builders were still at work on it. Every family that came wanted to bring an offering to God at the temple — a sheep, or a young bull, or, if they were poor, a pair of doves — and most of them had walked for days and could not drive animals all that way. And the temple tax had to be paid in one special kind of coin, so men sat at tables to change people’s money into it, and charged them for doing it. So the selling and the changing went on right inside the temple courts, in the big outer court, the one part of the temple where foreigners were allowed to come. And when Jesus walked in, he found them there: men selling cattle and sheep and doves, and the money-changers sitting at their tables behind their piles of coins. And he made a whip out of cords. And he drove them all out of the temple — the sheep and the cattle together, and the men who sold them — and he tipped out the money-changers’ coins and turned their tables over, so that the coins went rolling all across the stones. And to the men selling the doves he said, “Take these things away from here! Do not make my Father’s house into a place for buying and selling.” And his followers remembered words that had been written long before, in one of the psalms: “The fire I have for your house will eat me up.” Then the officials in the temple came up to him. They wanted to know what right he had to do a thing like that. “What sign can you show us, to prove you are allowed to do this?” And Jesus answered them, “Destroy this sanctuary, and in three days I will raise it up.” And they said, “This sanctuary has taken forty-six years to build — and you are going to raise it up in three days?” But the sanctuary he was talking about was his own body. Nobody understood that then — not the officials, and not his own followers. Only later, after he had been raised from the dead, did his followers remember that he had said it; and then they trusted the scriptures, and the words Jesus had spoken. All through the days of the feast he stayed in Jerusalem, and he did signs there, and many people watched them and put their trust in his name. But Jesus did not put his trust in them. He knew them all. Nobody needed to tell him what people were like. He knew what was inside a person.

Some time after that he got into a boat and crossed the lake and came back to Capernaum, his own town. And the word went round at once: he is home. So many people crowded in to see him that the house was full, and then the doorway was full, and there was no room left anywhere, not even outside the door. And he was telling them God’s message. Sitting there among them, listening, were Pharisees and teachers of the law who had come from every village in Galilee and in Judea, and all the way from Jerusalem. And the power of the Lord was with him to heal. And four men came, carrying a fifth man on a mat, one at each corner. He was paralyzed; he could not walk. They wanted to carry him in and lay him down in front of Jesus. But because of the crowd they could not get anywhere near the door. The houses in Capernaum were small, with flat roofs, and there were steps up the outside wall to the top. So they carried the paralyzed man up onto the roof. And right over the place where Jesus was, they started taking the roof apart. They pulled up the tiles and dug through, with dust and bits of roof falling down on everybody underneath, until the hole was big enough. And then they let him down through it, on his little bed, mat and all — down into the middle of the room, right in front of Jesus. Somebody’s roof, with a hole in it. Four men who would not be stopped by a crowd. And when Jesus saw how much they trusted him, he said to the man on the mat, “Take courage, child. Your sins are forgiven.” Now some of the teachers of the law and the Pharisees were sitting there, and inside, in their hearts, they were thinking, “Why does this man talk like this? He is speaking against God! Who can forgive sins except one — God alone?” And straight away Jesus knew in his spirit what they were thinking, and he said to them, “Why are you thinking these evil things in your hearts? Which is easier — to say to this paralyzed man, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up, pick up your mat, and walk’? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has the right here on the earth to forgive sins —” and he turned to the man lying on the floor and said, “I tell you: get up. Pick up your mat, and go home to your house.” And he got up — at once, in front of them all. He picked up the mat he had been lying on, and walked out through the middle of the crowd, and went off home, giving glory to God as he went. And everybody in that house was beside themselves. They were amazed, and they were afraid, and they gave glory to God, who had given such a right to people. And they said, “We have never seen anything like this! We have seen wonderful things today.” And up above them there was still a hole in the roof, letting the daylight in.

After that he went out again along the shore of the lake, and the whole crowd kept coming to him, and he taught them there. Capernaum stood on the road that ran along the lake, and traders passed through it all day long with fish and grain and cloth and oil. Beside that road there was a tax booth. A tax collector sat at a booth like that and took money from the people who passed by with things to sell, and handed it on to the rulers of the country. Many tax collectors took more than they were supposed to, and kept the rest for themselves. People hated them for it, and would not eat with them, and counted them along with the worst sinners in the town. Sitting in that booth was a tax collector named Levi, the son of Alphaeus; he was also called Matthew. And as Jesus went past, he looked at him and said, “Follow me.” And Levi got up, and left everything behind, and followed him. And then Levi gave a great feast for Jesus in his own house. And the people who came to it were tax collectors — a big crowd of them — and many sinners besides. They lay on the cushions round the table with Jesus and his followers, the way people did at a feast. There were a great many of them, and they were following him too. The Pharisees and their teachers of the law saw who he was eating with. They did not go to Jesus himself. They went to his followers, and grumbled at them, “Why does your teacher eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus heard them, and he answered them himself. “People who are well do not need a doctor. Sick people do. Go and learn what this means: ‘Mercy is what I want, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call righteous people. I came to call sinners — so that they will change their minds.”