jars of stone a heart of love

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From Jars of Stone to a Heart of Love

The way Jesus chooses to fulfill His mother’s request also tells us many things. Jesus chose six stone jars used for ceremonial washing. Finding wine in these jars would be the last thing anyone would think of. We are told they each hold about twenty to thirty gallons. It is highly doubtful that Jesus thinks they need 120 to 180 gallons of wine, so we know He chose the jars for another reason.

These jars hold water to wash with to make a person ceremonially clean. The cleansing is just a temporary outward removal of the grime of life on the street, but has no real effect on the soul. At the time the wine would have no real meaning, but later in the upper room Jesus would use wine as a symbol of His blood which would cleans the soul.

For the Jewish people cleansing, sacrifice and forgiveness was a temporary thing. Cleansing with water was symbolic and only lasted until you entered the streets of life and your feet became soiled again. The sacrifice of the Lamb would absolve them of their sin at the time but was not a lasting forgiveness that covered the whole of life. There was no movement from the life of sin to the life of the redeemed.

The wine is symbolic of Jesus’ blood which not only cleanses from our current sin but redeems us from all sin. Jesus’ blood breaks the hold that sin has on us and sets us free to pursue God with our whole and undivided heart. In the act of choosing the water jars Jesus announces that He is about to change the whole way people view and relate to God.

Before Jesus dies on the cross, people make sacrifices and go through cleansing to try and become acceptable to God. Once Jesus dies on the cross God has made the sacrifice on behalf of people, because He wants them to be acceptable to Him. God has moved from being the one we must appease, to one who extends grace. Water turned into wine and sin turned into grace.

Gods’ grace is not a temporary fix for the problem of sin in our lives, it is eternal, permanent. This once for all sacrifice does not have to be renewed every now and again to be effective. While the water runs away leaving us to be covered again by sin, the blood is a permanent covering that washes us in an ongoing manner that never ends. We no longer run around trying to make God accept us, we only accept what He has done for us.

The jars are made of stone. They are cold, inanimate and impersonal. The blood that the wine represents is warm and flowing from the very heart of Jesus. The blood is by nature very personal and represents a God who is very much alive. While the stone of the jars cannot have a relationship the heart of Jesus can.

This marks a very real change for the people then and people today. For the Jews of Jesus time God was impersonal, an authority figure that stood watch over your every move keeping a list and checking it twice. Jesus becomes the list breaker. Jesus shows us that God is not so much interested in keeping track of our sin as He is of forgiving them. The heart of God is that none should perish but everyone have eternal life.