“What Jesus Creates He Can Transform”
John 2:1-11
1/14/07
Surely the Lord wasn’t promoting drunkenness,
was He? Here He had transformed 120 gallons of water into wine to
give to a bunch of sauced wedding guests - wedding guests who were
already intoxicated to the point where they could no longer tell the
difference between the poorer wine which they had just finished off and
the new wine which Jesus had just made. The Scripture states that
wine makes the heart glad, and glad they were. Jesus was about to
make them hilarious. Tough words for those who think drinking
alcohol is a sin!
But what about the being drunk part? This fact
makes this miracle of Jesus transforming water into wine a rather
difficult miracle for us to try to justify Him doing, especially as the
first of His miracles. Why not show off some of His healing
power, raise somebody from the dead, or cast a few demons out?
Wouldn’t they be more fitting for Jesus to do if He wanted to
reveal His glory as God? Why give more alcohol to a crowd that
had already had too much? The short answer is that the Lord does
what the Lord does. And the result of His doing is that His
disciples saw His glory and believed in Him, which is exactly what
Jesus intended.
In the Gospel according to St. John the miracles of
Jesus are called “signs.” Signs aren’t just
extraordinary wonders; they reveal something to us about Jesus - who He
is, what He came to do. The Lord revealed His glory in this first
sign of His at the wedding in Cana. This fits in well with the
season of Epiphany, which is about Jesus revealing His glory as God in
the flesh, God our Savior. So, He’s revealed to be such by
the gifts given to Him by the Magi. He’s revealed to be
such at His Baptism. But how is He revealed as such through this
sign? How does He reveal His glory as God here?
The wonderful thing about Epiphany is that we are
shown what kind of God we have, not the kind of God we expect. If
Jesus revealed Himself in ways you expected, He’d be a god of
your own making, an idol. Those who have their own gods are
looking for God to fit the image they’ve constructed for
Him. When God doesn’t fit that image, they want nothing to
do with Him. They’d rather have God the way they’d
like to have Him - a god they can control, a god they can wheel and
deal with, a god that will accept them the way they are - sins and
all. But the glory that Jesus reveals through His signs is a
glory that we know nothing about. It’s a glory that shows
itself behind simple, earthly things, a glory that shows itself behind
signs of weakness, suffering, and the cross, a glory that shows
God’s ability to take those earthly, weak-looking things and
transform them into spiritual, life-giving, powerful things. Here
in His transforming simple water into wine God’s power is made
manifest. Here, He who created both water and wine, shows His
ability to transform the one into the other. And here He shows
His power to use that sign to transform a group of unbelieving men into
believing disciples of His.
The disciples don’t observe this sign and say
to themselves, “So here’s the One we’ve been looking
for, the One who fits our expectations of God, the One who has all the
qualities we think God should have.” Rather, seeing this
sign they conclude, “So this is God!” This first sign
of Jesus reveals that He is God in the flesh, perhaps not in a way we
would expect or even think appropriate, and perhaps not even the God we
want, but God nonetheless. It also reveals what God is
like. It shows us that He creates and transforms things; it shows
us that He is gracious and merciful; and it shows us that He gives
until our cup overflows, and then He gives even more.
First, it shows us that Jesus is God in the
flesh. Who else could change water into wine? Of course, a
magician might make it look like he could do it, using some sort of a
trick. But Jesus used no tricks; just plain, ordinary water
poured into ordinary, everyday containers. Besides, the signs
Jesus performed were not done for show, but in order to reveal who He
was. Unlike magicians who are praised for their tricks,
Jesus’ signs got Him into trouble with the Jewish leaders.
The signs accompanied Jesus’ claims to be God. For that He
was crucified. If Jesus didn’t want the Jews to get the
impression that He was making Himself out to be God, He did rather a
poor job. In fact, they understood exactly who He was claiming to
be. But Jesus made no apologies; He didn’t recant and say,
“Oh, you’ve misunderstood me!” No, He let His
words and His signs stand, and this brought Him to the cross, after
which followed the greatest of His signs - His bodily resurrection from
the dead, the sign of all signs, proving once and for all that Jesus is
God in the flesh.
Second, this sign at Cana showed not only that Jesus
is God, the Creator of all things, but that He is also the transformer
of things. From water (which He created in the beginning) He
creates something else - wine, normally produced in a winery from the
juice of grapes. (I’ve often said that of all the relics
collected by the Roman Catholic Church, why couldn’t they have
gotten hold of a bottle of this wine that Jesus made; but that’s
probably because it was so good, that there was nothing left once the
wedding guests got hold of it!) But here Jesus doesn’t
create wine using the normal means of a winery. He does it by
transforming the one creation of His (water) into another (wine).
This shows us that Jesus is in the transforming
business. Just as He took ordinary water and transformed it into
wine at the wedding in Cana, so He takes plain, ordinary water today
and transforms it into baptismal water, with His words and command
attached to it. As Luther writes, “...without the Word of
God water is simple water and no Baptism. But with the Word of
God it is a Baptism, that is, a gracious water of life and a washing of
regeneration in the Holy Spirit...” With this water, Jesus
cleanses you from all sin, gives you a clean conscience before God, and
sprinkles you with His blood. With this water He clothes you with
Himself, puts the Name of God upon you, and adopts you as His
child. Thus, a miracle happens every time one is baptized with
the ordinary water that Jesus has transformed by His Word.
Not only does He transform water, but He transforms
bread and wine in His Holy Supper, so that they are more than just
bread and wine but are at the same time His body and blood. With
this bread and wine Jesus gives you the body and blood which He gave
and shed on the cross for you to eat and to drink for the forgiveness
of your sins. No ordinary bread and wine could do such a
thing. But again, with Jesus’ words and promise attached to
them, they are exactly what Jesus says they are and they do what He
gives them to do. In the same way, Jesus takes ordinary human
words and with them He absolves you of your sins. It’s just
as Jesus says to His disciples, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not
forgive them, they are not forgiven.” And so you can be
sure that when the pastor speaks the Lord’s words of forgiveness
to you, that absolution is just as valid and certain, even in heaven,
as if Christ our dear Lord dealt with us Himself.
But the transforming doesn’t stop there.
With the ordinary things that the Lord transforms to use for His
purposes, He transforms you. He transforms you into a new
creature. He transforms you into a saint and a child of
God. He transforms you into the image of Christ. He
transforms your heart, your will, and your mind, so that you are
strengthened in the faith and walk in the Lord’s ways by the
power of His Holy Spirit.
He also transforms our thinking about what kind of
God we have. The sign at Cana shows us that we have a gracious
and merciful God. When the wine was all gone, Mary brought it to
the attention of Jesus. She knew that He could and would do
something about it, even though His time had not yet come. It
might have seemed like an insignificant problem, one that Jesus
shouldn’t have been bothered about at all, but He shows by His
actions that He cared even about this minor inconvenience in these
people’s lives, and in His compassion for them He graciously
provided what they needed at that time. If Jesus cares enough to
provide wine for a bunch of drunken guests at a party, what won’t
He provide for you? There’s nothing too small or too
insignificant to bring to Jesus. As the Apostle Paul writes,
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and petition
with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”
And Peter writes, “Cast all your cares upon Him, because He cares
for you.” And if Jesus cares about the small things in your life,
what about the big things, especially the big things of forgiveness and
salvation?
Jesus showed how much He cared about these people by
giving them even more than they could have asked for. They had
already drunk enough, and yet Jesus gave them more. And
that’s what He does for you in giving you His gifts: He
gives until your cup overflows, and then He gives you even more.
Jesus gives you more gifts than you are able to receive, to the point
that you’re intoxicated with His gifts. And His gifts are
always good. Jesus made good wine, the best wine, better than any
wine the best winery in the world could produce. The gifts of God
are always the best gifts for us, even though they may not seem to be
so at the time. Sometimes those gifts hurt; sometimes those gifts
are gifts of discipline, rebuke, sickness, or trials. The Lord
knows better than we do what we need when we need it, and He causes all
things to work together for our good. So, we can be sure that
because He has not withheld His only Son from us, that He will not
withhold any other good gifts from us, and that because of His mercy
and compassion He will use those gifts to keep us steadfast in His Word
and faithful to the end.
The sign at Cana, then, did its job. The
disciples saw the Lord’s glory revealed in it and they believed
in Him. That’s what the Lord’s signs are given to do
for you. As John writes at the end of his Gospel account,
“Many other signs therefore Jesus also performed in the presence
of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have
been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God, and that believing you may have life in His Name.” The
greatest of signs that attest to His being the Christ, the Son of God,
is His death on the cross and His bodily resurrection. There on
the cross, though not what we expect in God, God revealed Himself as
our Savior, as He suffered, bled, and died in order to take away our
sins. And there at His resurrection He was publicly portrayed as
the Son of God with power, showing thereby that He had indeed overcome
sin, death, and the power of the devil. Now He reveals that glory
to you through His Word and His Sacraments, so that you too might
believe and confess with the disciples, “So that’s God;
that’s what He’s like!” Amen.