Asks No More

Let us wonder, grace and justice
Join and point to mercy's store;
When through grace in Christ our trust is
Justice smiles and asks no more.

--John Newton, 'Let Us Love and Sing and Wonder'

Water into Wine

In John 2 Jesus, having declared that his hour 'has not yet come' (v. 4), turns water into wine at a wedding uniting a bride and a bridegroom; a celebration, a feast.

In John 3 Jesus calls himself the bridegroom (3:29).

Conclusion: John 2 is an anticipation of the real wedding, the true celebration, the ultimate feast. That's why Jesus told his mom, 'My time has not yet come.' His own wedding was yet to come. (see further D. A. Carson, p. 179 of this book)

As Edmund Clowney once put it, reflecting on Jesus' presence at the Cana wedding:

Jesus sat amid all the joy sipping the coming sorrow, so that you and I today can sit amid all this world's sorrow, sipping the coming joy.

Lothlorien

Here is what Tolkien writes of Lothlorien as the company enters this wooded elf land that has escaped the diseased fallenness of the rest of Middle Earth.

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder.

It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no color but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.

In winter here no heart could mourn for summer or spring. No blemish or sickness or deformity could be seen in anything that grew upon the earth. On the land of Lorien there was no stain.

--J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter VI

Only Two Options

Fisher:

If you desire to be justified before God, you must either bring to him a perfect righteousness of your own, and wholly renounce Christ; or else you must bring the perfect righteousness of Christ, and wholly renounce your own.

Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity (Christian Focus, 2009), 111

Forget Forever

"What fountain's that?"

"It is up there in the mountains," said the Spirit. "Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else's: without pride and without modesty."

--C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, ch. 9