The wedding went well. The bride was beautiful. The mother of the bride, widowed only a year ago, felt the sting of being without her husband while their daughter took a husband. It was a relief that all her planning and preparing had gone so well. But she went pale when she suddenly was reminded about the wine that she assumed was in the storeroom.
It turned out that those containers hadn’t been wine at all! Two of them were half filled with grain. The other one was olive oil. This was a disaster! Everyone in town had been invited and it was going to be like a wedding of people bound by those non-drinking Nazarite vows!
She stumbled, tripped, and almost fell as she rushed to her eldest, a bachelor who was never known for having a lot of money but otherwise a reliable guy, and said, “The wine’s gone!”
Coming back from talking to her son, she was terrified of what people would think of her. As she approached the waiters, who were all looking expectantly at her, she merely shook her head, and waved a limp hand towards the bride’s oldest brother.
Hearing some of the guest laughing together, she stopped, turned, and on shuffling feet, headed away from the party toward the kitchen. As she walked past the waiting servers— without even looking up— she said, “Just do whatever he tells you.”
Shrugging shoulders, raised eyebrows, and empty serving pitchers in their hands, the men looked at their boss, and then toward the man Mary pointed out, they thought, ‘What’s he going to do?’
Walking over to Jesus, the embarrassed head waiter thought, ‘This is going to be a party we’ll all be talking about for a long time.’
After talking to Jesus, as he went back to the rest of his crew, he shook his head, ‘Yep! This is definitely going to be a party that is talked about for a long time!’
“He said we should do WHAT?” The waiters were scared. They knew that telling people they couldn’t have more to drink was risky, but, to offer them water instead? “We are gonna go home with some bruises tonight!”
“Well, he’s part of the family. His mom’s the mother of the bride, so I guess we’re going to do what he said to do. It’s not going to be pretty, but let’s get it done, people.”
There was no spring in his step as he approached the MC, and as he began to pour the water into the Master of Ceremonies’ chalice, the headwaiter’s entire body jerked, almost spilling, not water, but wine, all down the man’s wedding garment.
And as the deep, rich coloring of the wine being decanted caught the man’s attention, he whipped his head toward the chalice with raised eyebrows. Then when the scent of the beverage reached his nose, his jaw dropped. “Whoa! That’s good stuff! So, THAT’s what she’s been keeping in the back of the storeroom! Hope there’s enough, ’cause I’m definitely having more than one glass of THAT!”
“Yes, sir,” was all that the server could say. Nodding to the others, they all started refilling empty wine glasses, accompanied by comments like, “It’s about time!” and, “Whoa! This is good stuff!”
Later, with the party in full swing, and the waiters mostly just standing around, the headwaiter went outside, alone, gazed up into the starry sky, “You, my God, are amazing! This— this—” Falling silent, the headwaiter shook his head. He couldn’t even find word for what he’d just witnessed. “This,… You,… I,… um, Lord, that was a miracle! That was not sleight of hand. That was Your hand, Lord. Is he the One? The Messiah? He’s got to be! Oh, Lord,” he chuckled, “His mother said, ‘Do what he says.’ You got THAT right. For sure, I’ll do what he says. From this day on.”