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John 2:1-11/2 epiphany / 18 January, 2004 /Holy Trinity - Hacienda Heights / WM Cwirla


†In Nomine Iesu †

Preaching on the wedding at Cana is a bit like. . . opening a bottle of very fine wine, a vintage that you know as well as the back of your hand and the tip of your tongue, but you don’t mind getting reacquainted with after a year’s absence.  This isn’t something new, but something familiar, something worth going back to year after year.  That’s why traditionally the wedding at Cana was read every year on the 2nd Sunday of Epiphany.  It’s worth coming back to year after year.  Lets break out the fine glasses, the crystal decanter, and savor this vintage.  We’ll sniff the cork, twirl the glass, let the wine breathe, roll it over our tongues, and hopefully catch some of the wonderful overtones that the Master Winemaker has put into this sign.

John calls this miracle “the first of Jesus’ signs.”  Signs.  Not just miracles but signs.  This isn’t just a cute parlor trick to show Jesus’ power.  A sign is a sacrament., a visible Word.  It reveals something hidden about Jesus, something you otherwise could not have know.  A sign is intended to work the response of faith.  According to John, by this sign of changing water into wine, Jesus manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him.  In fact, John’s version of the Gospel is a collection of seven signs intended that you would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and believing, would have life in His name.  The goal of this sign is not for you to say, “Wow, Jesus sure is powerful,” but “I believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”

Every detail is important in a sign.  The time and place are important.  It happened on the third day.  Now I wouldn’t be too far off the mark if I said that there probably isn’t a creed confessing Christian around who doesn’t hear “on the third day” and think “He rose again from the dead.”  We might call this a “third day” miracle, and recall that Christ rose on the third day.  Here Jesus’ gives a little sneak preview of the joy of the resurrection and the feast of fatted meats and fine wines of which Isaiah spoke. 

You might also remember that the third day of creation is the day the God caused plants, including grapes, or at least their ancient ancestors, to come up from the earth by His Word.  Changing water into wine is a creative sign, revealing Jesus to be the creative Word in the flesh.  Every day in the Napa Valley and in the Santa Inez Valley and wherever wine is made, Christ is doing this sort of work.  But on this third day, in Cana of Galilee Jesus leaves out the middle man and just does it directly: water to wine without the help of Robert Mondavi., or even the grapes.  Water into wine with nothing but the Word made flesh.

The place is important too.  This happened in Cana, a tiny, insignificant town (we’re not even sure where it was) in the far north country of Israel.  Overshadowed by the Judah and Jerusalem, it would have been completely ignored except that the prophet Isaiah said the light of Messiah would dawn first in Galilee:  “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in the land of deep darkness, on them has light shined” (Is 9).  That’s the way Jesus works.  Not from the top down, but from the bottom up.  The last are first, the first last.  And so Jesus begins His ministry with the least, in the unlikely, unexpected place, far away from the center of political power and religion.

The event is meaningful as well.  It happened at a wedding feast.  We can’t overlook that.  Luther used this text to preach on the sanctity of marriage, but I’m afraid that only scratches the surface of this sign.  Marriage is certainly God’s institution, intended to protect the one flesh union of a man and a woman.  But the apostle Paul in his letter to the Ephesians shows that there is much more to marriage than meets the eye.  Marriage is a picture of the relationship between Jesus Christ and His Bride, the Church.  A wedding party is literally a foretaste of the great feast that is to come, the marriage feast of the Lamb in His kingdom, when God would gather and reclaim His people from the ends of the earth and joy would reign. 

A wedding feast in Jesus’ day was a week-long affair to which the whole town was invited and you were expected to provide the food and wine.  A few unexpected guests, not to mention some unannounced friends could put a serious dent in the food and wine.  If a wedding feast ran out of wine before its time, it was a social embarrassment sure to make the gossip circles in town.  There is a fuss at this wedding.  The steward of the feast is speaking in hushed tones to the groom.  There’s a look of urgency, panic even.  Mary articulates the problem:  “They have no wine.”

I’m not sure precisely what Mary had in mind, except to inform Jesus.  Since this is His first sign, Mary could have no expectations about what her Son would do.  And Jesus doesn’t seem all that eager to do anything.  “O woman, this is none of our business.”  He won’t let her pull any apron strings.  Mary has no special “in” with Jesus.  “Besides, my hour has not yet come, “ He explaines, referring to His death.  In death, Jesus would pour out the wine of His blood, shed for the life of the world.  Jesus seems reluctant, almost irritated at even the slightest hint that He should do something.

Yet Mary forges ahead.  Nothing Jesus said would encourage her, but she goes ahead anyway.  She’s a picture of faith that pursues God even when God doesn’t seem interested.  Without even so much as a syllable of hope from Jesus, she says to the servatns, “Do whatever He says.” 

Those are the last recorded words in the Scriptures from the Virgin Mary.  “Do whatever He says.”  For all the interest there is in Mary, and all the supposed sightings of her and her speaking to the world, if you want to know what Mary would say to the world, it’s this:  Do whatever my Son Jesus says.”  You can’t go wrong there.  He’s the One who died on a cross and rose from the dead to save you.  If He says “make disciples of the nations by baptizing and teaching,” then do what He says.  If He says, “Take this bread which is my body and eat it; and take this cup of wine which is my blood and drink it, and do this for my remembrance,” then do it.  If He says, “Believe that in Me you have eternal life,” then believe it.  It may seem absurd, ridiculous, counterintuitive or maybe just plain weird to our logic or reasoning, but do whatever He says, because He’s the only Son of God and He knows what He’s talking about.

What Jesus told the servants to do was to fill six  (not seven, but six!) stone water jugs used for ritual washing to the brim with water, and then take some the water to the bartender.  And, of course, you know what happened next.   The bartender tastes the water now become wine and immediately calls the groom.  “Listen,” he says.  “Someone made a mistake here.  The usual thing is to break out the good stuff first, and then when the group is getting a little dull in taste buds, you can slip in the chep stuff.  First the Mondavi, then the two-buck Chuck.  But you’ve saved the best until now.

Now the sign brims over with double meaning.  When Mary says to Jesus, “They have no wine,” she might as well have been talking about OT Israel who’s time had come.  No joy, no celebration, under the political thumb of Rome and the religious hand of the Pharisees.  Hopelessly mired in the law and nothing to show for it but six stone jars full of water.  That’s as far as the law will take you.  Clean hands but no joy, no celebration, no feasting.  Water but no wine.  “The law came through Moses,” John wrote in his prologue, “but grace and truth come through Jesus Christ.

All that Moses can bring to the wedding is six jars of washing water.  Not much joy in that.  But in Jesus, the old has gone, the new creation has come.  Bath water becomes wedding wine.  Jesus fills up the commandments of Moses to overflowing with His own perfect obedience.  He came to fulfill the law, to fill it up to full with Himself, and then to die an innocent death  on the cross, to pour out His blood, a wine from heaven to gladden heavy hearts with the joy of forgiveness.

“You’ve saved the best until now.”  More than a comment on the wine, it’s a comment on Jesus.  God truly saved the best for last in His Son Jesus Christ.  Everything that God did in the past comes to fruition in His sending His only-begotten Son to take on human flesh and die to rescue fallen humanity and the entire cosmos from our sin and its consequences.  Jesus is truly the best vintage, God’s private reserve, set aside from before the foundations of the earth and appointed to be poured in the fullness of time.

The jars of water were there for ritual purification, for the guests to wash their hands or the kitchen to purify the dishes or some people think, for the bride to wash herself on her wedding day.  Now it was 180 gallons of wine.  Which begs the intriguing question:  How were the guests, or even the bride, supposed to purify themselves now?  What were they going to do now?  The law is fulfilled and grace overflows in Jesus.  All they could do is trust in  the promise of God and live in the freedom of that trust and raised a toast of Cana wine to the God who reveals His glory this way.

There’s even more to this sign.  The rabbis loved to speculate about what the age of the messiah was going to be like.  One of the popular views was that in the age of messiah, a single bunch of grapes would yield 10,000 barrels of wine.  The coming of the Son of God in the flesh meant that the age of messiah had dawned.  The abundance of wine was the signal.  All Jesus had to do was be there, not even lift a finger or say a direct word, and the wine overflows.  The age of messiah has come.

Jesus fills the stony jars of the Law with His own living water which becomes wedding wine.  He is the end of the Law for all who believe, the end of all that hand-scrubbing religion, the end of all our attempts to wash ourselves from sin.  You can’t do it, no matter how much you bathe and scrub in the tub of Religion.  You can never be pure enough.  Christ does it by His dying and rising and by His being there in His death and resurrection where you are in your sin.  Cleansing, purifying, making whole. 

He’s the end to the bad news of man’s religion.  He’s the end to all the teatotaling pietisms that would drain the joy from your glass of wine, and instead fill your cup with the grape juice of guilt and fear.  Jesus has come and brings pleasures eternal.  The joy of Jesus is the joy of an unending wedding feast where the meat is fat and the wine never runs out.

Have we made too much of this first sign of Jesus at a wedding in Cana?  No.  In fact, we haven’t made quite enough.  Not until we recognize that what goes on here at Holy Trinity every Sunday morning is more marvelous, more joyful, more revelatory than that first sign at the Cana wedding.  He makes water a sign, a sacrament of His death and life given to you in Baptism.  He takes bread and gives it as His Body; He takes wine and gives it to you as His blood.  This is His wedding feast where Christ is Groom, and bartender, and even the Food and the Drink, and you are the honored guests at His table.

Don’t go back to the old ways of hand scrubbing pietism and legalism.  There’s no joy in that.  Sinners can’t cleanse themselves.  You are clean because Jesus says so.  You have His Word, His promise.  And in the strength of that promise, taste and see that the Lord is good.  Lift the cup of salvation He has provided, and take it to your lips and drink a toast to the God who saves the best vintage for last, who pours salvation out with a lavish wrist, and whose wine cellar never runs dry.

To life, my fellow believers, to life in Jesus.

In the name of Jesus,
Amen.