Lesson: John 2:1-11

I love officiating at weddings, and I work hard to make sure at least my part goes smoothly. In my experience, however, sometimes things happen at weddings that good planning won’t solve. There was the limo driver who forgot to go back and pick up the bride after he dropped the bridesmaids at the church. There was the best man who got sloppily drunk before the ceremony. At an outdoor wedding officiated by a friend, there was the duck who landed right between my friend and the couple, and then sat there quacking through the entire ceremony.

What happened at the wedding at Cana? Poor planning, or bad luck? Jesus’ mother says, “They have no wine,” but what she really means is, “They have no wine. Fix it, Jesus.” Despite his reluctance, Jesus tells the servants to fill six large stone jars with water, and to draw some of that water, now turned to wine, and take it to the chief steward. The chief steward doesn’t know what Jesus has done, but he does know wine, and he’s amazed at the quality. Most hosts would serve the best wine up front, wanting to make a good impression. They’d save the cheap wine for later when the guests are less likely to recognize the drop in quality. But this host, the steward assumes, has ignored the traditional timing, and saved the best wine for last.

Last week, Jesus’ baptism showed us how he took his place among the ordinary folks. Today’s passage is intended to show us this is no ordinary guy. John tells us this is a sign, a sign that revealed Jesus’ glory. Because of this sign, his disciples “believed in him.” The point of this miracle, this sign, is not, “Wow! How did that happen?” It’s “Wow! Who did that?”

All the signs and miracles in John’s gospel point to who Jesus is. That’s the purpose of John’s gospel, as the narrator explains in the closing verses of the book. As one commentator puts it, biblical miracles are signs that say, “God at Work!” The wedding at Cana not only shows us that God is at work, but something of what God is like, what God is about, and therefore, what Jesus is like, and what Jesus is about.

The stone jars held water used for the rite of purification. They represent the purity code and its distinctions between who and what is “clean,” and who and what is “unclean.” Jesus turns that water into wine, and these concerns about clean and unclean give way to joy and celebration. Jesus provides this celebration with the very best wine, in abundant quantity. The jars are filled to the brim. The God that Jesus reveals isn’t obsessed with what’s clean or unclean but is characterized by lavish generosity and extravagance. That the good wine had been saved “until now” is a symbolic way of saying that in God’s own timing, the Messiah had come.

If these biblical miracles are like a sign that says, “God at Work,” how can we see God at work now? One way to look at it, as C. S. Lewis and others have pointed out, is that many of Jesus’ miracles are small, fast examples of the big, slow acts that God performs all the time. Every harvest God feeds the multitudes with many loaves multiplied from a few grains. Every summer, along sunny hillsides not far from where I live, God turns water into wine. Jesus does the same thing fast and on a small scale.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom we honor this coming Monday with a national holiday, wrote: “At the center of the Christian faith is the conviction that in the universe there is a God of power who is able to do exceedingly abundant things in nature and history.” The miracle, the sign at the wedding at Cana connects Jesus to this God – our God who is able, as King puts it. God is able to create and sustain the world. God is able to work through human history to save that world. King described how one event followed another to bring a gradual end to the system of desegregation. He concludes, “These changes are not mere political and sociological shifts. … When in future generations men look back … they will see God working through history for the salvation of man. They will know that God was working through those men [and women] who had the vision to perceive that no nation could survive half slave and half free. … The forces of evil may temporarily conquer truth, but truth ultimately will conquer its conqueror. Our God is able.” God is able; and the miracles of Jesus show that he, God’s son, is also able.

Turning water into wine at a wedding might seem like a trivial way to announce that Jesus is “God at Work,” given all the weighty concerns of the world: racial inequality, economic injustice, climate change and the L.A. wildfires, terrorism, war, and on and on. It was only a private party, after all. Only Jesus’ mother, the servants, and the disciples ever did know where all that great wine came from. Oh, and of course, we do. We, the readers of John’s gospel, know, as well.

At the wedding at Cana, Jesus supplies what is needed so that the celebration can continue. He does it quietly. It isn’t a flashy show of divine power. Most miracles aren’t. There are miracles of love and justice and hope taking place all around us: extreme acts of generosity, gracious acts of forgiveness; people overcoming their fears and standing up for what is right; people healing what seem to be unbridgeable divides. All these miracles point to the sign that says, “God at Work,” the sign that says God’s promise to the least and the last, to the lost and the lonely, is there in fullness, in abundance, in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. So that the celebration can continue.

© Joanne Whitt 2025

Resources:

Cornelius Plantings Jr., Beyond Doubt (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002).

Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our God Is Able,” in Strength to Love, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010).

David Ewart, http://www.holytextures.com/2009/12/john-2-1-11-year-c-epiphany-2-january-14-january-20-sermon.html.