Drunk or Well Drunk

Yesterday I was listening to a Christian call-in radio show. You hear some silly things on these shows. That isn't to say that the folks calling in aren't really sincere about what they say, and yesterday was just such a case. I listened to a man who identified himself as a mature born again believer, but who argued with the host and said that Jesus enabled people to get drunk. I wasn't sure I had heard him correctly, so I started paying closer attention.

He referred the show host to the account in John, of the wedding at Cana where Jesus changed the water in six stone water pots to wine. The man focused his point on verse 10 where the master of the feast said to the bridegroom, "Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!"

His thinking was that the man's meaning was that the people had gotten so drunk that they could not taste the difference between lesser quality wine and the superior wine that Jesus had just produced. The caller had made a couple of mistaken assumptions, but he had lost sight of something. He lost sight of the fact that Jesus cannot sin, and to give wine to drunk people would be a sin. Throughout all of Scripture, drunkenness is forbidden by God, (see Ephesians 5:18 for example) and for the Christian, it isn't an option. Jesus would not contribute further to such sinfulness.

The verse says, "when the guests have well drunk," not "the guests are drunk." Such wedding feasts often lasted for a week, sometimes even longer. What is in view here is that the guests had been drinking every day, and that the taste of the wine had become commonplace. In other words, they had become a bit desensitized to the taste of wine by their exposure to it. Hence, the good stuff first, and when people were accustomed to it, trot out the lesser stuff, perhaps in order to save some expense, or maybe to avoid wasting better wine on the palate of those who wouldn't appreciate it. The master of the feast was probably at a loss, and simply expressing dismay at the fact that he believed the more normal and sensible practice had been reversed.