Sermon Tone Analysis

I want to start out today with a thank you to those who pulled together to help host a memorial service for one of our church families last night.

For those who might not have heard, Kathy Cain lost her mother to cancer last week, and we hosted a memorial service and dinner here in the fellowship hall last night.

As I was talking to Kathy and her family on Friday about how they wanted the service to work,

It was an informal affair, where Kathy’s uncle — her mother’s brother, who is a missionary in Kenya — spoke about his sister’s love for Christ and their shared experience of having grown up in that country as children of missionary parents.

I was extremely proud that our church was able to bless the family by providing a full dinner for the guests and providing an atmosphere of love and compassion to them.

Those who were able to be there were blessed to hear the Cains’ teenage son, Zachary, share a beautiful testimony of his grandmother’s influence in his spiritual life.

Because of the

This is what we in the church are called to do for one another — to weep with one another, to rejoice with one another and to bear one another’s burdens.

This proclaims Christ to the lost world.

What most of you do not know is that we had some concerns over whether or not we would have enough food for the 100 or so people who were here to support the family.

When Kathy first told me the service would need to take place during the dinner hour in order to accommodate traveling family members, we figured that about 75 people would attend.

That’s the number I gave Mary for her planning.

The family told me some folks who would be attending from other churches planned to bring food

But then, when I met with the family on Friday, we learned that we should probably expect about 100 people.

They told me some folks from other churches were also planning to bring food, and I said that I hoped they’d bring loaves and fishes, since we had begun planning for fewer people.

I must admit that I was worried we would not have enough food for everyone.

But God worked it out, as I should have known that He would.

Everyone had plenty to eat, and we had extra food to send home with the family.

And your pastor snagged a leftover helping of Mary’s fantastic corn pudding.

Praise the Lord, amen?

It would have been embarrassing to everyone if we’d run out of food, wouldn’t it?

At the very beginning of Jesus Christ’s public ministry, a family that seems to have been close to His own faced a similar problem during a wedding feast, and we’re going to take a look at John’s account of that event today.

Turn with me to John, Chapter 2, please.

While you’re doing that, let me give you some cultural background.

Wedding celebrations at this time and place in history were grand affairs that stretched out for a week or more.

You can imagine the cost that would have been involved for the bridegroom’s family to provide a week-long feast for all the guests that would have come to celebrate the wedding.

Let’s pick up the story in Verse 1.

Mary was at the wedding, suggesting that she had a close connection with the family.

Jesus, it seems, was invited because of His connection to Mary, and His disciples were likely invited because of their connection to Him.

Perhaps the family had not expected six extra guests.

We don’t know.

But what we do know is that the wine ran out.

Now it’s important to understand some things about wine within this cultural context before we move on.

Grain, wine and oil were the primary agricultural products of Israel at this time, and they were therefore staples of the Middle Eastern diet.

Israel’s hills and mountains were a perfect environment for growing grapes, and in a place and time in which water might be scarce or contaminated, wine was the primary beverage.

Consuming wine was associated with happiness.

Consuming wine was associated with happiness.

Ps

It was used to provide relief for those who were suffering, wounded or sick.

Prov

And wine had a significant place in Jewish theology.

The presence of wine in the land signified a divine blessing.

Prov

And the absence of wine signified a divine curse.

So, as you can imagine, running out of wine at a wedding feast would have been considered not just an embarrassment, but maybe even a curse on the marriage.

So Mary, the mother of Jesus, recognized that her friends were in a bad place, and she told her Son about the problem.

Jesus’ response to her is puzzling.

Commentators are divided on what our Lord was saying here.

We tend to bristle at the term of address He had for her, but understand that this would have been an honoring way for Jesus to address His mother in this culture.

What’s puzzling is the rest of the response.

To our modern ears, it sounds almost callous.

But Mary’s next statement suggests that she heard something that we do not.

Clearly she took her Son’s response to mean that He would help somehow, though even she was not clear as to how He might help.

One thing we should take from this exchange is her advice: Whatever He says to you, do it.”

Would that we were as quick to obey our Lord as Mary was.

Whatever He says, do it.

Now, continuing the account in Verse 6, we see what Jesus commanded.

9

Now, God had been turning water to wine ever since Noah planted his vineyard.

But this was something different.

And we don’t want to miss the implications here.

This wine that Jesus miraculously made from water was better than what had already been served.

That was surprising to the headwaiter, because the custom was to serve the good wine first and hold the lesser quality stuff until all the guest’s senses had been dulled a bit.

There’s a parallel here to the way that God had been dealing with people and the way that He would deal with them in light of His Son’s work on earth.

From the time of Moses, God’s people had been under the Law.

The 10 Commandments and all the Levitical laws governed their relationship with Him.

We talked about one of those Levitical commands during our last communion service, when we learned about the showbread in the tabernacle.

Wine was also part of that

But the Law was unable to save them.

In fact, the Law resulted in them becoming more sinful.

The Law shone a spotlight on sin, and fallen man was drawn to it like moths to a flame.

The Law had the power to identify sin, but it had no power to release us from the penalty for it.

Only grace — God’s matchless, immeasurable grace — can do that.

And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, God was about to pour out grace upon a lost world.

The Law was good, but Jesus is better, because Jesus ushered in a new era of grace.

He would sacrifice Himself on a cross.

He would be the perfect lamb led to slaughter so that we who follow Him in faith could be forgiven for our sins once and for all.

It is significant that this water-to-wine miracle marked the beginning of Christ’s public ministry.

His first public miracle was to restore blessings and joy, just as His ministry and His sacrifice bring blessings and joy to the world.

God had made a covenant with His people when He gave them the 10 Commandments.

The covenant was that if they would keep His commandments, He would be their God, and they would be His people.

The people affirmed this covenant, and it was sealed with the blood of young bulls.

Ex 24

8

To establish the covenant, the people were covered by the blood of the sacrifice.

But the people of Israel broke that covenant even as God was giving Moses the Law.

When Moses came down from the mountain, he found them worshiping a golden calf.

And so began a long history of faithlessness on the part of His people.

But Jesus brought a new covenant, a better one under which we are saved by grace, through faith — and that not of ourselves.

But Jesus brought a new covenant, a better one under which we are saved by grace, through faith — and that not of ourselves.

During his last Passover observance with His disciples, just hours before He would be betrayed and crucified, Jesus talked about that new covenant, and He made it clear that it, too, would be sealed with blood, but this time it would be His.

Luke

The cup that Luke refers to here is the wine that Jesus and His disciples were sharing during their Passover meal.

For we who suffer from the brokenness that sin brought into the world, this wine — the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on the cross for the remission of sins — represents the grace that brings us salvation through faith.

For we who were dead in our transgressions, this wine represents the life-giving blood of Jesus Christ.

Though we were once under the curse of God because of sin, we who have made Jesus our Lord now have been restored.

We have life because of the death of Jesus.

When the wedding party at Cana ran out of wine, Jesus provided somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of it.

That works out to nearly 4,000 glasses of wine.

More than sufficient for the party.

Similarly, when Christ died on the cross, the blood that He shed was more than sufficient to cover our sins.

What a great Savior.