First Lutheran
Church, Salol, MN
January 17, 2016
Epiphany 2
John 2:1-11
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
Once there was a pastor who was paying a visit on an
elderly woman in his parish. This woman
had a reputation for expressing strong opinions and not being afraid to criticize
the pastor—but, to her credit, she didn’t do that behind the pastor’s back, but
spoke to him directly, sharing her concerns with him, face to face.
“One
of the things I have against you, Pastor,” the woman began
to say, “is that I hear you like to have
a glass of wine now and then…and you don’t preach about the evils of drinking.”
The pastor, who’d heard this complaint from her
before, smiled and said: “Well, Edna,
have you forgotten that even our dear Lord Jesus turned water into wine at the
Wedding in Cana?”
….to which Edna replied: “No I haven’t forgotten that….and, to be
honest, that’s one of the things I have against Jesus, too!”
This is but one of many jokes that have been told
about Jesus’ first miracle here in the 2nd chapter of St John.
I think that telling jokes is one of the ways we deal
with serious things we don’t fully understand.
The miracles of Jesus, frankly, baffle us. We don’t know what exactly to make of them—and
that may be especially the case with this one, the miracle of water into wine
at the Wedding in Cana.
In this miracle, Jesus doesn’t save anyone’s life or
heal their illness or restore their sight.
Turning water into wine seems more like an illusion,
some sleight-of-hand, a parlor-trick.
Which of course couldn’t be further from the
truth!....especially as we pay attention closely to the language St John uses
here, when he calls this NOT a “miracle” but a “sign.” “Jesus did this, the first of his signs
in Cana of Galilee….”
For John the key word is “sign,” not “miracle”…because
while a miracle can become an end in itself—stopping us dead in our tracks….
…a sign keeps us moving….because a sign points ahead
to something else, some bigger reality, some fresher, more transforming insight--a
revelation--in this season we might say, an epiphany.
If this is a sign, not a parlor trick, to what does
this sign point?
Let
me suggest three startling realities to which this sign points.
First, Jesus’ turning water to wine, especially the
way it’s told here with such an economy of language, points us to all the ways
God works among us in hidden ways—away from the spotlight, behind the scenes, in
the daily-ness of life.
I picture this Jewish wedding in Cana as a panoramic, week-long
party, a play being acted out on a huge stage, with the bride and the groom and
their friends and family members all in the spotlight….
….while behind the scenes, tucked into the background,
another drama is silently unfolding.
Someone had miscalculated, apparently. The wedding guests had hit the wine a little
too hard, too early in this multi-day wedding reception. As the celebration was going on full-tilt,
the wedding host draws aside the bridegroom and breaks the awful news to him: “the wine is giving out.”
This week-long celebration could come to a screeching
halt, long before anyone anticipated!
The wedding host speaks quietly to the groom who, for
some
reason passes it on to Mary who in turn passes it on to Jesus. Then Jesus—behind the scenes, mind you!—asks
the servants (the “wait staff”) to fill six large jars with water and take some
of this “water” to the wedding host who is utterly baffled by where this luscious,new
wine came from so late in the game.
We know, of course, because we’re the readers of John’s
gospel, twenty centuries after the fact.
We know what’s going on here, only because we have the benefit of centuries
of hindsight.
But on that day in Cana of Galilee, with the exception of Jesus’
circle of disciples, no one knew just what had happened. All they realized was that the wine kept
flowing and the celebration continued, to the joy of the bride and groom and to
the delight of those who loved them.
“Jesus
did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee….”
And although down through the ages the whole world has come to know what
happened here, on the day it happened, in Cana of Galilee, only handful
of folks—Jesus’ closest followers—believed he had done something amazing.
But God is always doing that sort of thing.
God is always at work, even when we are unaware,
clueless….and that’s a sign worth paying attention to. You and I have already experienced God’s
power today, just by getting up, raising us from our slumbers on this bitterly
cold morning, making sure our cars started (!), finding our way here to this holy place,
because we’ve learned that God shows up here, often when we least expect it.
There’s a second thing this sign points to, though,
and that is signaled by the magnitude of what Jesus did here.
Jesus does a wonder involving both quantity and
quality here.
If you do the math, you quickly calculate that Jesus
produced not just a tidy little batch of wine but somewhere between 700 and 1,000
gallons of the stuff--just like that.
Jesus didn’t produce just enough wine for the
bridegroom to save face and the revelers to keep on partying. No, he produces enough wine to satisfy not
just the wedding guests—but to slake the thirst of the whole town and beyond.
But isn’t that just like God? God is always going overboard, lavishing
good things upon his precious people. That’s
because God knows how to give gifts in only one way: with an open hand--abundantly,
lavishly, unsparingly.
The sheer magnitude of this unexpected gift of wine is
matched by its quality and flavor.
And the quality of these six large jars of wine defied
the logic of how first century Jewish wedding hosts normally functioned: serve the good wine first, then when
everyone’s senses are a bit impaired, bring on the cheap wine, when no one will
notice the difference.
No, Jesus provides the most and the best of the wine
at the end of this wedding. Isn’t that just like God—to surprise us with
more than we could have imagined and better than we ever deserved.
“You have kept the good wine until now,”
the wedding host muses, not really realizing he was tasting not a chardonnay
but a sign that pointed beyond itself, pointed ahead, to what God was about to
do in this Jesus the mysterious wedding guest.
And this brings us to the third and greatest reality
here. This sign points us and everyone with
eyes to see to what God was about to do—not just on that day in Cana of
Galilee—but in all the days yet to come…as God prepared to fulfill all the old
ways in the advent of God’s new way, in Jesus Christ.
Those six stone water-jars, you see, represented an
ancient, passing-away age that focused on us trying to wash away our sin,
extract our impurity, remove our uncleanness—really a never-ending task, when
you think about it.
But Jesus beheld in those six stone water jars the raw
materials for the New Creation. Jesus
boldly determined, in one single act, to sweep aside the old and make way for
the new.
It was scandalous for Jesus to commandeer these sacred
vessels of the old age, in order to inaugurate God’s new age….as the six water
containers were filled to overflowing with the soul-gladdening,
face-brightening wine of God’s Kingdom, bursting into this old, dying world.
But really, how can we miss, dear friends, the
connection to the wine that we still share, the cup of the new covenant that
conveys to us, indeed allows us to receive into our dying bodies the
life-giving blood of our Savior, Jesus Christ?
If it were up to us to wash away our own sin, every
day, there’d never be enough soap and water to get the job done. We’d never get anything else done!
That’s why God came to us in Jesus Christ to take care
of sin, once and for all on the Cross, and to open up God’s new creation on Easter
morning. And that’s the greatest
reality to which this sign points—God’s “once and for all” sin-forgiving,
death-defying, future-opening saving work in the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ.
God says to us, in effect: put down your soap and water. Come to a party instead—my own beloved Son’s
Party, the heavenly bridegroom’s Wedding Feast that knows no end.
And make sure, please make sure to invite all your
friends and neighbors to this Wedding Feast that will last forever!
In the name of Jesus.
Amen.
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