[Machine transcription]
This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory,
and his disciples believed in him.
You may be seated.
In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, we have been speaking quite a bit about marriage lately, and there’s reason
for that.
The text invites us to it again today.
I don’t want to say too many things, but we know that this is one of the flashpoints
between the world and the church over the question of marriage.
What is it?
What’s right?
And what’s good?
I was with⦠we were having a Bible study this week with doxology and a number of us
were there together and the point was made, and I think this was kind of helpful, that
during the Enlightenment, the world criticized the church for being irrational.
Our doctrine of creation, our doctrine of history, our understanding of the miracles,
this was rejected as an irrational doctrine.
But the criticism of the world has changed now, and instead of â I mean, I suppose
the world still considers the church irrational, but now the accusation is that the church
is immoral, that the church is wrong.
It’s perhaps good for us to kind of get our heads around this.
When the world looks at the church and the teachings of what we say is good and right
regarding man and woman, regarding marriage, in fact there’s probably four things, race
and marriage and gender or sex and also warfare, when the world looks at the church’s doctrine,
it sees it as a wrong teaching, a dangerous teaching and immoral.
And it’s the sola that gets us in trouble.
I mean, remember in the Reformation, the Lutherans said grace alone and faith alone and Scripture
alone.
It wasn’t the grace.
Everybody believed in grace, but it’s saying grace alone, that’s where the problem is.
Everybody had the Bible, but it’s when you say Scripture alone, that’s where the problem
comes in.
Well, so I suppose it is when it comes to questions of man and woman, and we say, well,
that’s it.
Those are the only options.
Or marriage is a man and a woman, and we say that’s truly what marriage is.
And the world gets riled up at that.
It hates to hear it, it wants to hear something different.
So for us to know, this is just good for us to know that the pressure from the world comes
to the church in these areas and it will continue to come in regards to the biblical teaching
of what marriage is.
So we’re ready for that.
But the thing that I want to think about this morning is not so much about what the text
reveals about marriage, we want to see what the text reveals about Jesus.
That, after all, is what Epiphany is about, the revelation of Jesus.
But how wonderful for us to remember that Jesus here decides to perform His first miracle
and sign, which is a miracle that preaches, that’s what a sign is, it’s a miracle that
indicates something further.
Jesus chooses to perform His first sign and miracle here at a wedding feast.
There’s a beautiful part of the wedding liturgy where it says that Jesus blessed and hallowed
marriage by His presence and first miracle at Cana in Galilee.
So when our Lord Jesus is pleased to accept the invitation to this wedding and to come
to the wedding with His disciples, He’s saying that this is good, that the Adams and the
eves, marrying one another, joining together in marriage, having children, that He blesses
that.
Beginning to end, the Lord blesses it and delights in it.
But there’s a problem with this wedding and that is that the wine ran out and Mary
notices.
Now, you’ll notice in the text how it begins.
It says the third day there’s a wedding at Cana and Mary was there and Jesus and His
disciples were invited there.
It doesn’t say that Mary was invited.
It seems like Mary is there with a different purpose.
Maybe she knew the family, maybe she was helping support the marriage or the marriage feast
or something like this.
But Mary notices before really anybody else notices that the wine is run out and this
is perhaps one of the worst things to happen at a wedding feast, especially in the ancient
world.
This was a matter of pride that the wine was served for the days of the wedding feast.
Christ. And Mary notices that the wine runs out and she turns to Jesus and says, the wine
is gone.
Now, someone asked me last week, because remember last week we were talking about Mary and Joseph
and Jesus in the temple when He was a boy, and they’re looking for three days and can’t
find Him, and then Mary and Joseph, they find Jesus and she rebukes Him, where were you?
Did you not know that I had to be about my Father’s business, Jesus said? And so Jesus
is rebuking Mary, and yet he goes home and it says that he remained faithful, and he
honored his father and his mother all the way through, and Mary pondered these things
in her heart.
So from the beginning, I mean, from when the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and announces
that she’s going to be pregnant with Jesus, to the visit of the shepherds, to the visit
of the wise men, and to the preaching of Anna and Simeon in the temple, to the visit of
the temple when Jesus is 12 years old, Mary is thinking about these things. Who is this
her son? Who is this now, in the text, 30 years old? Who is this man, my son? Who is
this Jesus? Mary’s trying to figure these things out. And Mary perhaps heard of the
baptism of Jesus by John and the descent of the Holy Spirit, and she is thinking, is it
time? I mean, remember, Jesus, as far as we can tell, never performed any miracles or never
indicated his divine power
in any way up until this point.
It’s the first miracle he’s doing.
And so Mary is waiting and watching.
And now at the wedding,
she’s saying, is it time?
Are you now going to show yourself
to be who I think you are,
who I know you are, the son of God?
Is it time now?
And Jesus answers her and says, no.
It’s not the hour.
My hour has not yet come.
Now Jesus is going to perform the miracle, so He must mean something different by His
hour has not yet come.
And this comes when we look in the Gospel of John and see that almost always that hour
is the hour of His death.
That’s the hour that was to come.
But Mary looks at Jesus, and looks around at the feast, and looks at the servants who
were there, and she says, do what He says. It’s an amazing thing that these words here
are the last recorded words of Mary in the Scripture. And that maybe is just something
for us to meditate on. It’s something helpful when we’re having conversations with our family
and friends from the Roman Catholic Church that just gets carried away with their thoughts
and teachings about Mary, is to remember what the very last words of Mary are. Listen to
Jesus. Mary doesn’t want to stand between us and her son. Go to Jesus. Listen to Jesus.
Pray to Jesus. Receive gifts from Jesus. Whatever he says to you, do it. So there are six water
pots of stone there and John is careful to tell us this, according to the rites of purification
of the Jews, containing 20 or 30 gallons apiece. The rabbis were crazy about purification.
I mean, they just loved to think about it, to write about it, to practice it. There’s
all these handbooks of rabbinic lore about how to be a good rabbi, and the biggest one,
One, the biggest volume, is the volume on purification.
How to wash your hands, how to wash your feet, how to wash your head, how to wash your clothes,
how to wash your couches, how to wash your homes, you know, the ritual washing, how to
wash your food, all of these sorts of things.
There was a joke in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus that said the mark of a good rabbi
is he could make clean a bug, which were declared unclean by Moses, but he could apply so many
rights of purification to them that you could declare the bug to be clean. That was what
the Jews were all about. And so there’s all this water that was there, probably set aside
for the bride and the groom and the attendance of the bride and groom, for all the rights
that they would have to go through for purification according to the rabbis. And Jesus is specific
in this. He says, you see those water pots there that are set apart for purification?
take them and fill them up, all the way up, and then draw some out and take it to the
master of the feast. And he does. The servants do it. They fill it up to the brim, and they
bring the water to the master of the feast, and it turns out that it is now wine. When
And the master of the feast tasted the water, made wine, and he didn’t know where it came
from.”
It’s amazing to me that Jesus is keeping this miracle on the down low.
The bride, the groom, the master of the feast, the parents of the bride and groom, the people
there, they don’t know where the wine came from.
They don’t know what happened.
In fact, there’s only two people who know, two groups of people who know, the disciples
of Jesus and the servants.
I was thinking about it this week.
You know, if you woke up on the morning of this wedding and you’re like, hey, everyone
is probably pretty excited to have a wedding that day.
The bride and groom no doubt were excited about the wedding, the parents of the bride
and groom were excited about the wedding, the wedding guests were excited to go to the
wedding feast.
I imagine the only people who woke up that morning who were like, oh well, we got a wedding
today were the servants.
That’s a lot of work, serving at a wedding.
But they are the ones that Jesus lets in on the secret.
They’re the ones that know what happened.
They’re the ones that know who Jesus is.
They’re the ones that see it and listen and watch
and know now that the water has been turned to wine.
It says, the servants who drew the water knew.
This reminds me of the psalm where it says,
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of God.
It’s better to be one of the Lord’s servants
and to be in on who He is than to be anywhere else.
But the Master of the Feast tastes this wine and it turns out that Jesus just doesn’t
turn water into wine.
Jesus turns water into good wine, into the best wine.
It’s a, you know, John didn’t have to tell us this, but he wants us to know it.
He wants you to know that when your Lord Jesus turns water into wine, He turns it into the
finest tasting wine.
wine, and we hear about it in this joke. The master goes to the groom and he says, you
messed things up. Don’t you know? You’re supposed to serve the good wine at the beginning,
the nice stuff first, and then when people have had a couple of glasses and they don’t
know the difference between the bottle and the box, then you bring out the cheap stuff.
But you, you’ve waited to serve the good stuff now.
It’s a huge mistake.
I think I’ve told you this, my imagination can’t get off of this idea of John, who’s
writing this, in his old age, probably from Patmos.
Remember that John was, he was a young disciple of John the Baptist and his brother James,
And John the Baptist says, go follow Jesus, and so he’s one of the first disciples of
Jesus.
He’s with Jesus all through the three and a half years of his ministry.
Remember John, his parents, his dad Zebedee, he had a fishing fleet in Galilee.
He also had a home in Jerusalem.
He was well known to the high priest.
So he traveled in all these circles.
He was the only apostle who wasn’t killed for his faith.
He died in his old age, although in his old age he became the pastor and the bishop in
Ephesus, and he was exiled to Patmos, that’s where he received the revelation, and then
back in Ephesus.
He was the caretaker of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who Jesus from the cross says, behold
your son and behold your mother.
This John, okay, I like to imagine John as the old man bishop in Ephesus with his old
white beard and these old bishop robes, and he would stand up and preach, he would go
and he’d visit people in their homes, and he would sit with people and he would have
dinner with them, and they would put before John a food and a glass of wine. And I think
that every time that John would have taken that glass of wine, he would have sipped the
first sip and tasted it and thought to himself, not as good. Not as good as the wine that
Jesus made this day at the wedding in Cana. So that Jesus takes this water for purification
salvation, and gives it to the wine of gladness and joy to all the people who are there.
Now this is the first sign that Jesus does in Cana of Galilee, and He manifested His
glory and His disciples believed in Him. We mentioned before that a sign is a miracle
that preaches, and we don’t want to miss the preaching of this miracle. In fact, let’s
Let’s let this miracle preach two things to us.
Number one, Jesus is God.
There’s this very old joke about this text.
I don’t know, I was reading a Bible commentary that’s like 150 years old and it mentioned
how old this was, so I don’t know where this comes from.
But it says that, you know, the wine, the water came out of the jar and it saw its Lord
and it blushed, and became wine.”
I think that’s kind of a silly joke, but it gets to the point is that Jesus is the
one who can do this miracle.
He is God in the flesh.
He is God with us.
He is the one who created the world in six days.
He is the one who will recreate the cosmos on the last day.
He is the one who upholds the world.
He can perform miracles, and He does this day.
Water to wine, no big deal.
But there’s a second sermon that the sign preaches, and it’s this, it’s that Jesus
is replacing all of the human attempts to be clean and pure on our own terms with the
joy of the wedding feast.
Jesus in this sign is establishing what His church would be about, is about.
I have been reflecting, continuing to reflect on what it is that the world thinks that the
church does.
what do our neighbors think that we’re doing when we come in here? I think that’s helpful
for us to think about. What does your family, who doesn’t come to church, think that you
do when you come to church? Gather around the water pots and figure out how to be pure.
Gather around the water pots and figure out what we need to do to be clean while the world
is unclean. To gather around here and talk about how good we are and about how bad everybody
else is. I think that’s probably what the world thinks that we’re doing. We’re puffing
ourselves up and we’re diminishing them, that we’re talking about how great the Christians
are and how bad the non-Christians are or something like this. No, we come gathering
to the Lord’s church not because we are holy, not because we are good, not because we are
clean, not because we are pure, but because we need, most of all, the Lord’s mercy. That’s
That’s why the very first thing we say when we gather here in the Lord’s Church is I’m
a poor miserable sinner.
And if you can’t say those words then you should leave because this is a place for sinners.
The Lord Jesus deals with us in that way.
As unclean, unholy, unpure, as law breakers which we are and we have deserved His temporal,
His now and His later eternal punishment.
We are better than no one.
We are sinners in desperate
need of the Lord’s mercy
and kindness.
But what does the Lord do?
Does He judge us according
to our sins?
Does He cast us off in His
anger and wrath?
Does He give us a bunch of
rules to keep so that we can
manage our own holiness?
Jesus turns water into wine.
He prepares a feast for you.
He comes to you with joy,
with happiness.
This is wonder of wonders.
Did you get the line at the end of the Old Testament lesson from Isaiah 62?
You know, we often think about how we should think about the Lord Jesus and how we should
consider Him.
But how wonderful to think that the Bible tells us how God thinks about us, and listen
to what it says.
It says, as a bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.
How does God think of you? He delights in you. He rejoices over you. He loves you, and
He’s invited you to the feast. Whenever Jesus wants to capture the joy of heaven, you know
what He does? He calls it a wedding feast. In fact, when you get to the last page of the
Bible, that’s what’s there, a wedding feast, the wedding feast of the Lamb. Jesus is the
bridegroom and we, his people, are the bride and we will be with him in joy, eternally,
unending, in peace that knows no limits or no bounds.
And this first sign at Cana is just the beginning.
Jesus still comes to manifest his glory.
And for us it’s a little bit different.
Instead of turning water into wine, He starts with wine, and He adds for you and I His blood.
The blood of the New Testament, shed for you for the forgiveness of all of your sins.
He invites you to this feast of joy and peace, because Jesus, who is good, is good to you.
Jesus was kind is kind to you and Jesus who is love loves you so may we with the
disciples rejoice in the signs that he does as he manifests his glory and may
we with the disciples also believe and rejoice in him may God grant it for
Christ’s sake amen and the peace of God which passes all
understanding guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord.
