The One About Weddings, Wine, and The Mixed Bag of Being a Person
Every Thursday I write a pastoral letter to the West Congregation of The Austin Stone. It is a simple opportunity for me to share some devotional thoughts from my week with my congregation. This post is one of those weekly letters. You can find the full series here.
Dear West Family
I say it all the time, but it is a heck of a thing to be a human being.
People are incredible.
People are also the worst.
What a wonderfully, messy, potential and risk-riddled endeavor it is to be a human being.
Over the last week I have been reading a chapter of John’s gospel everyday and sharing some of my devotional thoughts on 90 second Instagram Reels (because I am cool, and the kids are all about those reels.) When I read John 2 I was struck afresh by how profoundly human the incarnated is. That sounds like an obvious statement, but it actually isn’t. It took the church hundreds of years to come up with good credal statements on the humanity of Jesus because it is such an outlandish concept to consider.
God … took on flesh … and lived in the midst of all of the messiness of being a person surrounded by other people.
In John 2, we see it so viscerally.
We see it in Jesus’ back and forth with His mother about what He ought to do about the fact that there is no more wine at the wedding. This conversation feels so coded to an almost mischievous extent. I love how Jesus tells Mary that He can’t help, and she just winks at the servants and says … “do whatever He asks.” Only a mom has such insight and confidence.
We see it in the fact that Jesus sees it as a good thing to make more wine. Think about that! He knew how valuable celebration was in a context full of hardship and suffering. Where many religious leaders would be happy to end the party, Jesus uses supernatural power to enable it to continue.
We see it in the fact that He makes good wine, the best wine. A friend pointed this out to me this week that God knows all the ingredients and inputs that make the best of wines. He doesn’t begrudgingly give the people some “two-buck chuck” but blesses them with unnecessary kindness for their senses.
We see it in the fact that he takes a few days with Siblings and His mom in Capernaum. We don’t think of Jesus taking time for rest and recreation. Many of us don’t think much about Jesus at all when we go on vacation, but we should, because He knows what it feels like to need one and to take one.
We see it in His anger at what the temple in Jerusalem had become. He took time to make a whip, knowing full well that He was going to wield it in the temple courts, consumed with the zeal that He had for His Father’s house. I picture the humanity of the anger in His eyes when He saw that a house of prayer had become a place of enterprise and extortion.
But then we see something really fascinating at the end of John 2. It says …
While he was in Jerusalem during the Passover Festival, many believed in his name when they saw the signs he was doing. Jesus, however, would not entrust himself to them, since he knew them all and because he did not need anyone to testify about man; for he himself knew what was in man.
- Jn 2:23–25.
As a person, who made all people, Jesus knew full well that He couldn't build His sense of self off of the acceptance of other people, because He knew what was in them. He knew that a life devoted to the acceptance of others was a race to the bottom, because people, well, as previously discussed, are a bit of a mixed bag at best.
What a thing to consider the humanity of Jesus and the love that drove Him to take it on. He knows what it is like to love people, and He knows what it is like to be a person. Whatever it is that you may face this week ahead, you can go to Him. He knows you’re human, and He knows what that is like.
What a merciful king we have.
The music this week is from Canadian band, Dizzy.
I saw them a few years ago when they opened for Lisa Loeb at Stubbs, and I have been hooked ever since.
See you Sunday,
Ross
