2nd Sunday after the Epiphany
John 2:1-11
January 19, 2025
Imagine if you were a guest at the wedding in Cana detailed in our Gospel reading today. Would you have even known that something quite extraordinary happened in the back room where a man named Jesus turned water into wine?
Actually, weddings were big events, probably one of the biggest events that had happened in the small town of Cana since, well since the last wedding feast. Weddings meant “party time,” and everyone would gather together for days on end to celebrate, feast, drink, and rejoice in the Lord for the new bond of man and woman, husband and wife.
There was food – lots and lots of food. They would dance every night. And, of course, there was wine, lots and lots of wine. And guess who paid for the whole 2-week ordeal? The bride? Nope, not the bride, not like today, but the groom! He and his family would cover everything.
Well, at this wedding feast, everything was going as planned. People were enjoying the food, the wine, the laughter, and for one reason or another, a Rabbi was also invited to this particular wedding feast, He and his disciples. It’s quite possible that the connection to Cana was through the disciple Nathanael, who was from Cana in Galilee. But to add another curve ball, not only was this Rabbi named Jesus and his 12 followers there, but so was Jesus’ mother. It could simply have been that the bride or groom was somehow related to Mary or that she was a close friend of the family.
So, not all that unusual to see a Rabbi and his followers at a wedding in Cana.
And there was nothing particularly telling about the guests at the wedding. We don’t know who the bride or groom was. The food was nothing unusual for such a feast, the dancing was pretty typical, the wine was typical wine…well at least at first.
In fact, for the guests, the only strange thing was that the wine got better the longer the wedding feast went on. That was a little different since the wedding planner would typically serve expensive wine at the beginning of the 2-week feast, and then serve the cheap wine as time went on, to keep costs down.
So, if you were one of the guests at the wedding feast in Cana, you might notice something unusual about the wine, but not so unusual, for maybe the family of the groom was just being overly generous or gracious.
In fact, the only people who knew what happened were Mary, the servants, Jesus, the disciples since John wrote of the event in His gospel, and we who now get to read about the event in Scripture.
Now typically, wedding feasts back then had more than enough wine to cover all the guests’ dietary needs for the 2-week event. But at this wedding, the wine ran out. Poor planning? More people showed up than were expected? Maybe some of the wine was accidently spilled, who knows. We know from our own experience that, when doing receptions for weddings or funerals, things don’t always go as planned.
But to run out of wine at one of these ancient wedding feasts is a pretty big deal. They’re not going to drink water as the water wasn’t always safe to drink, and water wasn’t really a wedding feast drink anyway. They didn’t have pop or fruit drinks. Beer was not really a Jewish wedding feast beverage and not really a Jewish thing either. So, when the wine ran out, it was a problem.
At the request of His mother Mary, Jesus took care of the problem. He asked that 6 stone water jars be filled with water. These jars were used for ritual purification rites such as baptisms and ceremonial washings and the like. Jesus asked they be filled with water. Likely, the jars were there at the feast because the attendees, bride and groom, families, and guests, all had to ritually cleanse themselves before entering the feast. It was custom and it was Jewish law.
And here’s the extraordinary thing that happened. These six stone purification jars were filled with ordinary water, and the ordinary water was turned into extraordinary wine. Jesus made it possible that the wedding feast continue unscathed, and so few people even knew what happened, except for the fact that the “best wine” was reserved until the ordinary wine was used up.
Now, this was the first miracle of Jesus after He was baptized and His public ministry began. And what we know about Jesus and the miracles He performed is that He didn’t do miracles to put on a show. They had purpose. Jesus did miracles to reveal His glory, to show the world who He was, that He had come to do the Father’s will and to save His people Israel from their sins. And what we notice right away after this particular miracle is that the disciples “put their faith in Him.” They came to an ordinary wedding as ordinary people on an ordinary day, and they left that wedding anything but ordinary. These men became extraordinary ordinary men because they believed in Messiah who had come to save them from their sins.
And, you may not have caught it, but Jesus’ miracle at Cana was a fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. That’s right. Isaiah 25 says that Messiah will come to setup a “feast with rich foods, a banquet with aged wines and with the richest foods and finest wines.” Jesus even compared His ministry and His invitation to believe in Him to a wedding feast. Invitations go out, and people are even begged to attend. Those who are called need to be ready for when the groom shows up and leads them to the banquet, no matter when He comes. And once at the banquet, those who are called need the right clothes for the wedding, which of course is faith.
Everything written in the prophets is fulfilled in this man, this Jesus, this Rabbi. The disciples begin to see this and they begin to recognize Him as no ordinary man, but as someone extraordinary indeed. And because of faith, they also become extraordinary. And yet as with Jesus they are viewed as ordinary by the onlookers. But in the eyes of God, extraordinary to the fullest.
And Jesus used these extraordinarily ordinary men to carry His ministry to the world. Like Him, they would heal the sick, raise the dead, and do all sorts of other miraculous things in order to point sinners to Christ and to establish the church. But most often, it wasn’t about miracles or signs, but about preaching and talking to people and calling sinners to repent, to be washed in the waters of baptism, and to believe in the Savior. Through their words, extraordinary things happened. True, many people rejected their message and treated those 12 Apostles with distain, even to the point of their being martyred for the faith, but through it all, many also heard and believed.
Ordinary circumstances, ordinary people, ordinary things being used by God for extraordinary work, saving sinners from death and hell. Just as Jesus saved the wedding feast from utter failure and saved the reputations of the groom and his family, Jesus saved us from sure and utter failure, giving us deliverance from eternal death and hell by the pouring out of water and blood at His death on the cross.
And the whole point? We are very ordinary people, we are. Like everyone else in the world, we are sinners through and through, full of excuses and rationalizations and inhibitions, weaknesses, sins that we really don’t want to abandon even though we know we should. In this way we are no different than our neighbor. But in spite of our ordinariness, God has chosen us to be extraordinary, not because of our works or our nice smiles or our great attitudes, but because of Christ Jesus our Lord who did a very extraordinary thing for us by giving His life for us. Jesus came to call sinners, no not flawless people, but sinners to repentance and faith in Him, and to go out into the world to speak and share and carry the love of God to the neighbor, the brother, the sister, the bride, the groom, the employee, the employer, to all the other ordinary people who, like us, need salvation and forgiveness of sins.
Many will reject us. Many will refuse to repent of their sins and instead stubbornly stand in their sin as if it is their god. Some will even attack us for speaking the truth. This is how it’s always been. Yet, once in a while God does the extraordinary when, through simply speaking the truth to your neighbor, they turn and believe.
You are an extraordinary child of God because He has called you by name and cleansed you of your sins and given you life eternal. Nothing more extraordinary than that! Repent of your sins, and hold fast to His mercy, and allow Jesus to use you to share His extraordinary mercy with others. Amen.
