The Good Wine Kept Until Now

“On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee” (John 2:1), and the wine gave out. In a village wedding that ran for days, running dry was not a small hitch but a public disgrace a family would be remembered for. Mary brings the problem to her son with no request attached — “They have no wine” (John 2:3) — and receives an answer that sounds like a closed door: “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). Yet she tells the servants the truest thing anyone says in the story: “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5).

What he tells them is strange. Standing there are six stone jars “for the Jewish rites of purification” (John 2:6) — the water of ceremonial washing, the old system for getting clean before God. Fill them, he says, and they fill them to the brim; draw some out, and what reaches the master of the feast is wine. The water of the old purification has become the wine of a wedding. And the steward, not knowing where it came from, pays the bridegroom an unwitting compliment that turns out to be the theology of the whole gospel: “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10).

That single line runs against the grain of everything we expect. The world serves its best first — its youth, its opening pleasures — and the longer we drink, the thinner it gets. God pours the other direction; he saves the best for last. What Israel had lived under — the water jars, the washings, the long centuries of getting ready — was never the poor wine of a stingy host; it was the shadow before the substance. And here at a village table the substance arrives, in a cup no one can trace.

John will not let us miss what has happened: “This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory” (John 2:11). The glory the Word came to show did not first break out on a mountain or a throne, but at a family celebration that had run out of joy — because that is the kind of Savior he is, come to keep the feast from ending.

But the wine points past the wedding. Jesus said his hour had not yet come; in John's Gospel that hour is always the cross. When it comes, he lifts a cup and says, “This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20). The good wine kept until now is bought with his own blood; the joy poured out at Cana is poured out in full at Calvary, where the true Bridegroom gives himself for his bride. The water of our failed cleansing could never make us clean; his blood does. And the story is still moving toward a wedding — the marriage supper of the Lamb, where “Blessed are those who are invited” (Revelation 19:9), and the best wine of all is served last and never runs out.

So when our own supply runs dry — of strength, of gladness, of the resources to keep up appearances — we are not far from the place where he does his best work. Let us do the one thing the story asks: whatever he tells us. The Bridegroom has kept the good wine until now.