2nd Sunday After the Epiphany
January 13 & 14, 2007
Rev. Chad E. Hoover
To you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, saints by calling, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Introduction
Jesus changed water into wine! In the grand scheme of things, how important was it for this particular bride and groom to have enough wine at their wedding to satisfy all the guests? It seems rather insignificant in comparison to the other miraculous signs that Jesus would perform throughout His ministry. Don’t you think Jesus would have wanted to start off with something a little more flashy, like the cleansing of some lepers, or making the lame to walk and the blind to see? Or, if He really wanted to impress some people, He could have brought someone back from the dead as He would do a good number of times throughout His ministry!
Turning water into wine . . . seems rather trivial. But perhaps there is something more to this miracle . . . something more that we ought to be getting out of it. Maybe turning water into wine was just a warm up for Jesus, a chance to get His divinity juices flowing. Or maybe, He wanted to start off with a small miracle just to make sure that He could really do it.
After all, it wasn’t even His idea – it was Mary’s! Jesus was reluctant to manifest His power, but maybe Mary was just a proud Jewish mother who wanted everyone to see what her Son could do? And Jesus listens to His mother!
Which is why, according to a Roman Catholic friend of my wife’s, we ought to pray to Mary. Because she’s a headstrong woman, and Jesus listens to her! “That’s the kind of woman I want going to bat for me,” she said.
Is this what we are to take away from this account of the wedding at Cana? That Jesus didn’t really know what He was capable of and that it was Mary who gave the timid Jesus a boost to get him started in the whole miracle man business.
Though we may never know the all details surrounding this miracle at the wedding feast of Cana, we do know what resulted from it. Although Jesus tells His mother that His time has not yet come, John tells us that through “this, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus . . . thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.”
We find this text within the liturgical setting of the Epiphany season for good reason:
JESUS MANIFESTS HIS GLORY At thIS
Wedding feast, and when the time comes
His glory will be revealed even more fully.
I.
As with all the miracles of Christ, turning water into to wine is no small thing. This, the first of His miraculous signs, sets the tone for and is consistent with the entire ministry of Christ. John writes, “When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’
“’Dear woman, why do you involve me?’ Jesus replied, ‘My time has not yet come.’
“His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.
“Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water;’ so they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.’ They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine.”
If this had been some sort of cheap party trick that Jesus was doing for the amusement of others, to show off, or to receive fame and recognition it would not have been done so secretly. But apart from Mary and the disciples, only the servants who filled the jars with water and drew out the wine knew what Jesus had done.
When the master of the banquet tasted the wine, “He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew.” In typical Jesus fashion, this miracle was done rather secretively with only the lowly servants being privy to such a fantastic manifestation of God’s glory.
And this was a magnificent manifestation of God’s glory. Jesus invokes nothing and no one to perform this miracle. He didn’t pull out His book of magical incantations like a witch doctor putting together some crazy concoction. In fact, He didn’t even say anything apart from, “Fill the jars with water;” and “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.” I wonder though, did He wave His hand or cock His head to the side similar to a great illusionist concentrating on the execution of an otherworldly feat?
The point is, He didn’t need to because the power to change the water into to wine was within His person. The man standing before them was God in the flesh and He revealed this in the manner by which He performed this miracle. I don’t think He even broke a sweat. And that in no way diminishes the sheer brilliance of this miracle. If anything, it pointed more clearly to the Divine Nature of Christ.
And yet, no one really knew what He had done. When the master of the banquet tasted the wine, “he called the bridegroom aside and said, ‘Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.’”
Jesus provides not just any old wine (like the boxed White Zinfandel you can get at Meijer) but the best wine. And in true God-like fashion, Jesus provides for the wedding guests in overabundance just like He did on the hillside in the feeding of the 5,000. In doing the math, we realize that Jesus changed 120 to 180 galloons of water into wine. That, my friends, is a lot of wine. Much more than Meijer would be able to stock on their shelves in Aisle 5. (Yes, I know the aisle number – doesn’t everyone?)
And this provision of the best wine for these wedding guests is indicative of Christ’s blessings to us as well. This account shows us that Jesus does care for us and our earthly needs. Day after day, He blesses us with the good gifts of His creation.
How often, though, do we fail to recognize the source of those blessings? Like the master of that banquet, the bridegroom, and all the guests at this celebration there are times when we are completely oblivious to the gracious provision that God has for us in this life - provisions that are perhaps on par with this very good gift of wine that Jesus provided for the wedding guests.
We ought to be thankful for everything that we have, knowing that these good gifts come from God above. When we receive a wonderful blessing in this life, how often do we to go on drinking the wine, thinking, “Man, this is good” without stopping to thank God for His good gifts to us in this life? Far too often, I would imagine. Thankfully, for us these temporal miracles and earthly blessings are not the primary purpose for Christ’s coming.
II.
This miracle, like all those that would follow, were evidence of something greater and pointed for a far more incredible signs. As John wrote, “This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed in Cana of Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.”
As Lutherans we may cringe to hear, “and his disciples put their faith in him” (emphasis mine) and you’d be right to question this. Where the NIV translates the Greek verb pisteuw “put their faith,” the English Standard Version (for example) translates it simply and correctly as “believed.”
Faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit – not something that the disciples possessed within themselves, something that they could choose to place here or there. Their belief in Him is evidence of the faith that they’ve been given.
Additionally, the NIV translates the Greek word faverow as “reveal” - that through this miracle Jesus revealed His glory. But this Greek word has a much stronger meaning than this. It means “to make manifest,” that is to say, something which was always there but simply hidden is now made known. The reality is realized. For the disciples, the reality of who Jesus is was realized through this miraculous sign. And the same is true for us.
This miracle at the wedding feast of Cana is a sign that allowed Jesus’ disciples to peek beneath the veil of Christ’s flesh them for the first time and see that this Man was God Himself. This man, in His person, holds all the power of the God of Creation in His body for He is the God of all Creation!
I wonder if Philip and Nathaniel thought this was what Jesus was talking about when He first called them to be His disciples (John 1:49-50) when Nathanael declared, "Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel."
To which Jesus replied, "You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that."
This miracle at the wedding feast in Cana was pretty great! How could it get any better than this? But, as we know, Jesus continued to perplex and amaze His disciples with His miraculous signs and teaching, further manifesting His glory to these men, to the crowds that followed Him around from place to place, and to us as the truth of our Lord is proclaimed even today.
And yet, as Jesus tells His mother at the wedding banquet, His time had not yet come to fully reveal the glory of God to the world. That time would come as Christ hung naked upon the cross of Calvary – suffering and shedding blood for our sins and dying the humiliating death of a criminal.
Though Christ is fully aware of our earthly needs in this life, he is more acutely aware of our need for a Savior. His death upon the cross does more for us than to show how much God loves us. It shows us just how ugly our sin really is. Our sin is retched, mangling, twisted and vile.
In Cana, Mary looked to her Son for a miracle, but upon the cross of Calvary she saw how the sin of the world ravaged His flesh, broke His Spirit, and sentenced Him to death.
In Cana, Jesus said to His mother, “Dear woman, why do you involve me? My time has not yet come”, but upon the cross of Calvary the time had come for Jesus to reveal God’s glory. But even in this, Jesus continued to care for His mother saying, “Dear woman, here is your son” and to His disciple, “Here is your mother” (John 19:26-27).
In Cana, Jesus took ordinary water and produces extraordinary wine, and upon the cross of Calvary Jesus took the wretchedness of our sin upon Himself and produced a new man in you.
In Cana, Christ provided the best wine for the wedding guests to drink, but upon the cross of Calvary when He said, “I am thirsty,” he was given only a sponge soaked in wine vinegar (John 19:30) to drink.
In Cana, the bridegroom was honored by the master of the banquet, but upon the cross of Calvary Christ, our bridegroom, was abandoned by the master of all Creation for your sake.
In Cana, Christ manifested his glory and his disciples believed in Him, but upon the cross of Calvary, where Christ manifested the fullness of God’s love and mercy, those same disciples abandoned Him.
In Cana, Jesus performed His first of many miraculous signs, but upon the cross of Calvary Jesus declared, “It is finished.”
We too have been given faith to believe in Jesus,
| to believe that He is God in the flesh |
| to believe that He has fulfilled all things for our salvation |
| to believe that in Him we are a new creation |
| to believe that He continues to reveal His glory to us through His Word and Sacraments. |
| We will indeed see more signs of His everlasting glory when He comes again in blazing glory to call us, His bride the church, home to be with Him forever. In the Name of Jesus. Amen. |
May the peace of God which surpasses all human understanding guard and keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.