Encounters With Jesus

Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions

Timothy Keller

• Publisher: Hodder Faith
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781444754162
• eBook ISBN:
  9781444754155
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

What is my purpose in life? Who am I meant to be? How can I live a successful life? Why is there so much wrong with our world today? Am I part of the problem? What can I do to help change that? These are the big, seemingly unanswerable questions that everyone must ask and then answer in life. In Encounters With Jesus, New York Times-bestselling author and renowned pastor Timothy Keller explores Jesus' answers to life's biggest questions by showing what happened to those who met Jesus personally.Jesus changed the lives of nearly every person he met in the Gospels. These were powerful experiences that can have a profound effect on us today and help explain not only different aspects of Christianity, but the deep questions of life itself. Timothy Keller highlights ten of these encounters, including his meeting a sceptical student, a religious insider, an outcast, even Satan himself, and proves how invaluable the lessons from these encounters are for contemporary readers.

FOUR

THE WEDDING PARTY

We have seen in earlier chapters that Jesus came into this world because of its broken and dark condition. But in this chapter, I want to think about how things can be put right in the world. More pointedly, how did Jesus come to do it?

This encounter involves a wedding feast. John 2 tells us that Jesus, his mother, and some of his disciples had been invited to a particular banquet in the town of Cana. Ancient and traditional cultures put far more emphasis on the family and the community than on the individual. Meaning in life was to be found not in individual achievement but in being a good husband or wife, son or daughter, father or mother. The purpose of a marriage was not primarily the happiness of the two individuals but instead to bind the community together and to raise the next generation. In other words, the purpose of marriage was the good of the commonwealth. The bigger, the stronger, and the more numerous the families of a town, the better its economy, the greater the military security, the more everyone flourished.

And this meant that weddings and wedding feasts were a far bigger deal than they are today. Each wedding was a public feast for the entire town because marriage was about the whole community, not merely the couple. At the same time, it was also the biggest event in the personal life of both the bride and the groom. This was the day they came of age and became full adult members of their society. It is no surprise, then, that ancient wedding feasts went on for a week at least.

And with this background we can see that our text opens abruptly on a great disaster. Perhaps just a day or two into the festivities the family ran out of wine, the single most important element in an ancient feast. Essentially, the party was over. This was not a mere breach of etiquette but a social and psychological catastrophe, particularly in a traditional honor-and-shame culture.

This is the occasion for conflict between Jesus and his mother:

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”

“Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”

His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.

Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.

Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2:2–11)

Now, the key to understanding this event is the last verse. This was not called merely a miracle but a sign. A sign is a symbol, or signifier, of something else. Jesus did not have to exercise his power in this situation, but he did. And when he chose to do so, it became “the first of his signs through which he revealed his glory”—his true identity—to others. And the fact that he did it this way is full of interest.⁸

Consider that this is the very beginning of Jesus’ career, of his public ministry. Imagine you are a candidate for office, an entrepreneur launching a brand, or a musician releasing your first major recording. In every case, you will choose your first public presentation with enormous care. Each detail will be carefully controlled so that every single thing you say and do will convey the message of what you are about. But look at this calling card, as it were, of Jesus’. Nobody’s dying, nobody’s possessed by demons, nobody’s starving. Why would Jesus decide that a quintessential signifier of all he is about would be to keep a party going? Why would his first miracle—a signifying miracle, according to John—use supernatural power to bring a lot of great wine to sustain the festivities? Why in the world would he do that?

Reynolds Price, who was a very prominent professor of English literature at Duke University for many years and a celebrated novelist, wrote an interesting book called Three Gospels in which he translated and analyzed the Gospels of Mark and John and then wrote his own version of the life of Jesus. Speaking as a literature expert, he argues that the Gospel of John was not a work of fiction but rather was written by “the hand of a clear-minded thoughtful eyewitness to the acts and mind of Jesus.”⁹ One of the many reasons for his conclusion is this account of the first miracle. Price asks: “Why invent—for the inaugural sign of Jesus’ great career—a miraculous solution to a mere social oversight?”¹⁰ No one would have made something like that up!

Now, as we have already seen, Price is exaggerating a bit. To people in this culture, running out of wine was more than a mere social embarrassment. Still, for all the shame the bride and groom must have felt, it was not a life-and-death situation, so you feel the force of Price’s question. What did this act signify about what Jesus came into this world to do?

First, let’s look at what Jesus brought to this situation (and to us). In verse 9 we are introduced to the “master of the banquet.” He was essentially a master of ceremonies, a presider. It was his job to call people to celebrate and to make sure the conditions for that celebration were all in place. Bottom line: It was his job to make the party great. And when Jesus turns water into wine and saves the day, do you see what Jesus is saying? He is saying, as it were, I am the true master of the banquet. I am Lord of the Feast.

“Wait,” someone says. “I thought he came to humble himself, to lose his glory, then to be rejected and to go to the cross.” Of course that is right, but in a way, Jesus is putting even that terrible loss and pain into context.

“Yes,” he is saying, “I’m going to suffer. Yes, there’s going to be self-denial. Yes, there’s going to be sacrifice—for me first and then for my followers as well. But it’s all a means to an end, which is festival joy! It’s all in order to bring about resurrection and the new heavens and new earth. The end of all evil and death and tears. You know all those Dionysian legends about the forest running with wine, dancing, and music? That’s nothing compared to the eternal feast that is coming at the end of history. And those who believe in me will have within them a stream of that joy, a foretaste of that joy, now. A taste that will be profoundly consoling and refreshing in the hardest and driest of times—like living water. That, ultimately, is what I’ve come to bring. That’s why this is my first sign.”

Indeed, the Bible often uses sensory language to talk about God’s salvation and even God himself. In Psalm 34 the author David says to his Israelite readers, “Taste and see that the Lord is good” (v. 8). But don’t they already know that the Lord is good? Yes, they do, but when David invites them to “taste” he wants them to go beyond mental assent to a proposition, however true it may be. “Of course you know that the Lord is good,” David is saying, “but I want you to taste it.” He wants them to experience it deeply.

I am a Presbyterian minister; and for me to say, “Jesus Christ comes to bring transporting joy and deep heart fulfillment, not only later but now,” can seem a little odd to some people. Presbyterians have a reputation of being a little more buttoned-up than that. But the Bible gives me no choice. Do you know what the Bible says about the last day, at the end of time? Jesus may have been thinking about that at this moment in the wedding. Isaiah 25:6–8 says, “On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth. The Lord has spoken.”

In J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, when Samwise Gamgee wakes up having been rescued from the fires of Mount Doom and he sees Gandalf still alive, he realizes what has happened. He says, “Gandalf, I thought you were dead. But then I thought I was dead. Is everything sad going to come untrue?” The whole Bible says that’s essentially what Jesus is going to do in the end. We’re not going to be taken out of this world into heaven, but heaven is going to come down at the end of time to renew this world. Every tear will be wiped away. In essence, everything sad is going to come untrue. That’s what he came to do.

In Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novel The Brothers Karamazov, there is a scene in which two people are talking about suffering. Ivan Karamazov is talking about there being any possibility that we can make sense of suffering, and here’s what he says:

“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”¹¹

That’s Dostoyevsky’s Christianity surging through his literary imagination and craft. He says that he believes that at the end the reality will be so astonishing, the joy will be so incredible, the fulfillment will be so amazing that the most miserable life will feel (as St. Teresa of Ávila was reputed to have said) “like one night in a bad hotel.”

Jesus Christ says, “I am the Lord of the Feast. In the end, I come to bring joy. That’s the reason my calling card, my first miracle, is to set everyone laughing.”

That tells us what he came to bring; but why did he have to bring it? Let’s notice another detail of this miracle. He’s going to rescue this young bride and groom from their gaffe, but how will he do it? By filling up jars used by the Jews for ceremonial washing. You know that Old Testament Judaism contained a great number of rites and regulations, which required many and various courses of physical cleansing and purification, all in order to point to our spiritual need. These vividly got across the idea that God is holy and perfect and we are flawed and that to connect with him at all, there needs to be atonement, cleansing, and pardon. We cannot just walk right into his presence. So Jews had many purification rites leading up to the blood sacrifices. That’s what the jars were normally used for.

And here we should remember that the failure of the wine supply was more than a mere embarrassment. Imagine how deep the humiliation can be if you’ve let your family down in a shame-and-honor culture. We don’t understand that dynamic very well today in the individualistic West. But these young people were facing certain public shame and guilt. Jesus Christ rescues them from all of that. And by employing the jars normally used for ceremonial washing, he is saying that he has come into the world to accomplish in reality what the ceremonial and sacrificial laws of the Old Testament pointed to. How is that so?

In chapter 2, I talk about the idea of sin. I know the term grates on us, and it’s natural to squirm when a minister talks about it, but we can’t understand the joy Jesus is going to bring unless we understand sin. We must understand that we are stained, that we need to be purified, that we have guilt and shame, and we need to be rescued from it—not conned into believing it doesn’t exist. Allow me to be direct and personal. You actually do know deep down that something is really wrong with you. Why are you working so hard? Why do you need to be right all the time? Why do you worry so much about how you look? It’s because you know there is something wrong and you’re trying to purify yourself, prove yourself, cover it up.

Do you remember the first Rocky film? Just before Rocky’s big fight with the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed, he is lying beside his girlfriend, Adrian, and says that he doesn’t actually need to win the fight, just stay on his feet to the end, just go the distance. He explains:

“I just wanna prove somethin’—I ain’t no bum. … It don’t matter if I lose. … Don’t matter if he opens my head. … The only thing I wanna do is go the distance—that’s all. Nobody’s ever gone fifteen rounds with Creed. If I go them fifteen rounds, an’ that bell rings an’ I’m still standin’, I’m gonna know then I weren’t just another bum from the neighborhood.”

I propose to you: One of the reasons you have all these dreams of working hard to look good and do well and achieve is because you are trying to prove to yourself and everyone else, even people who may not be around anymore, that you are not a bum.

Or remember Harold Abrahams from the movie Chariots of Fire. What was driving him to be the best at the hundred-meters sprint? Just before the final race he says, “I’ll raise my eyes and look down that corridor … with ten lonely seconds to justify my whole existence.” He’s simply being candid about something that a lot of us do not want to be candid about. We do not want only to do well. We do not want just to make a contribution to society. We do not want just to make our mark. Deep down inside, we feel—no, we even know—that somehow we are bums. Another way to put it, if you want biblical imagery, is to go back to Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve eat the apple, turn away from God, and immediately feel naked. They feel they have to cover up, that they can’t let even God see what they are like. So they put fig leaves on themselves. Consider the possibility that your success in life is just a big fig leaf. Consider the fact that in the end it will never be enough to cover up what you know is wrong with you.

I firmly believe we know we need to be cleansed, even those of us who are very uneasy with the idea of sin. It’s awkward to put it so boldly, but there is more self-centeredness, more sin, in us than we want to believe. There’s plenty in you that you would like to deny, theologically and philosophically. Ah, you will say, “I am a humanist, I don’t believe that human beings are inherently evil.” But if you live long enough and you are honest enough with yourself, you will learn beyond any doubt that there are things in your heart that will bite you and even shock you. You’ll say, “I didn’t know I was capable of that.”

The problem, actually, is that we are all capable of that. Adolf Eichmann was one of the Nazi architects of the Holocaust who escaped after World War II to South America, where he was caught in 1960 and taken back to Israel for a trial. He was tried, found guilty, and executed. But there was a very interesting incident during the trial. They had to find witnesses who saw him commit the terrible crimes against humanity he was charged with. They needed to find people who saw him participate in atrocities at the death camps. One of the material witnesses was a man named Yehiel De-Nur, and when he came in to testify, he saw Eichmann in the glass booth and immediately broke down, falling to the ground and sobbing. There was pandemonium. The judge was hammering to get order. It was very dramatic.

Sometime later De-Nur was interviewed by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. Wallace showed De-Nur the tape of him falling down and asked him why it happened. Was he overwhelmed by painful memories? Or with hatred? Is that why he collapsed? De-Nur said no—and then said something that probably shocked Wallace and should shock almost all secular Western people. He said that he was overcome by the realization that Eichmann was not some demon but was an ordinary human being. “I was afraid about myself. … I saw that am capable to do this … exactly like he.”¹²

You can choose to say the Nazis were subhuman, that they were nothing like us, and that we are not capable of doing what they did. But there are serious problems with that view. The scariest thing about that whole chapter of history is not the few individual evil architects of it but the complicity of vast numbers of people across a society that was producing so much of the world’s best scholarship, science, and culture. That makes it impossible to write off the whole era as the work of a couple of isolated monsters. Besides that, to call the Nazis “subhuman” or “not like us” is in fact the very reasoning that led the Nazis into their unthinkable atrocities. They, too, thought that certain classes of people were subhuman and beneath them. Are you prepared to deny our common humanity with them? Do you want to make the same move that they did? The vast majority of the Nazis and the millions of people who were led by them were not monsters with fangs. Hannah Arendt, watching Eichmann during the trial, reported to The New Yorker that he was by no means psychopathic, that he exhibited no hatred or anger. Instead he was an ordinary man who had wanted to build a career. She called this “the banality of evil.” Evil lurks in the heart of all quite ordinary human beings.

So it would actually be more honest to say, “I’m somehow the same a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Also by Timothy Keller
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• One :The Skeptical Student
• Two: The Insider and the Outcast
• Three: The Grieving Sisters
• Four: The Wedding Party
• Five: The First Christian
• Six: The Great Enemy
• Seven: The Two Advocates
• Eight: The Obedient Master
• Nine: The Right Hand of the Father
• Ten: The Courage of Mary
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author