Series Introduction 

When I went to Sunday school growing up, we learned lots of different Bible stories, including many of the stories about Jesus’s miracles. But there was never an attempt to knit those individual stories into a more comprehensive picture of who Jesus is. When we don’t do this, it’s sort of like looking at a brick and failing to see that that brick is part of a larger, and far more glorious building. So over the next six sermons, I want to look at stories of Jesus’s miracles, but I hope that we can look at them not as six separate stories, Rather I hope we can see them as six parts in one broader story that helps us understand God as he’s revealed to us in Jesus. 

The miracles recorded in the gospels are a small subset of what Jesus did. In the last verse of his gospel, John tells us that it would be impossible to make a comprehensive list of the things that Jesus did, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written” (John 21:25, NIV). So from this embarrassment of riches, the Gospel writers chose the acts of Jesus that they felt best communicated who he was and what God was doing through him. So let’s start looking at this portrait of God revealed in the actions of Jesus. 

A very special wedding 

Weddings are the kind of time that we have high hopes for. This can lead to embarrassing situations when things fall short of our expectations. I remember going to a wedding once where the pastor seemed unprepared. He did vows twice during the ceremony and once very obviously forgot the bride’s name and tried to cover up the fact that he’d forgotten in a way that convinced absolutely no one. Another time, I was at a wedding as a photographer. The couple exchanging their vows had met each other because his son and her daughter were dating. Now this couple, who we’re still dating, were becoming stepbrother and stepsister. Stepsister. You can imagine all the jokes that people could tell. They all got told. 

The story I want to look at in this sermon happens at a wedding. Jesus, his mother, and his disciples have been invited to celebrate a couple’s wedding and this serves as the backdrop for Jesus’s first miracle.

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”

“Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour 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. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then 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.”

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. John 2:1-11 (NIV)

The wedding where the wine ran out. This isn’t necessarily a big deal in our culture, at least in the company that I keep. I came from a teetotaling family, and Carolyn came from a family where people occasionally indulge, but not frequently. We decided to have a dry wedding, and no one complained, at least to our faces. This would be unacceptable in Jesus’s culture. Not providing sufficient wine was, some commentators have noted, a potential source of legal action. People brought extravagant gifts, but they also expected a certain minimum standard of hospitality. The wine running out partway through the feast would not rise to this minimum standard. The expectation was that the family of the Bride would set aside a barrel of wine on the day she was born, and then an additional barrel on her birthday each year. Year. By the time the girl reached marriageable age, there should be an abundant supply of wine with which to celebrate her nuptials. For some reason, runs out. Maybe Jesus asked if he could bring some friends along, but they expected one or two, not a dozen thirsty men. Maybe the family of the bride was poor and couldn’t afford to set aside the right amount of wine. No matter the reason for the wine running out, the scandal such an incident would cause would cast this family in a negative light for decades to come. Jesus’s mother finds out about this problem and discreetly approaches. Jesus to inform him. It’s unclear what she’s hoping Jesus will do. The narrative says that this is Jesus’s first miracle, so it’s not that he has a history of miraculously intervening to fix people’s problems. Jesus seems reluctant to get involved. Perhaps he’s concerned that fixing the problem might seem like a party trick, and so cheapen the work that he’s doing. Perhaps it’s when he sees the stone pots that he concludes that he can intervene because to do so allows him to teach those with eyes to see an important lesson about what God is doing through him.

Water

The stone pots, we are told, are used for ritual washing. In Jewish law, there are many instances where a person is commanded to bathe themselves when they’ve come into contact with something impure. So, for example, if you had contact with a dead body, you would be required by the law to bathe in water before you could worship God in the temple. But that’s not the kind of ritual washing these pots would be used for. They’re not bathtubs. In Mark’s gospel, we read about how many Jews had elaborate washing rituals, not found in the law of Moses, but part of an oral tradition that had developed in the previous few centuries. After they had been exiled to Babylon, the Jews who returned to Israel wanted to make sure that such a catastrophe never befell them again. As a response, they created much more stringent rules to separate faithful Jews from unfaithful Jews and Gentiles. That way the remnant wouldn’t be tempted to compromise in the same way that many of the Jews had compromised before the exile. Ritual washing was part of this body of rules. If you had contact with an unfaithful Jew, like a tax collector, you might want to wash away the impurity, and so you would wash your hands. If you had dealings with a Gentile, you would want to wash your hands. So these Stone pots serve as a a symbol of Jewish religious exclusivism. They are what separates the literally unwashed from the washed, the righteous from the impure, The Insider from the outsider. But Jesus turns this water of exclusion into wine.

Wine

Wine is a complicated symbol in the scriptures. First of all, wine was a symbol of hospitality. If you had a stranger visit you in your home, you would be expected to serve them wine. At the same time, wine was associated with celebration. As I mentioned above, not having enough wine at your wedding was something someone could sue you for. Why not? Also serves as a symbol associated with God’s blessing and the restoration of his people. Shortly before the Jews were taken into exile, the prophets warned them of God’s coming judgment, but they also wanted to communicate that this judgment would be discipline, not total rejection. He promised to restore the fortunes of Israel, and the language used to describe this is celebratory and includes language about wine. Some examples from the Old Testament prophets:

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,

“when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman

 and the planter by the one treading grapes.

New wine will drip from the mountains

 and flow from all the hills,

 and I will bring my people Israel back from exile.

“They will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.

 They will plant vineyards and drink their wine;

 they will make gardens and eat their fruit.

I will plant Israel in their own land,

 never again to be uprooted

 from the land I have given them,”

says the Lord your God (Amos 9:13-15, NIV).

And Isaiah says:

On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare

 a feast of rich food for all peoples,

a banquet of aged wine—

 the best of meats and the finest of wines.

On this mountain he will destroy

 the shroud that enfolds all peoples,

the sheet that covers all nations;

 he will swallow up death forever.

The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears

 from all faces;

he will remove his people’s disgrace

 from all the earth.

The Lord has spoken (Isaiah 25:6-8, NIV)

For this age of restoration had never materialized. The Jews were allowed to return home after several decades of exile, but they lived as functional slaves in their ancestral Homeland, ruled over by a succession of foreign empires: the Persians, the Greeks, and finally the Romans. Several generations after the return of the people from their exile, we read about the lament of some Levites about their situation living under foreign domination: “But see, we are slaves today, slaves in the land you gave our ancestors so they could eat its fruit and the other good things it produces. Because of our sins, its abundant harvest goes to the kings you have placed over us. They rule over our bodies and our cattle as they please. We are in great distress” (Nehemiah 9:36-37, NIV). The Jews’s return from exile, seemed underwhelming, like God had over-promised and under-delivered. Many Jews assumed that the exile had never actually ended. So when Jesus makes a bounty of wine appear, his actions signal that Israel’s long wait for restoration is finally coming to an end in what he’s doing. 

Wine also takes on further symbolic meaning at the Last Supper, where Jesus uses wine as a symbol of his blood poured out to affect a reconciliation between God and people. It points to a paradox, of Jesus’s suffering. Love brings about a situation of celebration and hospitality and inclusion and blessing. 

The fact that all of this happens at a wedding is also important. Weddings are where people who are not family become family. I remember the day after my own wedding when I asked my mother-in-law, Elsie, what I should call her. Her. She insisted that I should address her as Mom, even though 2 days prior, we were not related.

So what is the picture that these symbols are trying to convey to us? Jesus is breaking down the barriers that separate religious insiders and outsiders through his blood, and he’s joining them all together in one family through that blood. And this is the fulfillment of God’s promises. The new age of promised restoration is breaking into the old age through what Jesus is doing, and that life will be experienced in a new people of God. The life of the new age is experienced in the church. Or at least it should be. 

Embodying the Celebration

Historically, the church hasn’t always been good at living this message out. In the first century, many religious Jews found it difficult to include gentile believers in their communities. After all, God had decreed that his people should bear certain distinctive practices, like circumcision, kosher dietary restrictions, and Sabbath observance. Observance. They reasoned that people coming into the church should follow these practices. But what this did was to communicate to Gentiles that they needed to become culturally Jewish to be participating members of God’s people. This caused a dust-up between Peter and Paul outlined by Paul in his letter to the Galatians:

When I saw that they were not acting in line with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas in front of them all, “You are a Jew, yet you live like a Gentile and not like a Jew. How is it, then, that you force Gentiles to follow Jewish customs? We who are Jews by birth and not sinful Gentiles know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ. So we, too, have put our faith in Christ Jesus that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law, because by the works of the law no one will be justified. (Galatians 2:14-16, NIV)

It seems certain Christians were licking to the water of Jewish religious exclusivism rather than looking to the wine of God’s grace. Making space for the outsider when you are an Insider is a humbling thing to do. 

We struggle with this same tendency, although the presenting issue isn’t the division between Jews and Gentiles. It typically involves our difficulty in accepting people who are theologically, culturally, or politically different from us. We have a hard time understanding the kind of life that makes Christians unique and separating that from our church culture. We assume that to be a Christian means to worship in a specific way, to dress in a specific way (especially at church), to vote a certain way, to hold a specific “biblical” view of hot-button cultural issues (as if the Bible mandates one way of thinking about every issue). Like the religious Jews of Jesus’s day, we create boundaries between religious insiders and religious outsiders. Our boundary-making denies the hospitality expressed by Jesus, both in this miracle and on the cross. 

Bounded Sets and Centred Sets

I find the mathematical concept of sets can be helpful for us to understand how to draw the lines between insiders and outsiders. The most common type of set we might think of is a bounded set. Bounded sets use a predefined boundary to determine what is inside the set and what is outside the set. This can be mathematical, for example, a set of between 1 and 10 includes four, and eight, but not 19. It can apply to other disciplines as well. In geography, we could say that Toronto, Montreal, and Kirkland Lake all belong to a set of Canadian municipalities, but Tokyo and Tehran do not. When we think of the distinction between insiders and outsiders as a bounded set, then we spend a lot of time defining the boundaries. “Real Christians oppose abortion” And government regulation,” someone might say. But is this what Jesus is communicating?

Centered sets are quite different. They begin by defining a center defining what is inside and outside the set based on its orientation to that center so, for example, if I am the center of a set, then people walking away from me are not part of the set, and people walking toward me are a part of the set. It’s about orientation and direction. Not location. A person can be close to me, and not be a part of this set, a person might be on the other side of the room, but if they’re moving toward me they are an Insider. Insider. Think this is what Jesus is communicating. There are many religious Jews who are near Jesus, but reject his authority, they are oriented away from him. But many pagans are far from Jesus, but they are open to seeking him out. These people are invited to the table despite the distance between them and Jesus. 

Reconsidering Our Spiritual Practices

This parable also asked us to reconsider our spiritual practices. Washing your hands is not a bad thing, but if washing signals an unwillingness to engage with those who don’t wash, then it can become a problem. Similarly, spiritual practices like prayer, reading the Bible, and attending worship services are good things. It’s just when they become a substitute for or an impediment to our mission that they become a problem. The Jews before the exile had failed to live distinctly from the Nations around them. They were in the world and of the world. The Jews who returned from exile tried to be faithful, at least in their external behaviour, but they achieved this by walling themselves off from outsiders. They were neither in the world nor of it. The call of Jesus is for us to follow his example. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (John 1:14a, NIV). Jesus takes up residence with us, while at the same time, living according to the distinct values of God’s kingdom. We need to be in the world, but not of it. As Anabaptists, we have historically suffered from the same shortcomings as the Jews in Jesus’ day. We have tried to live distinctively by isolating ourselves from the surrounding culture. If this is how we live, it doesn’t matter how righteous we are, the world will not see God in our lives. Our lives need to be an invitation to the great wedding.

At that wedding, Jesus was telling us that the boundary between insider and outsider was being blown up, because it was time for the great celebration when both would be invited into a new family headed by Jesus, God with us. We are meant to be people of the wedding invitation, our lives overflowing with the wine of hospitality, inclusiveness and love, not the water of exclusivism. So let’s join in the celebration of the marriage of heaven and earth made possible by what Jesus has done for us.