From Background Notes [BN] for August 11th & 12th
written by Pastor Bob Brown:
The command to take away the stone in John 11 has a parallel in John 2 where Mary, Jesus’ mother, gives instructions to the servants at the wedding feast “Do whatever he tells you” (2:5). We hear this only after Jesus and his mother have their own dialog when the guests run out of wine.
The command to take away the stone in John 11 has a parallel in John 2 where Mary, Jesus’ mother, gives instructions to the servants at the wedding feast “Do whatever he tells you” (2:5). We hear this only after Jesus and his mother have their own dialog when the guests run out of wine.
It must have been a really big party and not due to the poor planning by the master of the banquet, or so we’d like to imagine. Comparing the coming of God’s kingdom to a wedding feast is a rich theme in the other Gospels, where Jesus tells parables to that effect and then proceeds to act out those parables by sharing table fellowship with all sorts of people who need salvation. He shunned none of them but invited them to dine with him (Matthew 22; 25; Luke 14:13ff). What we have in John’s account is simply a different literary form for telling that same story. Just as the guests at a really successful wedding feast drink all the wine, so we might say that the people of Israel have reached the end of the available resources found in their traditions, and so they must now turn to Jesus for new wine — the kind that will last. It’s a bit like Lazarus running out of, not wine, but life. [BN, 8]
Join us this week in Study, Worship, Praise and Celebration at Chicago First Church of the Nazarene:
* Saturday 6:00pm
* Sunday 8:30am & 11:00am, 5:30pm
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