The Good Wine of Now.

John 2:1-11.         (February 1, 2015)

I.

            Jesus and his disciples make their way up to a town in Galilee called Cana, which happens to be the hometown of Nathanael, Jesus latest disciple.  They are invited to a wedding. 

            When the text says “on the third day,” it may literally mean it took three days to walk there; or it may also mean they arrived on a Tuesday. But whenever we hear the expression, “on the third day,” it should remind us of Jesus’ resurrection.  It means that this story is happening in the fullness of time, in resurrection time.

            By starting this part of the gospel with “on the third day” we are invited to look on this story, and perhaps everything Jesus does throughout his ministry, as anticipating, foreshadowing, previewing, and revealing his resurrection life.  His ministry is the breaking-in of the future.  Jesus’ whole life and ministry reveals in advance the nature of the eternal life we see in his resurrection.   

            John calls Jesus “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  Now in Jesus’ ministry we will see how he takes away the sin of the world.  Sin means separation and alienation, adversariality and enmity, brokenness and hostility, resulting in fear and violence.  When sin is “taken away” from something it is restored to unity, peace, and wholeness.  What gets taken away are the divisions and oppositions.  The role of the Lamb of God in the world, then, is to bring back into unity, to reconcile, that which had been separated, divided, ripped asunder, and put at war with itself.  It is to heal our hatreds by the power of his love. 

            Jesus is fulfilling in himself the atonement and forgiveness ritual from the ancient liturgy of the Day of Atonement.  There, the blood of the goat representing the Lord was spread all over the Temple to signify the interface or membrane that reconnects the people to God.  Blood was life, and the blood of this goat represented the life of God.  They would take some of the life that God placed inside a living thing and offer it to God as an outer sign of the life shared with God. 

            What happens symbolically and ritually in Leviticus, Jesus will do permanently, once and for all, in his death and resurrection.  His blood, the blood of God – the Word, the Life, the Light, the Lamb, the Messiah – not just of a goat representing God, will become the glue that reunites humans to God, to each other, and to their own true selves.  That blood will knit us all together from within.

            The first manifestation of sin, that is, of disunity, separation, and hostility that he chooses to break down is the division between male and female, the fundamental split that runs through all of life and even through the human soul.  In a traditional wedding, this is what is happening.  Two people, male and female, are being united into “one flesh.”  This is one of the unities listed by the apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28, of course.  “As many of you as have been baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  There is no longer… male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” 

II.

            But, like the ritual in Leviticus, an actual human marriage falls somewhat short of realizing the full truth it points to.  A wedding, God knows, does not take away sin.  It does not in actual fact reconcile two people and join them in a mystical union in which they are restored to created goodness.  It kind of points to this, but in the end we are left with two individuals trying together to work through the promise of a more perfect union.

            At this particular wedding, Jesus’ mother is present.  And she is the one who notices that the wine has run out.  Certainly, panic must have already set in among the planners of this banquet.  Running out of wine would have been a profoundly embarrassing and shameful thing to happen to the host.

            The running out of wine is a symbol for the energy being depleted from the established traditions.  The gospel is saying that there wasn’t enough juice in the current practices and rituals to actually accomplish what they were supposed to be about.  They ran out of gas, they were exhausted, before they could finish or complete their full meaning and importance.

            So, recognizing this, Mary just makes to Jesus this statement of the facts of the case: “They don’t have any wine.”  There is no Spirit here, there is nothing happening, no life.

            To which Jesus replies, “Woman, what does that have to do with me?  My time hasn't come yet.”  People were still caught in their own time; they had not yet entered into his time.  His time had not yet occurred to them.

            Undeterred, Mary goes – not to the headwaiter, or the bridegroom, or anyone else in charge – but to the kitchen staff.  She goes to the busboys and the servers and the cooks and the dishwashers, the anonymous, invisible minimum-wage workers who actually make a banquet happen.  And she tells them to do whatever Jesus tells them.  She is going to make his time come here and now.

            As far as we know, Mary is just an invited guest at this wedding reception.  Nevertheless, she gives orders to the staff, who have to make a choice whether to listen to her or to wait for orders from their actual boss, the one who is paying them, the headwaiter, the steward.

            So in a sense it is left up to these workers to decide whether Jesus’ time has come or not to this wedding.  Whom do they decide to obey?  Do they proceed to fill up these 6 large, stone jars with about 160 gallons of water, on the word of a guest and her son?  Or do they say, “Sorry, but we have to wait for our orders from the headwaiter”?  We work for the caterer, ma’am; you’ll have to talk to him if you want us to do anything.

            But no.  They obey Jesus when he, a guest, instructs them to fill the water jars.  They go out on a limb.  They take the risks.  They trust him that something is going to happen.  They obey Jesus’ commandment.

III.

            There is a sense here in which Jesus’ time comes for us when we trust him, when we obey him, when we put his teachings to work in our own lives.  Instead of waiting for instructions to come down the chain of command from the wealthy and/or powerful people in charge, instead of waiting until it is the safe, accepted, approved, and authorized thing to do, these kitchen servants follow Jesus’ instructions.  They apparently have no idea who he is except that he is a guest at the wedding and that he arrived with at least four other men.  Yet they do what he says.  Jesus only talks; these workers are the ones who make the sign happen, and they are the only ones who know it.

            The six stone water jars were there for ritual ablutions, washing.  They represent the whole scaffold of legal prophylactic measures that the leaders had carefully assembled around the Torah.  These were largely extra laws designed to prevent people from even coming close to breaking the actual laws by accident.  They stand for the principle that if law isn’t working the answer is to have more laws.  If the law isn’t taking away sin, then maybe we don’t have enough laws.  Instead of realizing that the present strategy isn’t working, they double-down on it even more.

            The stone water jars represent the failure of the legalistic approach of the establishment of the day to actually take away sin and restore people to wholeness and unity.  In Psalm 104, wine makes for gladness.  Jesus sees no joy in the people he meets whose lives have been made more difficult and repressed by these layers of legal restrictions imposed by the powerful. 

            So the point here is that following Jesus works, and following the letter of the law, or even the letter of these complicated extra-added laws, doesn’t work.  If you rely on the law, your wine, your juice and energy and spirit, runs out.  Law is draining and depleting.  It is soul-crushing and oppressive.  It only reinforces the power and authority of the establishment, who are the ones who let the wine run out in the first place.  You cannot keep the wine flowing, your lamp lit and your light shining, by rigorously and literally keeping to the regulations of a written code.

            Obeying Jesus, however, has the opposite result.  By keeping his word, we see the ordinary transformed into something bright, good, lively, and miraculous! 

            The servants do as Jesus says and fill the jars with water.  They take some of this to the headwaiter, who, surprised that there is a newly discovered supply of wine, tastes it.  He calls the groom, who is apparently responsible for the wine supply, and he says: “Everyone serves the good wine first.  They bring out the second-rate wine only when the guests are drinking freely.  You kept the good wine until now.”

IV.

            What takes away sin, then, is this good wine of now.  That is to say, when we obey the Lord Jesus instead of the chain-of-command of human hierarchies, principalities, and powers, when we reject our given place as underlings, lower class, mere servants, and instead turn and follow God’s Word… then we see miracles happen.  What is ordinary drudgery, what is common, what is empty and ineffectual, what is lifeless and rote… becomes alive and powerful, filled with the Spirit, inspiring joy.  Jesus’ time, Jesus’ presence, comes.

            That’s what makes this wedding real.  The wine of God’s Presence is what takes away sin in that it heals what was divided, and adheres what was broken, and unifies what was separated, and reconciles what had been at enmity and in mortal competition.  The divisions are erased when the good wine finally starts to flow at this wedding reception.

            In this gospel there is no story of the Last Supper.  Instead, the truth and power of the Eucharist pervades the whole story.  And that starts here, where Jesus provides the wine for the wedding banquet in anticipation of his blood being offered for the life of the world.  Here is the new covenant in his blood prefigured.  Later, in chapter six, on the hillside, he will provide the bread and speak at length about the importance of eating his body and drinking his blood, that this is the way we receive his eternal life and become one with him.  This is the way we live in his time. 

            This starts here, right at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry.  The first of his signs revealing who he is happens in this provision of wine.  If the taking away of sin and the reconciliation of the people to God was accomplished in the Torah by the spreading around of the blood of the sacrificed victim, here it is finally and forever fulfilled in the sharing and drinking of the wine together in the gathering of God’s people.  Instead of sprinkling and painting the blood on the surfaces of the Temple, we are taking the wine within us.  Our bodies are temples now, says the apostle Paul.  Our bodies are now where the saving sacrament of Jesus’ body and blood, the bread and wine, happens... and this is what makes us one Body together and individually members of Jesus Christ.

V.

            Jesus’ ministry is always about the transformation that happens when we trust in him and obey his word, rather than the regulations of human institutions and leaders.  Jesus’ ministry is always about revealing the truth hidden beneath and within the ordinary and often oppressive facts of our existence.  Jesus’ ministry discloses our own destiny, and the nature of the whole creation, as united in love with God. 

            For as the water became wine that day, so here, today, the fruit of the vine becomes for us, in our trust and obedience of him, in remembering his promises and his giving of his life for us and to us, a communion in his blood, his life, the very life of God, with and within us.  In this sacrament, we witness to our own transformation and renewal, and we see our sin, our misconceptions, divisions, illusions, hostilities, and fears and all their lethal consequences, get taken away, changed into the new wine of his life in us.

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