The Miracle of Fermentation

Paul Stilwell, at his blog Spike is Best, posts a marvelous meditation on wine and the wonder of fermentation;

There is a limitless range of symbols to be read in nature that mirror God's supernatural working and manifestation in His Son. While it is true that Christ would have suspended the laws of nature to make the wine in Cana, it is also true that the natural enzymatic process of fermentation anticipates this first public miracle of Christ; by mirroring the Cana miracle in the rather miraculous process we call fermentation.

Is it an accident that so many stupendously wonderful things are fermented? Bread, cheese, wine, beer... Kimchee...

St. Paul said;

We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. - Romans 6:4

Like the wine grape, we must die to be raised to a new, higher life, or as C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity;

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

Comments

[Jeff Hendrix]

Sorry for your family's losses; mine laid my father to rest at the beginning of the month.

The analogies - fermentation, egg to bird - are helpful and true. The caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly, of course.

'Trouble is, we as humans are aware of the process and apparently find it vvery difficult trusting the One Who created us to face this process.

Everybody looks forward to being a 'butterfly' - no one looks forward to becoming protein soup in a cocoon.

[Darin]

In the immortal words of Merry - "They come in pints!!"

[Shakespeare's Cobbler - who forgot how to log in]

I once mortified my college English class by insisting that Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" was romantic to keep wine in a catacomb because everything you eat, most especially alcoholic drink, is dead.