Water into Wine
Epiphany 2 John 2: 1-12
17 January 2010
I for one am very glad that Jesus was a guest at that wedding in Cana of Gallilee, which we commemorate today. It is amazing to me that He did what He did while He was there and it is amazing to me that the Bible records it. It is amazing because I know of a lot of Christians who would find the whole idea of reveling at a marriage feast distasteful in the extreme, if not downright sinful. This incident gives us a slightly different picture of the nature of our Messiah than some which have won wide currency in the religious world, a picture that we do well to keep in mind. Imagine, in the midst of all the suffering and need that was around Him, and in light of all the other miracles He wrought, which always seem to be directed to those in dire straits, Jesus would take the occasion of a lack of wine at a wedding feast to perform His first public miracle! It seems like such an unimportant and trivial problem. So they are out of wine; big deal! It’s just a village wedding, after all, in a little place that maps hardly even show, amongst unimportant people, poor peasants like Jesus’ own family and disciples—an embarrassment to the family of the groom, to be sure, but at least it would keep the party from getting out of hand. With insufficient wine, there would be no danger of some of the crowd overdoing it, as usually happens at weddings.
But, no, Jesus intervened and did so on a grand scale. I did the math once on the sheer amount of wine that Jesus produced. The jars held from 120 to 180 gallons of water, now turned to wine. That is roughly the equivalent of 750 bottles. And by all accounts it was not vin ordinaire, either—no Gallo jug wine—the vintage was excellent. Jesus not only inundated the wedding with wine, he supplied grande cru for the whole company. They had never seen a party like that in Cana of Gallilee.
But what was Jesus’ point? The interchange with his mother, Mary, provides a little help. She called his attention to the problem and in a strange idiomatic sort of way, he responded to her: “I know, Mother, I have seen the problem, but I am not yet sure what to do about it. The Father hasn’t shown me.” That seems to be the significance of his words about his hour not yet come. Maybe his mother only wanted Him to send out for some wine, as if, perhaps, Jesus’ presence with all his disciples had put a strain upon the meager means of the groom’s family. Jesus, however, always being attuned to depths in a situation of which others were only faintly aware, was listening to the Father for a deeper possibility. So instead of sending out for a few jugs of the local wine, he undertakes a major sign.
That is what St John calls this miracle: a sign. Jesus, at the direction of the Father, set out to show something about Himself, the Kingdom of God, and God’s will for his people. Let’s look first at this latter: God’s will for his people. Sometimes God calls us to make sacrifices for the sake of our obedience to his will, for the sake of our love for his people, for the sake of truth and righteousness. But there is nothing inherently good in denying yourself the good things that he has given us, as long as you are able to receive them with thanksgiving and enjoy them with justice. God is not happy to see people who gather together for a meal sour and restrained to the point of hardly enjoying each other’s company or the food. He has made food and drink for fellowship and enjoyment, as well as nourishment. There would be no such thing as wine if God had not intended eating and drinking to be a pleasure as well as a means of sustaining our bodies. The OT is full of ideas like this, but it is also one of the meanings of this miracle of Jesus. Water would have been sufficient to meet the physical need; wine was given for joy.
There are several levels of meaning to this. First, we are spared the strictures of tee-totalism. I know that alcoholism is a problem in our world. It probably always has been. Jesus’ miracle is no call for unrestrained abandonment to our desires for food and drink. Being unrestrained in our desires is no recipe for enjoying what we crave. On the contrary, enjoyment is always enhanced by a certain reserve. But there are always those who want to deal with a problem by eliminating everything that is not strictly necessary. It not being necessary to drink wine, you eliminate it because some get drunk or dependent. The more difficult issue is proper use. There are gluttons in this world: people who eat too much. Yet how awful it would be if to deal with it, we only allowed beans and rice and oatmeal to be sold for food. That would probably soon eliminate most of the problems with being overweight, but it would not contribute to human happiness. In order to combat the sin of lust, some of the old moralists advised that sexual relations even between husbands and wives, should only be engaged in for the purpose of procreating a child. Lust in our day is certainly out of control, but that is not a remedy that increases human happiness, either. Against all of these narrowings of human life, Jesus performs this miracle at Cana. He seems to be signifying to us that life is meant for our deep joy. The good things are providentially created by God for our enjoyment and proper use and delight. Above all people, Christians ought to experience life in an abundant way—as if all the water of their existence had been turned to wine.
That is what the quantity of wine and its excellence is meant to convey: in Christ a new era has arrived, an era of deeper joy and greater delight and more intense happiness. Jesus shows himself to be the long-awaited Messiah, who inaugurates a new era in human history. This era can be contrasted with the old order of things by the simple comparison of vintage claret and ordinary water. It means also that Christian life is not an elimination of ordinary life, or a narrowing of it, or its strangling, but its elevation. All that is normal and natural, Christ takes and blesses and uses and raises to an even higher level. There is a lot of misunderstanding on this point in our world, even yet. That old idea of Victorian repression, in which what is natural and normal and human is restricted and imprisoned under tons of black wool and rows of buttons, is simply false as an explanation of Christian life and morality. The natural is redeemed and transformed by Jesus, not eliminated or crushed. Water is changed into wine.
The context for Jesus’ miracle is also important in this regard. It was a wedding feast. Marriages were big things in those days, even amongst the poor. I think I remember reading once that for a poor family, this might be the only time ever in their lives when a man and woman would preside over a great feast and know real abundance. Great sacrifices were made for a proper wedding feast. In this feasting were symbolized things like hope for a fruitful union, the joy of a community in the creation of a new family unit, even hopes for the fertility of the land. Memories went back to Eden—Adam and Eve in the days of their innocence, God’s will for the world in creation, and the role of righteous marriage in undoing the effects of the fall through obedience to God’s Covenant. All this Jesus took up and elevated even farther, building upon hints like we find in today’s OT lesson, where God promises that one day there shall be such intimacy between Him and His people, that they shall experience His love for them as a wife experiences the love of a husband who cherishes her and takes delight in her. In just such a fasion does Jesus take delight in his Church. He is the great Bridegroom and we are his Bride. He shows himself to be the groom at this wedding in Cana, providing the groom’s supply of wine, and showing us that we are called to his Wedding Feast at the consummation of this age. We belong to him, we are espoused to him through our baptism, and we long to be united to him in a perfect and complete way, which will take place at his return. There we can expect the great marriage supper of the Lamb, the feast in the Kingdom, the party which will celebrate our union with him forever. Christian husbands and wives are called to express that hope and give us all a foretaste of that experience in their marriages. Jesus raised human marriage to the level of a Christian sacrament by this action he performed at a wedding in Gallilee.
To be sure, we don’t see with our physical eyes the realities of the Kingdom, to which all the baptized belong. We see what is natural and normal and human, the rest is open only to faith. Yet faith is a real experience and the abundance of which the wine of Cana speaks is poured out still on those who are close to Jesus. The wine of the wedding feast of Cana is available to us as the wine of our communion with Him, our great Bridegroom, who gives us a foretaste even now of the abundance of good things to come. Of course, we cannot receive this wine without remembering that it comes to us through great cost. The wine of our happiness and delight is the wine of his outpoured sacrificial blood. The Bridegroom has sacrificed himself for his Bride, and his Bride awaits a final triumphant reunion. Yet his Bride, the Church, is not cut off from him until that time—He is with her in the power of the Holy Spirit all the time of this life until the world is restored and healed.
There are two important things to remember at this point. First, that since the world is not yet healed, the abundant life that Christ gives us is known in the midst of suffering and distress—not always, but sometimes, perhaps even often. The purely normal, natural human life does not actually exist anymore, but is now lived within confines of sinfulness and alienation from God. That alienation has brought manifold suffering to this world. So, while building on what is truly normal and natural in us, in order to elevate it to its proper spiritual status, the happiness and joy that Jesus brings to us may often have to be struggled for within circumstances that are the result of sin and evil; not necessarily circumstances we have made for ourselves, but those into which we were born or fall unawares. Still, there is a joy that can be found even then. It is not God’s will that we renounce what is beautiful and good and enjoyable simply to be spiritual. Christians ought to be in the forefront of those who are discovering what is most truly human even in the midst of inhuman conditions. Secondly, for the sake of the world’s healing, Jesus was willing to sacrifice all normal human happiness on the Cross. Sometimes there come to us the opportunities and responsiblities to make similar sacrifices in order to work with him for the healing of this world. The good things of this world may have to be sacrificed for the sake of a greater good, a greater love. That doesn’t mean that life’s good things are wicked, only that they are temporal, and so not ultimate. For the sake of something greater, they may have to be given up—as all of us must learn to give them up eventually in death. The soldier who lays down his life for family and homeland, does not despise the joys of life, he sacrifces them out of love. The monk who renounces all material things for a life of prayer, does not despise them; he gives them up for a greater good. The Christian who trains his passions, desires,and appetites by regular fasting, is not saying that what he gives up is bad; he trains himself rather to value what is best and most important in order to recognize what is good and enjoy it in moderation.
Even the good things of life have to be valued and enjoyed according to reason. Immoderate desire for the world’s good things lies behind much of the corruption of our social and personal lives. Still, the reason for discipline in what we use and enjoy is our deepest enjoyment and the needs of others, not a fearful, anxious worry. In all the circumstances of our lives, Christ wants for us an abundance. His gift is a life overflowing with richness, joy, and delight, no matter what the external circumstances. Of this abundance the wine of Cana is a symbol. For those who have eyes to see the meaning of the symbol, who have faith in Jesus, his glory is visible, and it spreads itself around to those who are His.