Old Vine Zinfandel:

There is this wine I love. I first had it at 131 Main on the night after I got engaged to my wife. The wine, an old vine Zinfandel, is from the Renwood Winery in California. Now, I enjoy good wine, but I am by no means a wine snob. I love to cook a big meal on a Sunday afternoon and enjoy a really powerful red wine while I do. This old vine Zinfandel was one of the most amazing flavors to ever curl up and take a nap on my pallet. I have a hard time distinguishing the hints of cherry and allspice or the leather and chocolate in many wine descriptions, but this one smacked me in the mouth. It was intense. I love very smoky foods and this wine brought me right to that place with its character.

Why am I going on so much about this wine? Wine is a commonly used symbol of Christ’s blood. It goes beyond the color red. In the church of my boyhood, we took communion with wine. I remember kneeling for communion and being handed a community cup to drink from. Every time I sipped that wine I coughed, not being used to the alcohol. It was probably cheap and devoid of the character of this old vine Zinfandel.

This wine that I enjoy so much is like the character of Christ’s blood. It has scores of flavors combined into one intense experience. There is the gentle Jesus and the table-flipping Jesus, the crying out in pain Jesus and the brother Jesus, the shoving around demons Jesus and the soul reading Jesus. He wasn’t just the Prince of Peace or the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, he was everything. His character exploded into this society and created a rampage of history. The idea of God and us was forever shaken into all or nothing.

The old vines are really incredible too. Grapes from young vines cannot compare with the grapes from the wise old vines. While the grapes themselves, of both young and old vines, are new grapes, they are distinctly different in the root. Young vines have just sprouted, even if they have been around for decades, they are still new in the spectrum of history, while up on the hill, the old vines look down in all of their wisdom. The wisdom of droughts and wet years, the wisdom of having been young vines once themselves gives them the ability to transfer a certain strength to the grapes, who cling to the vine as life blood. The wine makers tout this quality so heavily because it makes a dramatic difference.

The ways of men are new, even if thousands of years old, but the ways of God ARE. I love those places in the bible where God says “I Am” and doesn’t finish the sentence, but really he does. And no one has a retort. We say, “You are what?” and he can simply reply “I Am”. End of argument. He is. His ways have always been. There is no older vine from which to draw life.

The only way to be truly rich and complex is to be the grape that draws all of its character from the Old Vine. I’ve never seen old vine Zinfandel in a cheap box. It is revered, put on the high shelf, with a label lauding all that it yields. And so God, from whom all is sourced, is on the highest ridge, not in need of, but more than worthy of, descriptors that surpass any that we can breathe.

Christ must be the most intense man ever to live. That is not a question, not a speculation. I say that as “Christ HAS to be the most intense man to live.” It is a must. To be the one that can deliver demands unparalleled intensity. We have the pictures of Christ in his most physically intense moments. When he went on a rampage in the temple, he was intense, and violent. I can see him yelling as his passion spilled into action. Flipping over tables and telling people that his father’s house would not be made into convenience store.

But this intensity is still yet more. It is molecular; it is in the blood cells. It is the intensity of the physiology of the creator.

“And the Word became flesh.”

The bigness of God, the overwhelming, incomprehensible, immeasurable, unfathomable God was in the bloodstream of this man. That which cannot be grasped, was.

Right there in front of our eyes, touchable. The God of the universe was there to talk to. Jesus.

You can distinguish the tannins and the smoke, the cherry and leather, the spice and the berries in the blood of Jesus. This bloodstream of intensity shoves all that is good in your face. It does not hint or beat around the burning bush.

From his birth, intensity surrounded his every move. As a baby, he had a death warrant from the king. The intensity of who he was, was threatening to those in power. Those who could only command men could never command God. Those whose rule must end were in town with the one whose rule would never end.

That intensity permeated the sky. It showed in a star that lead people to Jesus when he was just a little baby. Have you ever thought about the speed of light and the distance that is between that star and the earth? For that star to have been so bright and in just the right position means that either God broke physics to make it happen, or he sent that burst of light out through the heavens long before it would arrive, knowing that it would be needed to navigate people to the real light.

His synchronization of light and light is perfect. His cosmic pitch was thrown to be delivered without flaw in this bundle of real intensity.