Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Water to Whine and Cleansing the Temple

This week I would like to talk about John chapter 2. In John 2 it talks about two different occasions, the first being when the Savior turned water into whine, and the second being when the Savior drove merchants out of the temple.
I have never thought of the miracle of changing water into whine as that big of a deal when I have read through it in the past, but this time I realized that it was actually pretty impressive. In John 2:6 it says that there were 6 pots in total and that each one could hold "2 or 3 firkins apiece." To put that into perspective, in total the Savior changed anywhere between 100-150 gallons of water into whine. However to me that wasn't even the most impressive part. The part that I thought was most impressive was that the person that was in charge of the meals at the marriage celebration said that it was really good whine. Now I am not a whine connoisseur, but I do know that whine needs to be aged before it is considered "good whine" and the savior made good stuff pretty much instantly.
In John 2:4 it says "Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come." Now at first glance you might think that it is odd that Jesus refers to his mother as "Woman," but to them it was actually a sign of respect to call there mother "Woman." That is why the word "Woman" is capitalized in the sentence even though it isn't her name.
In John 2:13-16 It talks about Jesus coming to the temple in Jerusalem and driving out all the merchants and traders that he found inside of it with a whip. He did this for a couple of reasons. One being that the temple is a sacred place so selling animals and stuff isn't something that should be done inside of it. Two being that he wanted to teach a lesson about cleansing our inner temple. We have been told that our bodies are a temple, so we should treat it like one. We should evaluate ourselves and look for any imperfections that reside within us and try to drive them out like the Savior drove all the corruption out of the temple.

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