John 2:1-12
October 23, 2011
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
I’ve always considered this miracle to be one of the strangest miracles ever. Put aside your normal way of looking at it. Most of us have grown accepting Bible miracles like this at face value. We don’t think deeply about it. And maybe we make jokes about it at parties, saying things like, “Gee, we’re out of wine? Can’t we find someone religious who can turn a jug of water into wine?” At least that’s a joke they say to us pastors.
I want you to look at it from a more objective perspective. If you do that, there’s really only one conclusion: it doesn’t really make much sense. Why would Jesus waste his time changing water into wine? Is the point that he’s really good at helping people get drunk at the end of a party? That he’s a great party guy as well as a savior?
This miracle is so different from his other miracles. All of his other miracles much make life substantially better for people. He helps the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the mute to speak, the lepers to be clean, the possessed to be free, and the lame to walk. He feeds the hungry. These are miracles with substance that relieve suffering. Compared to these kinds of miracles, his changing the water into wine almost seems trivial.
There’s more here than meets the eye. To understand the miracle you have to get out of an objective view, and to look at it from a different perspective. Jesus’ changing water into wine is a transforming miracle, and it reveals something about life in Christ. When you look at it from this perspective you realize that this miracle fits in with all of his others miracles. You see, every one of his miracles is a transforming miracle. The point isn’t just to make lives better. The point of all of his miracles is that Jesus is leading people to become transformed in some substantial way, and even this miracle transforms people.
A transforming miracle takes a person from one way of living life, and opens up a whole new, better way of living. The Christian life is full of these kinds of miracles. Talk with Cheryl Shotts and her son, Mohammed ag Albakaye. They’ll tell you.
Cheryl’s life was transformed in 1985 while doing the dishes. At the time she was in her early forties, married, and her three children were on their own or in college. Cleaning up after dinner, she turned on the television to watch 60 Minutes. Diane Sawyer was doing a piece on a famine ravaging Africa. She interviewed an emaciated young boy of 12. The boy had a clubfoot, a scoliosis, the aftereffects of polio, and tuberculosis of the spine. He was 5’4” tall, but weighed only 65 pounds. He spoke with Diane Sawyer in broken English for all of 18 seconds as Cheryl watched with her mouth open. Cheryl thought to herself, “My Lord, that’s my son! I have to find my child and bring him home.”
She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind. This young boy of a different ethnicity, thousands of miles away, was her son. Cheryl knew that this was what she had been praying for. For years she had prayed to God, asking, “God, is this all there is for me? Is this what you want me to do with my life?” She always had a feeling that there was something more. When she would pray, though, she often would sense an answer: “You’ll know what to do, but now’s not the right time.”
Seeing Mohammed on 60 Minutes, she knew that now was the right time. She convinced her husband that this was her mission in life, so they set out to find her son. They traveled to Africa and contacted missionaries in Mali, where Mohammed was. It took some time, and some help from CBS and Diane Sawyer, but they finally tracked him down. They took out a loan for the $12,000 it would cost to adopt him.
When the missionaries told Mohammed that a family in America wanted to adopt him, he didn’t really understand, but he was excited. Coming to his new home in Indianapolis, he saw the big banner hung outside the house saying, “WELCOME TO AMERICA. YOU’LL NEVER BE HUNGRY AGAIN.” The next morning, after his welcoming party, Mohammed asked Cheryl, “Where’s the rug-cleaning machine?” Cheryl said, “I don’t understand. You want to clean my house?” He replied, “Didn’t you bring me here to be your houseboy?” She said, “No, to be my son.” He looked at her for a while, and then said, “I don’t know what it means to be a son. You have to teach me. But I promise to learn.” You see, Mohammed’s father had been killed when he was seven, and he had been separated from his mother when he was eight. They had been refugees in Nigeria, and when a famine hit that nation, soldiers had grabbed him and took him back to Mali (his light skin, as part of the Taureg ethnic group, made it easy to recognize him as non-Nigerian) where he survived through begging.
Over the course of the next three years, Mohammed had five major surgeries to rebuild his back and foot. The orthopedic surgeon removed ten spinal discs in two surgeries, seven days apart. He replaced Mohammed's discs with one rib, part of one hipbone and metal rods. After three weeks in intensive care Mohammed left the hospital in a full body brace that he wore the next 18 months.
Mohammed complained once, immediately after the first back surgery, saying in the recovery room, "This is a hell of a pain Mom." He never said another word about pain. He was simply grateful to have his body repaired. Once, while recuperating and sitting outside in a lawn chair, Mohammed asked for a glass of water. He held it up to the sky and said, "This is the life Mom, the sun is shining, my belly is full and I have clean water to drink."
Not knowing how to read or write, he had to start first grade as a 13-year-old. It didn’t matter to him that he was learning with children half his age. He was grateful. In 1998, Mohammed graduated from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. Since then he has lived in Florida and the DC area.
He now works with the Americans for African Adoptions to help with development and translations for the
agency his American mother founded. His long term goal is to work for peace in the Middle East and Africa, and to eventually become Secretary of State.
This is the kind of miracle that our miracle from our passage stands for. Jesus is about transforming lives, which you saw in both Cheryl’s and Mohammed’s life. You may not recognize this kind of transformation in the changing of water into wine, but that’s because you’re not Jewish, you’ve never lived in Cana, you didn’t live in the first century, and you never went to one of these kinds of weddings.
Let me take you back to the first century. The ancient Jewish weddings were not like our modern weddings. In our modern weddings, we have the wedding ceremony, and then we have a reception that lasts for several hours. Afterwards everyone goes home and the couple begins their honeymoon. The weddings and receptions last about five hours total. Ancient weddings lasted a week.
This particular wedding would have begun early in the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning. The bridesmaids would have sat in waiting, lamps lit in the darkness, waiting for the parade of men carrying the groom to meet her and her bridesmaids. Slowly, the groom’s party would have wound their way through the streets of the village as anticipation of the wedding built among the townspeople joining the parade. Eventually they would come to the bride’s home and the great wedding feast began. Wine was an important part of the feast. It was considered essential. Running out of wine would have been a huge humiliation,… but more on that later.
In an ancient Jewish wedding everyone in the village was invited, as were visitors. Weddings were THE big event of the year. This wedding, in a town of about 200, would have a big event, and running out of wine was embarrassing.
The folks at the wedding weren’t drinking to get drunk. Wine had special significance in Jewish and ancient cultures. Among the Jews, it was considered to be an essential part of life and a gift from God. There is an ancient rabbinical saying, “Without wine there is no joy.” The people of Jesus’ time drank wine with everything. In fact, they probably drank wine all day long. Their wine was a bit different from ours. The ancient wine was a concentrated wine that was mixed with water. At feasts they would mix two parts wine with three parts water. But for everyday use they mixed one part wine with about five parts water. There was a practical reason for this. The water quality in the ancient world was not good, and mixing wine with the water killed parasites and germs in the water (although they didn’t know the science of it—they just knew that it made the water healthier).
Despite the fact that wine was ubiquitous, the Jews had a strict understanding about drinking wine. Unlike many people of our age, the ancient Jews believed that drunkenness was a sin. It was considered shameful for someone to be publicly drunk. A person who had gotten drunk would have been severely criticized, and a person who was regularly drunk would have been ostracized. These are lessons of moderation that many could learn today. They considered wine to be a gift from God that facilitated relationships and laughter, but to be drunk was to abuse that gift. As I mentioned, wine was considered to be essential, and the humiliation of running out of wine at a wedding feast would have stigmatized the couple for the rest of their lives. By changing the water into wine, Jesus was basically saving the family from humiliation.
Still, Jesus had another reason for performing this miracle, and it was essential to the message John, the writer of our gospel, wanted to get across. Changing the water into wine was powerfully symbolic. This miracle was a statement about the Christian faith versus the Jewish faith.
Do you remember the stone purification jars and how many there were? There were six of them, each containing about 30 gallons. The jars were for a Jewish rite. Before each meal and between each course everyone was required to wash his or her hands in the water. By saying that there were six stone purification jars, John was telling his readers symbolically that the Jewish law was incomplete and that the Jewish religious practice had become corrupt. The law could not purify you because sin was always there. Only the grace of God in Christ could purify. The Greeks and the Jews reading this miracle would have picked up on how the wine represented grace. As mentioned before, wine was considered to be a gift from God, and it was something that brought a spirit of grace. By taking the water of those jars and turning them into wine, Jesus was transforming the incomplete law of the Jews into God’s grace. John was saying that through Christ, God had taken the incompleteness of the Jewish faith, a faith focused on trying to purify ourselves so that we can be acceptable to God, and transformed it into a faith focused on grace. A faith focused on letting God transform us. John was telling us, through this miracle, that Jesus brings grace that overcomes the law, and leads us to a religion of celebration and joy rather than one of obsession and self-righteousness.
The transformation of water into wine was a message about God’s grace. If you take all the water in those jars and do the math, you realize that Jesus created up to 180 gallons of wine. That’s an tremendous amount of wine. In most weddings, even the large, I’d be surprised if more than ten gallons of wine was consumed. 180 gallons is a lot of wine. The ancient people would have immediately understood that this was John’s way of saying, “Not only has Jesus transformed the old faith of the Jews with grace, but Jesus has done it so thoroughly that God’s blessings are now overflowing all over the place. We have grace in abundance!” The fact that it was the best wine meant that God’s grace is better than anything humans can manufacture.
I think the point of this miracle, but also of all transforming miracles, is that God isn’t content for our lives to remain the same, just as God wasn’t content to leave the Jewish faith the same. Most people are content for their lives to remain the same. In fact, most of us invest a lot of time and energy trying to keep our lives the same. But the nature of life is that change and transformation are inevitable. If you need proof, look at your body. Is it the same as it was twenty years ago, ten, five, three, one? Is your family the same, whether you and your kids, or you and your original family? Look at your life. How many jobs have you had? How many grades and schools have you gone to? Life is about constant change, but God’s miracles channel our lives into specific kinds of change.
What this miracle tells us is that God is always calling us to stretch, to grow, to become someone constantly new. Do you fight against transformation? Do you embrace it? If you think about the whole way this church is set up, it’s designed to move you through this transformation. My sermons are always meant to lead you through transformation. The music we play isn’t meant to just move you emotionally and spiritually, it’s meant to move you transformationally. The classes we teach are designed to help you change. Even our meetings have that focus. Every committee and task force in this church spends the first 20 to 30 minutes doing a study so that we can become open to God’s transforming power in our personal lives and the church’s.
I think that one of the points of our miracle for today is that God is both calling and leading us into constant change. The question is whether we embrace this transformation, or brace ourselves against it.
Amen.
