Listening to a song on PulpÂ’s
This Is Hardcore has made me think about the whole Jesus turning water into wine story in more detail than I had before. I started to question what type of wine Jesus had created from the H2O that he started with and whether the people who drank it had appreciated what they were getting. Because surely any wine created by the son of God must have been the most beautiful wine ever created. I imagine it must have tasted so good that anyone drinking it would have wept at the sheer beauty of the divinely created vino dancing on their tongue. I would be amazed if people had been able to drink very much of the stuff without being overcome with what they were experiencing. Had I been there and seen what had happened and tasted this amazing concoction I would have considered bottling some of it to sell off at a later date, once this messiah had got more famous. Ideally during or after his crucifixion when he was at the height of his publicity (or so I would have assumed, not realising just how far his popularity would later go). I could be under his cross saying, “Genuine Jesus wine for sale. Only 30 pieces of silver.” I am sure Jesus would have seen the funny side. I think you have to kind of admire Jesus, for having this ability to make beautiful wine for little or no outlay and yet still choosing to stay in the relatively badly paid Messiah business (sure you get the satisfaction of helping others, but none of them are in a position to pay). He doesn’t deserve the bad reputation he has in some quarters. He was a pretty decent bloke. In fact had I been there I might have come to some kind of deal where I tried to talk the guards into letting Jesus down, pointing out the good things he had done which atoned for the crimes for which many still believe he was rightly executed for, provided, in return, Jesus promised to supply me with 12 cases of his Jesus Juice a month for the rest of his life – again it would have been a brilliant deal for me, what with Jesus ending up living for infinity months, but I wasn’t to know that at the time. I feel stupid in hindsight. With compound interest I would probably own the Universe by now.
Yet even if it was the case that the Jesus wine surpassed all other drinking experiences, I suspect there were some blokes at the wedding party just necking the stuff and not even realising what they were getting. The kind of blokes who donÂ’t care what alcohol tastes like as long as it gets you pissed. The Jesus wine must have been wasted on them. Even when this magical thing was inside them, they would have felt no different, or assumed any unusual feeling was down to indigestion. They wouldnÂ’t care about the wineÂ’s miraculous provenance and would be merely laughing at the beardy-weirdy for providing them with so much booze for free. I suspect some of them would have complained that it wasnÂ’t as oaky as they liked, or they preferred Pinot Grigio or whatever. Wine snobs have always existed and many of them would not know if a truly great wine was placed in front of them.
I fear that if I am ever placed in a similarly historic situation the significance will pass me by as well. I think most of us would.
You have to take into account that this was a wedding where the guests had managed to drink ALL the available booze, which is quite a feat, so they must have been pretty drunk already, which would explain why they let the remarkable wine go unnoticed.
Also the true Messiah might actually create humble wine, which tastes a bit rough and gives you a rotten hangover and a feeling in the morning that some of the stuff you remember from the night before might not actually have happened – “I could have sworn that bloke turned water into wine last night. But he can’t have done. Can he?”
Cue music from
Tales of the Unexpected.
