Second Sunday After The Epiphany
Preaching
Lectionary Preaching Workbook
Series VII, Cycle C
Theme For The Day
With Jesus, wonders never cease.
Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 62:1-5
So Shall Your God Rejoice Over You
The theme of assurance for the exiles, voiced in last week's reading from Isaiah, continues in this week's passage. In verse 1, we hear the prophet speaking of the sense of calling that impels him to speak out: He will not be silent, he vows, until Israel's "vindication shines out like the dawn." This vindication will be clearly visible to all nations (v. 2). In verses 4-5, Isaiah introduces the metaphor of the Lord as the faithful bridegroom, and Israel the bride: "as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you."
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Spiritual Gifts For The Common Good
This week begins a seven-week series of lectionary selections from 1 Corinthians. The leadership situation in the Corinthian church, as in many of the Pauline churches in those early days, was chaotic. These were the days before church order had developed in any consistent way; Paul exercised considerable personal authority, but apart from that, the churches appear to have been governed in a loosely charismatic fashion. Consequently, the early church needed to work out what it believed about individual gifts of the Spirit, and how the manifestations of those gifts were to influence the life of the Christian community. An important principle is that spiritual gifts are given not for individual edification, but "for the common good" (v. 7). Gifts are widely distributed throughout the community; but it is the Holy Spirit who is responsible for "activating" and ordering them (vv. 8-11). Verses 8-10 are one of three lists of gifts of the Spirit found in the Pauline epistles; the others are found in Ephesians 4:11-12 and in Romans 12:6-7.
The Gospel
John 2:1-11
The Wedding At Cana
The first of Jesus' miracles in John's Gospel is this well-loved story of the wedding feast at Cana. Unlike most of Jesus' other miracles, the circumstances of this one are relatively trivial: the supplying of wine for a wedding. The story functions symbolically for John: The "on the third day" introduction (v. 1) foreshadows the resurrection. Furthermore, John clearly identifies the water jars as those that were ordinarily used for Jewish rites of purification. By changing this water (which had a solemn spiritual purpose) into wine, Jesus is publicly witnessing to the celebratory nature of his religious reform movement. The water of guilt and shame has been changed into the wine of celebration. There is some comical interplay between Jesus and Mary, as she gently goads him into taking public action to solve the wine shortage problem. The closing formula of verse 11 indicates the purpose of the "signs" (miracles) Jesus performs: They are to reveal his glory, and lead others to believe.
Preaching Possibilities
"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue." To that list of essential ingredients for a wedding, we could very well add one more: "Something to go wrong."
That's not a bad piece of advice to give to brides and grooms. There they'll be, all nervous that everything may not go exactly right on their wedding day. Some wise aunt or uncle ought to take them aside, well before their big day, and say -- in response to the worry that something will go wrong -- "Don't worry, it will." Always there's something (or someone) forgotten, neglected, backward, or late. Always there's that slipup, that mishap, that stumbling over words (or maybe over something more substantial).
"Don't worry," we ought to say to brides and grooms, "something will go wrong -- and very likely it will turn out to be that very thing, years from now, that will become the centerpiece of your favorite wedding story."
At the marriage feast at Cana in John's Gospel, something does go wrong. Only this is no minor glitch. According to the customs of the day, it's a social disaster.
The wine runs out. Midway through the feast, before any of the guests were remotely ready to go home, the last drop dangled from the spout of the last clay amphora, before detaching itself to plunge into the cup. It was not long after that the whispering began. It began with the next wedding guest in line at the bar who was left holding an empty cup in his hand.
Don't the rabbis say, "Without wine, there is no joy?" Is it not true that, at a wedding, the sacred laws of hospitality require a host to keep pouring the wine, liberally, until all the guests have had enough? Crestfallen, the bride's parents regard each other in dismay. The bride looks over at them, too, tears flooding her eyes; then she looks to her new husband, who's turning red with embarrassment. His eyes will not even meet hers. Round and round the room the whispering goes, and the bride's family doesn't need to hear the words to know what the guests are saying: "They have no wine."
Even Mary, the mother of Jesus, is passing on that grim message. But when she turns to her son, he declines to pass the rumor on to the next person. He dismisses it. "Woman," he says to his mother, "what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come."
But then, Mary -- who somehow must know what her son can do, even though John tells us this is his first miracle -- turns to one of the servants and gestures in Jesus' direction. "Do whatever he tells you," she instructs.
So Jesus tells him. He commands the servant to take the six stone jars lined up against the wall -- the jars typically used to hold the water used for washing hands and feet upon entering the house, according to the law -- and he tells him to fill them up with water. The servant does so, and when he pours some back out -- wonder of wonders -- it has turned to wine!
And not just any wine. This is the finest vintage, the stuff most hosts would serve first to impress their guests -- not the bargain label they might hold in reserve, for those guests who don't know when to stop!
The bride and the groom look at each other with astonishment and relief. If, as the servants claim, it's true that all six of the stone jars are filled with wine, there's not a chance of running short now. Why, each of those jars holds twenty to thirty gallons -- that's 120 gallons of wine at the very least. Jesus has taken their family's shameful deficiency and transformed it into overflowing abundance.
To some Christians, this miracle story of the wedding at Cana has always been something of an embarrassment. At first glance, it seems so trivial. Set it alongside the healings, the feeding of the hungry, the calming of the storm, the raising of the dead, and it looks like some piece of cheap costume jewelry laying on the black velvet on the Tiffany's counter.
Not only does the miracle at Cana sound trivial to modern ears, there's also the troubling fact that it's got alcohol at the center of it. During the years of Prohibition in our country, teetotaling Temperance preachers strove mightily, with all the biblical scholarship at their disposal, to explain this detail of the miracle away. A whole body of Christian midrash grew up, trying in vain to account for that fact that Jesus not only attended a rather drunken banquet, but appears to have picked up the bar tab! Suddenly, conservative scholars "discovered," somewhere or other, that all wine in Jesus' day was really unfermented grape juice; or, according to another theory, that people habitually diluted their wine three-parts-to-one with water, so it hardly had any kick at all.
Well, you know how hard it was to enforce Prohibition -- and that was with a whole body of laws behind it, and very few people having the wherewithal to brew alcoholic beverages in their homes. In a sunny Mediterranean land, with an agricultural economy and vineyards all around -- and everybody having near at hand the capacity to ferment grape juice -- don't believe for a moment that most people voluntarily diluted their favorite beverage with water. Besides, elsewhere in the Bible you can read numerous exhortations against drunkenness -- evidence that it was probably as much of a problem in Jesus' day as it is in ours.
No, it was real wine Jesus produced at Cana. He did so out of compassion for the bride and groom, and for their parents -- to spare them the devastating social stigma of having failed to extend the customary hospitality.
Besides, there's ample evidence that Jesus loved a good party. It's one of the things about him the scribes and Pharisees loved to criticize. They may have aspired to asceticism, they may have measured their lives by fasting and austere discipline ... but this tradesman-rabbi from Nazareth was none of these things.
Jesus does not come merely as rule-giver, as the sort of austere and humorless leader for whom the Pharisees fervently hoped. No, Jesus comes in order to celebrate all that is good about this world and this human life of ours, and to teach us what needs to be done to make sure such goodness continues to abound. Naturally, he opposes sin -- and naturally, he would never have condoned alcoholism, with its dreadful capacity to ruin families and destroy lives -- but our Savior demonstrates such a love of laughter and such a zest for life that at times he is charged with being, in his own words, "a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners."
In growing to maturity in a small, Palestinian village -- and later on, in tramping, along with his disciples, the length and breadth of that sunny land -- Jesus takes on human life in all its rich variety. He takes it on, and he redeems it. In being born to a human mother, in growing up in an ordinary family, in being baptized, in attending wedding feasts, in playing with children -- even in fashioning that whip of cords and letting his anger run its course as he drives the moneychangers from the temple -- Jesus hallows this human life of ours. He makes the experiences of birth, marriage, and even death all the more sacred and meaningful. In a small, out-of-the-way village such as Cana, a wedding could be the social event of the year, the focus of enormous pressures on the families involved. Jesus is happy to play a small role in making that social event successful.
Jesus will go forth, eventually, to take up a cross and die. In so doing, he will bear the burden of all the world's sin. In these bright and beautiful days he has left, the Savior of the world is not one to be weighed down by care and worry. He is not one to borrow trouble by gazing solemnly out into the distant future -- "Today's trouble is enough for today," he teaches, in the Sermon on the Mount. At the wedding feast, let the wine be poured. Let the people dance. And let the bride and groom be radiant with joy!
Prayer For The Day
O God whose giving knows no ending,
we confess that all too often
words of despair issue forth from our mouths:
"There is not enough."
Help us to trust your goodness to be good.
Teach us that your promises of abundance are sure.
Show us, in the common fare of everyday living --
bread broken, wine poured out --
that your love is without limit. Amen.
To Illustrate
Reflecting on the story of the marriage at Cana, preaching professor Thomas Long writes,
There is a time to laugh as well as a time to weep, and the Son of Man, who shared our tears on the way to the grave of Lazarus and the cross of Calvary, shared also our mirth at the feast of Cana. All the faculties of life are to be, not suspected, but redeemed from evil by the Christian; and one of the richest and happiest is the faculty of earth. Our duty is not to check its brightness, but to keep its innocence; and surely in the laughter that is like the laughter of the child, of the sunlight and the birds, God is well pleased.
***
In the Bible, there are 35 recorded miracles of Jesus. Of these, Matthew tells of twenty, Mark eighteen, and Luke also twenty (in absolute numbers, it's more than 35, but there is some overlap among the first three gospels).
The Gospel of John, however, stands alone. It's different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John tells of only seven miracles of Jesus and each of his miracles are unique to his gospel. John's interested much less than the other three in presenting a straightforward historical narrative. He chooses and arranges his miracle stories carefully, to make a point. Now considering how carefully John has arranged things, it may seem remarkable that he expends one of his seven precious miracle story slots -- and the very first one, at that -- on this story of the marriage at Cana. Surely, some may think, he could have chosen a more edifying miracle.
But maybe it's not so remarkable, after all. Maybe John's choice is highly intentional. Maybe he's painfully aware that the journey of his Lord and Master that begins with such giddy joy -- with an entire village laughing and dancing and singing the night away -- will end on a cross. Maybe, in choosing to begin Jesus' brief run of seven miracles with this tale of water turned to wine, John is wanting to teach something very important about his Lord and ours.
***
The water jars Jesus uses for the miracle are no ordinary containers. John takes pains to tell us they are the stone jars used in the Jewish rites of purification. All the wedding guests, upon entering the banquet hall, were expected to wash their hands and feet in the biblically prescribed manner, to make themselves ritually pure for the celebration. This was in fulfillment of the law, and surely every guest -- Jesus included -- would have done that. That's why those jars are sitting there empty, and why Jesus has to instruct the servants to fill them back up with water.
It's not without a sense of humor that Jesus singles out these six containers to hold the wine. He could just as easily have used the wineskins or clay jugs that the first round of drinks had come in. Indeed, it would have been perfectly logical to do so. Instead, Jesus makes use of the purification-vessels. Why?
Jesus chooses these six stone jars in order to make a point. Yes, Jesus is faithful to God's law, but he has seen too many people burdened down by the overly zealous application of it. He has seen the law -- that was first given in its pristine form, the Ten Commandments, in order to free the human race from sin -- transformed into a diabolical machine for crushing the human spirit. Remember what Jesus tells his disciples, when they are hungry one sabbath day, and he sends them into the fields to harvest food: "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath."
***
For John, the changing of water into wine is a sign. That's what he calls it; John studiously avoids the Greek word for "miracle" (even though that's the word most of us would use, in retelling this story). People of our age look back on this event, and focus on the suspension of natural laws. People of John's age, by contrast, would have taken it for granted that supernatural wonders like this could take place.
For John, the most important feature of the water turned to wine is the greater reality to which it points: the reality of God's redeeming love, already at work in the person of Jesus Christ. The wedding at Cana is a tantalizing glimpse, a sneak preview, of all that will one day come to pass: The rescue of the universe from the forces of darkness, and the everlasting celebration that will follow.
For the early church, that celebration finds its focus in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper -- and, for this reason, it's no accident that wine is the central feature of the Cana event. At the center of many other religions of the Roman world there is the acrid smoke of burning sacrificial meat, or the whispered words of mysterious revelation, or the re-enactment of a cosmic drama. Yet the center of Christian worship is different. At the center of Christian worship is a feast of bread and wine: the first fruits of a greater celebration yet to come.
Of this "first sign" that Jesus did "in Cana of Galilee," John says it "revealed his glory." That's the future dimension of this story, the one you and I are so likely to miss, if we allow ourselves to be dazzled by the miraculous nature of this event. For John, what's most significant about the wedding of Cana is the way it points us to the future -- the way it functions as a sign in the truest sense.
***
The famed escape artist, Harry Houdini, used to boast that he could escape from any jail cell ever built. When his vaudeville act would pull into a city, the first place he would go was the local jail, as a sort of publicity stunt -- to test whether that jail could hold Harry Houdini.
One police chief nearly got the better of him. He ushered Houdini back into his newest, strongest cell and pushed the door shut. Then everyone withdrew and left the master at his work.
Houdini made a small tear in the lining of his jacket and pulled out a lockpick. He went to work on the lock -- but found that this one wasn't so easy. From every angle he approached it, utilizing every trick and technique of his amazing repertoire, but the lock would not click open. An hour later, sweat running off his brow, the great Houdini gave up. He fell against the door in despair -- and to his amazement, it opened! The door had never been locked at all. It had only been locked in Houdini's mind.
That's the way sin is. Christians have, in Jesus, the most liberating news the world has ever heard, but so often we despair behind locked doors of our own creation. Jesus has promised us freedom from sin, that all we have to do is trust him and his atoning death on the cross -- but time and again, we fall into deadly old patterns and we despair. We fear there is no more wine!
With Jesus, wonders never cease.
Old Testament Lesson
Isaiah 62:1-5
So Shall Your God Rejoice Over You
The theme of assurance for the exiles, voiced in last week's reading from Isaiah, continues in this week's passage. In verse 1, we hear the prophet speaking of the sense of calling that impels him to speak out: He will not be silent, he vows, until Israel's "vindication shines out like the dawn." This vindication will be clearly visible to all nations (v. 2). In verses 4-5, Isaiah introduces the metaphor of the Lord as the faithful bridegroom, and Israel the bride: "as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you."
New Testament Lesson
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Spiritual Gifts For The Common Good
This week begins a seven-week series of lectionary selections from 1 Corinthians. The leadership situation in the Corinthian church, as in many of the Pauline churches in those early days, was chaotic. These were the days before church order had developed in any consistent way; Paul exercised considerable personal authority, but apart from that, the churches appear to have been governed in a loosely charismatic fashion. Consequently, the early church needed to work out what it believed about individual gifts of the Spirit, and how the manifestations of those gifts were to influence the life of the Christian community. An important principle is that spiritual gifts are given not for individual edification, but "for the common good" (v. 7). Gifts are widely distributed throughout the community; but it is the Holy Spirit who is responsible for "activating" and ordering them (vv. 8-11). Verses 8-10 are one of three lists of gifts of the Spirit found in the Pauline epistles; the others are found in Ephesians 4:11-12 and in Romans 12:6-7.
The Gospel
John 2:1-11
The Wedding At Cana
The first of Jesus' miracles in John's Gospel is this well-loved story of the wedding feast at Cana. Unlike most of Jesus' other miracles, the circumstances of this one are relatively trivial: the supplying of wine for a wedding. The story functions symbolically for John: The "on the third day" introduction (v. 1) foreshadows the resurrection. Furthermore, John clearly identifies the water jars as those that were ordinarily used for Jewish rites of purification. By changing this water (which had a solemn spiritual purpose) into wine, Jesus is publicly witnessing to the celebratory nature of his religious reform movement. The water of guilt and shame has been changed into the wine of celebration. There is some comical interplay between Jesus and Mary, as she gently goads him into taking public action to solve the wine shortage problem. The closing formula of verse 11 indicates the purpose of the "signs" (miracles) Jesus performs: They are to reveal his glory, and lead others to believe.
Preaching Possibilities
"Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue." To that list of essential ingredients for a wedding, we could very well add one more: "Something to go wrong."
That's not a bad piece of advice to give to brides and grooms. There they'll be, all nervous that everything may not go exactly right on their wedding day. Some wise aunt or uncle ought to take them aside, well before their big day, and say -- in response to the worry that something will go wrong -- "Don't worry, it will." Always there's something (or someone) forgotten, neglected, backward, or late. Always there's that slipup, that mishap, that stumbling over words (or maybe over something more substantial).
"Don't worry," we ought to say to brides and grooms, "something will go wrong -- and very likely it will turn out to be that very thing, years from now, that will become the centerpiece of your favorite wedding story."
At the marriage feast at Cana in John's Gospel, something does go wrong. Only this is no minor glitch. According to the customs of the day, it's a social disaster.
The wine runs out. Midway through the feast, before any of the guests were remotely ready to go home, the last drop dangled from the spout of the last clay amphora, before detaching itself to plunge into the cup. It was not long after that the whispering began. It began with the next wedding guest in line at the bar who was left holding an empty cup in his hand.
Don't the rabbis say, "Without wine, there is no joy?" Is it not true that, at a wedding, the sacred laws of hospitality require a host to keep pouring the wine, liberally, until all the guests have had enough? Crestfallen, the bride's parents regard each other in dismay. The bride looks over at them, too, tears flooding her eyes; then she looks to her new husband, who's turning red with embarrassment. His eyes will not even meet hers. Round and round the room the whispering goes, and the bride's family doesn't need to hear the words to know what the guests are saying: "They have no wine."
Even Mary, the mother of Jesus, is passing on that grim message. But when she turns to her son, he declines to pass the rumor on to the next person. He dismisses it. "Woman," he says to his mother, "what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come."
But then, Mary -- who somehow must know what her son can do, even though John tells us this is his first miracle -- turns to one of the servants and gestures in Jesus' direction. "Do whatever he tells you," she instructs.
So Jesus tells him. He commands the servant to take the six stone jars lined up against the wall -- the jars typically used to hold the water used for washing hands and feet upon entering the house, according to the law -- and he tells him to fill them up with water. The servant does so, and when he pours some back out -- wonder of wonders -- it has turned to wine!
And not just any wine. This is the finest vintage, the stuff most hosts would serve first to impress their guests -- not the bargain label they might hold in reserve, for those guests who don't know when to stop!
The bride and the groom look at each other with astonishment and relief. If, as the servants claim, it's true that all six of the stone jars are filled with wine, there's not a chance of running short now. Why, each of those jars holds twenty to thirty gallons -- that's 120 gallons of wine at the very least. Jesus has taken their family's shameful deficiency and transformed it into overflowing abundance.
To some Christians, this miracle story of the wedding at Cana has always been something of an embarrassment. At first glance, it seems so trivial. Set it alongside the healings, the feeding of the hungry, the calming of the storm, the raising of the dead, and it looks like some piece of cheap costume jewelry laying on the black velvet on the Tiffany's counter.
Not only does the miracle at Cana sound trivial to modern ears, there's also the troubling fact that it's got alcohol at the center of it. During the years of Prohibition in our country, teetotaling Temperance preachers strove mightily, with all the biblical scholarship at their disposal, to explain this detail of the miracle away. A whole body of Christian midrash grew up, trying in vain to account for that fact that Jesus not only attended a rather drunken banquet, but appears to have picked up the bar tab! Suddenly, conservative scholars "discovered," somewhere or other, that all wine in Jesus' day was really unfermented grape juice; or, according to another theory, that people habitually diluted their wine three-parts-to-one with water, so it hardly had any kick at all.
Well, you know how hard it was to enforce Prohibition -- and that was with a whole body of laws behind it, and very few people having the wherewithal to brew alcoholic beverages in their homes. In a sunny Mediterranean land, with an agricultural economy and vineyards all around -- and everybody having near at hand the capacity to ferment grape juice -- don't believe for a moment that most people voluntarily diluted their favorite beverage with water. Besides, elsewhere in the Bible you can read numerous exhortations against drunkenness -- evidence that it was probably as much of a problem in Jesus' day as it is in ours.
No, it was real wine Jesus produced at Cana. He did so out of compassion for the bride and groom, and for their parents -- to spare them the devastating social stigma of having failed to extend the customary hospitality.
Besides, there's ample evidence that Jesus loved a good party. It's one of the things about him the scribes and Pharisees loved to criticize. They may have aspired to asceticism, they may have measured their lives by fasting and austere discipline ... but this tradesman-rabbi from Nazareth was none of these things.
Jesus does not come merely as rule-giver, as the sort of austere and humorless leader for whom the Pharisees fervently hoped. No, Jesus comes in order to celebrate all that is good about this world and this human life of ours, and to teach us what needs to be done to make sure such goodness continues to abound. Naturally, he opposes sin -- and naturally, he would never have condoned alcoholism, with its dreadful capacity to ruin families and destroy lives -- but our Savior demonstrates such a love of laughter and such a zest for life that at times he is charged with being, in his own words, "a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners."
In growing to maturity in a small, Palestinian village -- and later on, in tramping, along with his disciples, the length and breadth of that sunny land -- Jesus takes on human life in all its rich variety. He takes it on, and he redeems it. In being born to a human mother, in growing up in an ordinary family, in being baptized, in attending wedding feasts, in playing with children -- even in fashioning that whip of cords and letting his anger run its course as he drives the moneychangers from the temple -- Jesus hallows this human life of ours. He makes the experiences of birth, marriage, and even death all the more sacred and meaningful. In a small, out-of-the-way village such as Cana, a wedding could be the social event of the year, the focus of enormous pressures on the families involved. Jesus is happy to play a small role in making that social event successful.
Jesus will go forth, eventually, to take up a cross and die. In so doing, he will bear the burden of all the world's sin. In these bright and beautiful days he has left, the Savior of the world is not one to be weighed down by care and worry. He is not one to borrow trouble by gazing solemnly out into the distant future -- "Today's trouble is enough for today," he teaches, in the Sermon on the Mount. At the wedding feast, let the wine be poured. Let the people dance. And let the bride and groom be radiant with joy!
Prayer For The Day
O God whose giving knows no ending,
we confess that all too often
words of despair issue forth from our mouths:
"There is not enough."
Help us to trust your goodness to be good.
Teach us that your promises of abundance are sure.
Show us, in the common fare of everyday living --
bread broken, wine poured out --
that your love is without limit. Amen.
To Illustrate
Reflecting on the story of the marriage at Cana, preaching professor Thomas Long writes,
There is a time to laugh as well as a time to weep, and the Son of Man, who shared our tears on the way to the grave of Lazarus and the cross of Calvary, shared also our mirth at the feast of Cana. All the faculties of life are to be, not suspected, but redeemed from evil by the Christian; and one of the richest and happiest is the faculty of earth. Our duty is not to check its brightness, but to keep its innocence; and surely in the laughter that is like the laughter of the child, of the sunlight and the birds, God is well pleased.
***
In the Bible, there are 35 recorded miracles of Jesus. Of these, Matthew tells of twenty, Mark eighteen, and Luke also twenty (in absolute numbers, it's more than 35, but there is some overlap among the first three gospels).
The Gospel of John, however, stands alone. It's different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John tells of only seven miracles of Jesus and each of his miracles are unique to his gospel. John's interested much less than the other three in presenting a straightforward historical narrative. He chooses and arranges his miracle stories carefully, to make a point. Now considering how carefully John has arranged things, it may seem remarkable that he expends one of his seven precious miracle story slots -- and the very first one, at that -- on this story of the marriage at Cana. Surely, some may think, he could have chosen a more edifying miracle.
But maybe it's not so remarkable, after all. Maybe John's choice is highly intentional. Maybe he's painfully aware that the journey of his Lord and Master that begins with such giddy joy -- with an entire village laughing and dancing and singing the night away -- will end on a cross. Maybe, in choosing to begin Jesus' brief run of seven miracles with this tale of water turned to wine, John is wanting to teach something very important about his Lord and ours.
***
The water jars Jesus uses for the miracle are no ordinary containers. John takes pains to tell us they are the stone jars used in the Jewish rites of purification. All the wedding guests, upon entering the banquet hall, were expected to wash their hands and feet in the biblically prescribed manner, to make themselves ritually pure for the celebration. This was in fulfillment of the law, and surely every guest -- Jesus included -- would have done that. That's why those jars are sitting there empty, and why Jesus has to instruct the servants to fill them back up with water.
It's not without a sense of humor that Jesus singles out these six containers to hold the wine. He could just as easily have used the wineskins or clay jugs that the first round of drinks had come in. Indeed, it would have been perfectly logical to do so. Instead, Jesus makes use of the purification-vessels. Why?
Jesus chooses these six stone jars in order to make a point. Yes, Jesus is faithful to God's law, but he has seen too many people burdened down by the overly zealous application of it. He has seen the law -- that was first given in its pristine form, the Ten Commandments, in order to free the human race from sin -- transformed into a diabolical machine for crushing the human spirit. Remember what Jesus tells his disciples, when they are hungry one sabbath day, and he sends them into the fields to harvest food: "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath."
***
For John, the changing of water into wine is a sign. That's what he calls it; John studiously avoids the Greek word for "miracle" (even though that's the word most of us would use, in retelling this story). People of our age look back on this event, and focus on the suspension of natural laws. People of John's age, by contrast, would have taken it for granted that supernatural wonders like this could take place.
For John, the most important feature of the water turned to wine is the greater reality to which it points: the reality of God's redeeming love, already at work in the person of Jesus Christ. The wedding at Cana is a tantalizing glimpse, a sneak preview, of all that will one day come to pass: The rescue of the universe from the forces of darkness, and the everlasting celebration that will follow.
For the early church, that celebration finds its focus in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper -- and, for this reason, it's no accident that wine is the central feature of the Cana event. At the center of many other religions of the Roman world there is the acrid smoke of burning sacrificial meat, or the whispered words of mysterious revelation, or the re-enactment of a cosmic drama. Yet the center of Christian worship is different. At the center of Christian worship is a feast of bread and wine: the first fruits of a greater celebration yet to come.
Of this "first sign" that Jesus did "in Cana of Galilee," John says it "revealed his glory." That's the future dimension of this story, the one you and I are so likely to miss, if we allow ourselves to be dazzled by the miraculous nature of this event. For John, what's most significant about the wedding of Cana is the way it points us to the future -- the way it functions as a sign in the truest sense.
***
The famed escape artist, Harry Houdini, used to boast that he could escape from any jail cell ever built. When his vaudeville act would pull into a city, the first place he would go was the local jail, as a sort of publicity stunt -- to test whether that jail could hold Harry Houdini.
One police chief nearly got the better of him. He ushered Houdini back into his newest, strongest cell and pushed the door shut. Then everyone withdrew and left the master at his work.
Houdini made a small tear in the lining of his jacket and pulled out a lockpick. He went to work on the lock -- but found that this one wasn't so easy. From every angle he approached it, utilizing every trick and technique of his amazing repertoire, but the lock would not click open. An hour later, sweat running off his brow, the great Houdini gave up. He fell against the door in despair -- and to his amazement, it opened! The door had never been locked at all. It had only been locked in Houdini's mind.
That's the way sin is. Christians have, in Jesus, the most liberating news the world has ever heard, but so often we despair behind locked doors of our own creation. Jesus has promised us freedom from sin, that all we have to do is trust him and his atoning death on the cross -- but time and again, we fall into deadly old patterns and we despair. We fear there is no more wine!
