https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=kk_R3bbo42A
Okay, so Drew McMahon asked, hi Jonathan, I was discussing Christianity with an atheist friend and a point he made was how random, silly, and relatively unimpressive many of the miracles that Jesus performed. Oh my goodness. I assured him that each miracle had a deep reason for why they each were done but wasn’t sure of the answer. Are you able to shed some light? Why would an all-powerful God turn water into wine and multiply flesh rather than something more profound? I believe he’s rehashing an argument Christopher Hitchens made in his books. Dude, the changing water into wine and multiplying fish is one of the most powerful, it’s one of the deepest symbolisms that you could muster in your mind. I mean, it is so profound. All right, I’ll give you a hint for both of them. Turning water into wine is a microcosm of everything. If you look at how creation starts, right, you have water at the bottom, then you have heaven and earth. And then God pulls the world out of the waters and pulls everything out of the water. He pulls the plants, he pulls everything out of the lower waters. But then there’s something that happens, which is that it leads to death in the fall. And so the fall is related to death and it has to do with the end and the beginning of a world as well. So think about the fact that wine is related to the fall. I know this is hard to understand, but you have to think of it like that wine is a form of fermentation. It’s a form of dying. And so that’s why it becomes an image of the fall for Noah. So if you think about the falls, think about how there are different falls, like there’s Adam and Eve eating the fruit, there’s Cain killing his brother, there’s Noah getting drunk in his tent, there’s the people building the Tower of Babel. So if you look at the different falls, one after the other, you can understand it like there are these, it’s like the fall is this and the fall is also this and the fall is also this and this and this and this. And so it’s trying to collate them for you to be able to see the pattern across all of it. And so wine in scripture is related to the fall of Noah and his being, his nakedness being uncovered. And it’s related to him falling asleep in his tent. And so it’s related to a kind of dying. That is what wine is related to. The thing about wine is that it also has a kind of euphoric transformative aspect. It’s something like, it can be both the highest and the lowest, right? It’s like a kind of ecstasy, you could say. There’s a relationship between wine and ecstasy. There’s also a relationship, that’s why in the story of the chaining of the water into wine, they ask him, they ask why did we wait until the end for the best wine? And so it’s all these little hints trying to make you understand that changing water into wine is moving from the beginning to the end. Moving from, but it’s not just end in terms of death, it really end in terms of resurrection. It’s like moving from the beginning to the end. And that’s what that whole thing, that’s what changing water into wine is. And it’s of course related to the blood that Christ will give on the cross, of course, but it’s so mysterious that I’m just trying to hint at it for you. But I can’t even completely bring it all together because if you look at it profoundly, you’ll see all of that, which is Christ is bringing into that imagery. And then also the image of the kind of the celebration of the feast, of the wedding feast is related to that as well. So imagine that it’s something like the fall, but then also the resolving of the fall. And so wine is used to celebrate the marriage of Adam and Eve, of the man and the woman, all of that is happening as well. And it’s also related to Christ and his mother. So you have these two images of the bride, the two, the married couple, and then also Christ and his mother. And these two are related in the story as well. Anyways, I can’t get to the end of that miracle. There’s just so much going on in that miracle. You have no idea. And so I’m not gonna go into the miracle of the fish just because I don’t wanna spend too much time on this question, but it’s the same with the multiplication of the fish. It’s exactly the same. The multiplication of the fish is something like, Christ is constantly finding the value hidden in the margin. That’s what Christ is doing. The multiplication of the fish is an example of that, where basically he pulls out of the crowd the food needed to feed them, because there’s not enough, but he’s able to kind of pull it out of the potential. So it’s similar to the miracle where he finds gold in the fish’s mouth, where Peter finds gold in the fish’s mouth that Christ tells him to go get. And there are many other miracles that Christ does that’s related to the miracle of just catching the fish in the waters, right? Where St. Peter puts his net out in the waters and pulls out too much fish, like so much fish. That is what Christ is constantly doing. He’s going into death and getting value back out of death. He’s going into quantity and gathering the quality out of the quantity. Christ is doing that all the time, like constantly in his story. Those miracles are amazing. Every single miracle that Jesus does is basically a little microcosm. It’s like a little microcosm of what he’s doing and a little microcosm of everything if you’re able to see it correctly. So, yep. So in that case, I would say, you always have to be careful casting pearls to swine. Like if you’re talking to someone who just can’t see it, like at all, and even if you tried to explain it, they can’t see it, it’s not worth wasting too much time on that because what are you gonna do? It’s like, if you can’t see that the miracles of Christ are amazing, like I don’t know. It’s like, can I really explain it to you? I’m not sure. All right. I don’t wanna make fun of your friend or anything.