Wedding in Cana

What are we to make of our gospel reading? We have so many questions. How can water suddenly turn into vintage wine? How big was the party that it needed another 120 gallons of wine? Why does Jesus bring it about just to save his host embarrassment? Why did Mary even ask him to do it? Why does he sound so reluctant? Why do we hear nothing of this in the other three gospels? Did it really happen or has some trivial incident been blown out of all proportion as it was talked about over the years before being written down?

These are our modern questions, and they are reasonable ones. But they wouldn’t have troubled the first readers of the gospel. In their pre-scientific world, miracles were taken for granted. Strange things could happen. To get to the point of the passage, we have to put aside our modern problems and try to pick up the message its first readers would have heard.

Jesus did this, we are told, as the first of his signs. Sign is John’s regular word for the extraordinary things Jesus does. He doesn’t call them miracles – things to wonder at. He doesn’t call them mighty works – acts of power – as the other gospels do. He calls them signs.

So, think about signs. Signs point beyond themselves. They tell you things. This is main street, London is in that direction, there is a road junction ahead. People don’t put them up for decoration but to send a message. An L-plate is not put on a car to make it look pretty but to tell you about the driver. And in John’s gospel, Jesus’ actions are signs. They tell you something about him. In Chapter 9, he heals a blind man of his blindness. That shows he is the light of the world and opens our eyes to it. In Chapter 11, he calls Lazarus out of the tomb and sets him free from his grave clothes. This tells us that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. So, this morning, don’t think about the miracle, think about the message.

So, what’s the message here? One clue is what is said about the wine. Most people, says the steward, serve the best wine first and later the inferior vintage when they are too sozzled to notice. ‘But you have kept the best wine till last’. What Jesus has provided is better than what went before. And what went before and has now been transformed, we are told, is water for the Jewish rites of purification, one of the necessary rituals to enable people to be open to the presence of God. Jesus has transformed all that, rendered it obsolete. Now, it is through him that we are offered the cleansing and new life we need.

It is an important truth. It is Jesus who now brings us into fellowship with God. But let’s pause a moment and digress, because that truth needs to be handled with care. From quite early times, the history of the Christian church came to be tarnished by its attitude towards the Jews. They crucified Jesus, it was said. In point of fact, it was the Romans who did it, put up to it not by the whole Jewish nation but by some of its leaders. Nevertheless, in spite of that, over the centuries the Jews have been persecuted and are still often abused, to our shame.

In more recent times there have been moves to change that. There is now a willingness to recognise that we have much in common. Jews and Christians share the same Old Testament scriptures. We share the conviction that God is one, not many, and is a good and just God. Dialogue is beginning to replace hostility. And so it is with our attitude towards the other world religions. Of course, all religions have their fanatics – including our own – but they are not representative of all. There is much good to be found in other faiths and much to be learned. God has not rendered himself without witness across the world. But we should be blind if we imagined that all religions proclaimed an identical message. It remains the case that Jesus brings something special, something irreplaceable to our understanding of God. He transforms water into wine.

We come to the heart of it at the end of our reading – ‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, and revealed his glory.’ The words ‘glory’ and ‘glorify’ occur 40 times in the gospel of John. We meet it right at the beginning of the gospel in the reading we may have listened to at Christmas: ‘The word became flesh and we have seen his glory – the glory of God.’

It’s easy when we think about glory to think of something spectacular – light, brilliance – like the summer sun at midday, like the light that shone from Moses’ face when he came down from Mount Sinai, like the light that shone around Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. But there are other glimpses of glory in the ministry of Jesus: those things that marked him out as special. His compassion for those in need. His readiness to help them. His fierce criticism of the rich and powerful and championing of the poor and downtrodden: ‘blessed are you poor for yours is the Kingdom of God – woe to you who are rich for you have had it all’. And if God’s glory is seen in Jesus, then that is what God is like.

But John’s gospel takes us further. In Chapter 17, Jesus prays before he goes out to Gethsemane on his way to the cross. ‘Father, the hour has come, glorify your Son that he may glorify you.’ The glory of God is especially seen on the cross, that most unlikely of places: seen in Jesus’ suffering, his arms outstretched in compassion for the world. The glory of God is that he loves us so much that he grieves and suffers over our sins. We cannot think of the glory of God without thinking of the cross. God is more than the creator of the galaxies in this vast universe. He is one who loves and shares our pain.

We could leave it there. It would be a reflection on the gospel reading for today. The changing of water into wine is a sign of who Jesus is and what he does. But we cannot leave it there. Near the end of the gospel, at the end of Chapter 20, John sums up the gospel’s message: ‘Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.’ It is not written simply for interest or for historical record. It is written that we may grasp it for ourselves. The glory of God is seen in the life and death of Jesus, especially on the cross. That’s what makes our faith distinctive. Because God is love, he suffers with us and because of us, and in Jesus offers us life. The challenge is to believe and accept the gift.