Sermon Tone Analysis

Jesus went to the wedding

The First Miracle: Water into Wine at the Cana Wedding (2:1–12) [Aland §22–23]

Early in his career, Jesus is invited to a wedding during which the wine runs out.

Inability to provide for the festivities would have caused the host of the multiday party acute social embarrassment and shame.

Drinking wine in moderation, particularly with meals, was commonplace in the ancient Jewish world.

At times it was healthier than the water that was available (cf. above, p. 186).

Various Scriptures and intertestamental works considered wine a gift of gladness and rejoicing from God (see esp.

Sir 31:27–28; cf.

Ps 104:15; Judg 9:13).

It was considerably more diluted than our modern wines but still could cause drunkenness if someone overindulged (cf. the caricature of Jesus in Luke 7:34 as a “glutton and a drunkard” because of his willingness to join in such merriment).

Mary, too, has been invited to this wedding, and she turns to her son for help in this time of need (v.

3).

Jesus’ cryptic reply that his hour has not yet come (v.

4), if taken at face value, would imply that he is not prepared to help just now.

In light of similar statements throughout John, however, it suggests that the climactic hour of his self-revelation still lies in the future.

The original idiom of Jesus’ reply involves no disrespect, meaning something like “what do you want from me?” but stresses his acquiescence to God’s sovereign timing.

Mary is not rebuffed and trusts that Jesus can still help in some way.

In fact, he does work a miracle to help out his host, but it occurs unobtrusively, even secretly, convincing only those with eyes of faith.

The remaining details in the passage suggest that more is involved than merely compensating for an awkward social faux pas.

In an otherwise sparse narrative, the detail of verse 6 stands out.

Why bother noting that the water jars were used for Jewish rites of purification?

Given, too, that wedding banquets in Jewish literature often symbolized the messianic age, many commentators have seen a symbolic level of meaning here: Jesus is bringing the wine of the new age, a joy that transcends and replaces the old “water” of Jewish ritual.

This interpretation is made probable by the fact that in the Synoptics he will tell a parable about not putting new wine in old wineskins to make a very similar point (Mark 2:22 pars.).

Verse 10 here reinforces this: Jesus has saved the best wine for last.

John adds one of his favorite themes—that this “sign” revealed Jesus’ glory and helped to produce faith (v.

11, though recall our balancing comments above, p. 188).

2:1 The next day: Literally On the third day; see 1:35, 43.

• The ceremonies surrounding a wedding celebration could last as long as a week; weddings often included dramatic processions in which the groom would bring the bride to his home for the festivities (Matt 25:1–13).

2:3 When the wine supply ran out, the host’s family would face embarrassment for failure to plan properly.

Perhaps Jesus arrived unexpectedly (cp.

Matt 25:1–13), bringing his circle of disciples, which might explain why his mother brought the problem to him.

• A wedding banquet was a primary celebration in Jewish village life, and this episode also symbolized the joy of the Messiah’s arrival.

2:4 Jesus initially distanced himself from the problem.

His mission and its timing could not be set by a human agenda.

• Jesus’ time (literally hour) would come in the future when he was glorified as he was lifted up on the cross (12:23; 17:1).

2:6 Carved from solid rock, the stone water jars were used for religious washing ceremonies (see Mark 7:1–4).

Jesus was about to fill Jewish ceremony with new content.

• twenty to thirty gallons: Greek 2 or 3 measures [75 to 113 liters].

2:9–10 The master of ceremonies cited a proverb.

The best wine was always served first when palates were most sensitive; yet this miraculous wine, served last, was the very best imaginable.

Good wine symbolized God’s blessing (Amos 9:13–14).

The Messiah, God’s greatest blessing, had arrived at last.

2:11 Jesus had offered his first miraculous sign (see “Miraculous Signs” at 2:1–11, above).

In it, he revealed the glory of God (see also 1:14; 11:4, 40).

One of the first events I ever organized was a treasure hunt.

It was during the school holidays, when I was about ten or eleven.

I invited all my friends from neighbouring houses and streets to come and join in.

With my mother’s careful help, I planned each of the clues in cryptic rhyming couplets, and worked out the different things people would find as they followed them.

I remember feeling nervous as fifteen or twenty children poured out of the house, eager to follow up the clues they had been given.

Would they understand them all right?

Would they get bored and give up?

Would some be much better at it than others?

I needn’t have worried.

The event was a success, and everyone had fun.

John’s gospel is planned as a kind of treasure hunt, with careful and sometimes cryptic clues laid for us to follow.

Now that he’s set the scene with the opening stories about John the Baptist and Jesus’ early followers, he gives us the first clue, telling us that it’s the first one so we know where we are.

He will tell us about the second one, too, two chapters later; from then on, we’re on our own, and he wants us to use our initiative and imagination in following the clues to the very end.

I won’t spoil it for you by telling you the answer at the moment, but if you wanted to sit down and read right through the gospel you might be able to work it out for yourself.

The word he uses for ‘clue’ is ‘sign’ (verse 11).

He is setting up a series of signposts to take us through his story.

The signs are all occasions when Jesus did, you might say, what he’d just promised Nathanael that he would do.

They are moments when, to people who watch with at least a little faith, the angels of God are going up and coming down at the place where Jesus is.

They are moments when heaven is opened, when the transforming power of God’s love bursts in to the present world.

That’s why it simply won’t do, despite what some people have said, to see the things that Jesus did, and the stories about them in this gospel and the other ones, as pleasant but imaginary legends—things that didn’t actually happen but which ‘illustrate’ some supposedly deeper, more ‘spiritual’ truth.

The whole point of the ‘signs’ is that they are moments when heaven and earth intersect with each other.

(That’s what the Jews believed happened in the Temple.)

The point is not that they are stories which couldn’t have happened in real life, but which point away from earth to a heavenly reality.

Whatever people today may think actually happened—and the more you get to know about Jesus the more you realize that this sort of thing was precisely what you should expect with him around—we should be in no doubt that what John badly wants to tell us is that with these events the life of heaven came down to earth.

That’s why one of the motto texts for the whole gospel is ‘the Word became flesh’ (1:14).

The present story has all the elements that we shall come to know well as we work through the gospel.

It is about transformation: the different dimension of reality that comes into being when Jesus is present and when, as Mary tells the servants, people do whatever Jesus tells them.

This is one of only two occasions we meet Jesus’ mother in this gospel, the other being at the foot of the cross (chapter 19).

This is important, because Jesus’ strange remark in verse 4, ‘My time hasn’t come yet’, looks on, through many other references to his ‘time’, until at last the time does come, and the glory is revealed fully, as he dies on the cross.

That event, for John, is the ultimate moment when heaven and earth meet.

That is when it takes all the faith in the world to see the glory hidden in the shame: the creative Word present as a weak, dying human being.

But events like this one point on to that moment.

The wedding is a foretaste of the great heavenly feast in store for God’s people (see Revelation 21:2).

The water-jars, used for Jewish purification rites, are a sign that God is doing a new thing from within the old Jewish system, bringing purification to Israel and the world in a whole new way.

The wedding itself, in the town where Nathanael came from, would probably involve almost the whole village, and several people from neighbouring ones too; which is why Mary, her son and his friends were invited.

Running out of wine was not just inconvenient, but a social disaster and disgrace.

The family would have to live with the shame of it for a long time to come; bride and groom might regard it as bringing bad luck on their married life.

Though Jesus hereafter addresses himself to other kinds of problems, we are already witnessing the strange compassion which comes where people are in need and deals with that need in unexpected ways.

The transformation from water to wine is of course meant by John to signify the effect that Jesus can have, can still have today, on people’s lives.

He came, as he says later, that we might have life in all its fullness (10:10).

You might want to pray through this story with your own failures and disappointments in mind—remembering that transformation only came when someone took Mary’s words seriously: ‘Do whatever he tells you.’

One final point.

What do you think John is hinting at when he says that all this took place ‘on the third day’?

The Cana Story (2:1–12)

FROM THE REGION around the north shore of the Sea of Galilee (Capernaum and Bethsaida), the scene now shifts to the hills in the west, to a small village north of Nazareth called Cana.

Jesus and his disciples appear at a wedding, and when asked, he performs his first “sign,” changing water into wine.

Earlier we learned that Nathanael was from Cana, and the village’s proximity from Nazareth makes it natural for members of Jesus’ family to be there as well.

A number of exegetical questions have always surrounded the story.

What is the relationship of Mary (Jesus’ mother) to the wedding?

Why does she feel responsible for the lack of wine?

Why does Jesus seem to treat his mother so abruptly?

Others have wondered if this text is here to legitimize either Christian use of wine or the institution of marriage.

At center is how much John intends us to see the story symbolically.

In 2:1 he mentions “the third day.”

For some, it is an innocent and simple chronological reference to Jesus’ progress through Galilee.

For others, the “third day” suggests an inevitable reference by John to the coming “third day” of the resurrection.

Still others count from the beginning of chapter 1 and find seven days (Cana occurs three days after the Nathanael story, day 4) and thus John is reporting a week of activities, much like God’s week of creative work in Genesis.