The Gospel of John
As I wrote in our last letter, the Scriptural theme for Urbana ‘09 (Dec 27-31) will be John 1-4, and I have the privilege of training our staff to lead the morning inductive Bible studies for the 20,000+ delegates at the conference. Our 18 months of marinating in this Gospel have begun.

Last week the Urbana leadership team, my trainers’ team and our Bible expositor for Urbana 09 spent three full days studying John 1-4. What a feast to study with such a group! (pictured below)

It is remarkable being with leaders of this major conference who want its vision and emphases to grow out of careful Scripture study. We were together discerning God’s Word for the community that will gather in Dec 09, believing that the Word who became flesh continues to speak by his Spirit through that apostolic testimony:

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14)

Ramez Attalah (back row to my right), the head of the Egyptian Bible Society, was with us. He will be our Urbana Bible expositor. In his university days, he was part of the InterVarsity chapter at McGill University in Montreal. It was such a blessing to study scripture with this great teacher and leader in the Middle Eastern church.

Four Gospels for One Gospel:
Teaching a seminary credit class on the four Gospels to 31 InterVarsity staff from around the country confirmed my love of teaching IV staff. I can’t imagine more energizing students!

The Wedding at Cana
It is a striking feature of Jesus’ miraculous conversion of water into wine (John 2:1-10) that he shares the glory with the undeserving groom.

Publicly, the groom gets credit for the wine’s great quality and abundance. Privately, only the servants, Jesus’ mother and disciples know what really happened. By this sign, “he revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.”

In any culture, running out of food or drink at a wedding reception would be a faux pas. But especially in an traditional kinship world like ancient Galilee, it would reflect poorly on the groom and his extended family that they did not provide adequately for their invited guests.

The fact that Mary takes responsibility for this shameful crisis suggests that she is closely related to the groom. With their honor at stake, the clan’s inner circle would have huddled to consider solutions without alerting the guests. Not even the chief steward knows of the shortage (v.9)!

Mary may not have expected Jesus to do a miracle. If Joseph were now deceased, as many suppose, Jesus would have been her eldest son to whom she delegates authority to resolve things as he sees fit.

Jesus’ miracle not only saves the groom and his family from public shame but actually increases their reputation as superb hosts. This act reveals Jesus’ glory to his disciples, who believe in him. In other words, Jesus’ glory consists in transforming our deserved shame into undeserved glory.

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