In our passage this morning we hear that Jesus is at a wedding with his mother and some disciples. Unfortunately, someone organizing the wedding didn’t account for how much the happy wedding guests were going to drink or how many there were going to be, and so the wine had run out. Jesus’s mother tells him this and Jesus replies, “What concern is that to me, my hour has not yet come.” This is a very odd answer and it should be your first clue that there’s more to the passage than just the literal meaning of the story. There’s a deeper spiritual lesson that God is giving us here.
The next part gets interesting. There are 6 stone jars filled with water that are supposed to be used for the purifying rites that are to occur before eating and drinking at a wedding feast. Jesus says something even more odd at this point: “Fill the jars with water and then draw some of that water out and take it to the person in charge of the wedding feast.” When that person goes to taste the water, he finds that it is actually wine. He doesn’t realize Jesus has turned the water into wine - only the servants who had drawn out the water knew it was Jesus - but instead, remarks to the bridegroom: “Wow, you’ve saved the best wine for now. Usually people serve it first so everyone is drunk enough that they won’t notice the cheap, bad wine they serve later!”
To really understand the significance of this passage and the deeper meaning that Jesus is driving at, you have to recall Scriptures that Jews would be familiar with. In Jeremiah 13, God tells the prophet that he is going to “fill all the inhabitants of this land - the kings who sit on David’s throne, the priests, the prophets and all the people of Jerusalem - with drunkenness” and then destroy them for the horrific way in which they have treated one another and the destruction they have wrought on themselves. Then we have this incredible contrast at the wedding at Cana: one man, Jesus Christ, who was a prophet, priest and the king, and having taken on our flesh to unite us to himself, able to stand in for every human being, who would sit on David's throne, filled jars with wine that would bring a blessing instead of destruction.
The good wine or the good creation God made - sullied by our sin which required an interim measure of being purified through things like water mentioned here, by the law given to Moses, or by animal sacrifices - is now finished. Christ is the new wine in this passage. The miracle of turning water into “good wine” is a small pointer to a much deeper reality: in Christ, God has overcome the evil destruction we bring on ourselves which leave us only a final destruction, and will make us new in his death and resurrection.
It makes sense that Jesus foretells of his own power to redeem and reconcile us to him at a wedding! We hear in our reading from Isaiah this morning: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate, but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her and your land Married, for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married. For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.” And Paul takes up this wedding imagery in his letter to the Ephesian church: “... just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, in order to make her holy by cleansing her with the washing of water by the word so as to present the church to himself in splendor without a spot or wrinkle or anything of the kind - yes so that she may be holy and without blemish.”
Christ is announcing to us here in this passage, that he is the one marrying the church, us, the bride. So no more will we be barren and unable to provide the good fruit of the children of God (to love God and neighbour, to return to God the gifts he has given us with interest). In him, by adoption and faithfulness, we are tasked to be the jar of good wine: that of Christ’s own body, bound by his blood, represented by the wine we take at communion.
Of course that faithfulness to which we are called in our new lives, bound to the good wine, being poured out for others, takes many forms just as we hear in Corinthians. Some will be teachers, some will knit, some will write or organize or speak, or call, or send cards, or simply care for others quietly, behind the scenes. Part of our calling is to recognize all of these gifts as little miracles, little signs, that God has placed in our lives, in our experiences, so that we might know and see that he is at work in transforming us into his body, his word, his wine. How is he calling us, and you, to develop your gifts and use them to provide the nourishment of Christ to others? AMEN
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