John 2:1-12 – The Gospel of John

Uh, presumably we've all been to a wedding before, and if you have, one of the things that you may well note that uh every wedding has an awkward guest.

Uh, not awkward necessarily because they they drink too much, uh, though if you've been at a wedding in Ireland, you may know that guest.

Uh no, awkward because they're they're kind of anti-fun.

Uh they're the kind of it's normally like an like an old aunt.

Yeah, an old aunt who's there and she's she's got her brooch on and she looks quite austere, and uh she doesn't smile during any of it.

And and you go to the board to see what table you're sitting on, kind of praying, please don't, please don't put me in the same table as that person.

That uptight, you say, Oh, I got stuck with your one, is what you might say at an Irish one, oh, I got stuck with your one at dinner.

That awkward guest who's kind of against all of the joy of the occasion.

For lots of people, that's uh that's who Jesus is.

If you were going to a wedding and you looked at the board, you know, oh, I'm on Jesus' table.

And he's like, oh no, I got stuck with your man, is what you might say at the at the party afterwards.

Because we have this kind of image in our mind, this false image in our mind, that Jesus is kind of disapproving of all uh fun and joy.

Uh, he's actually the kind of guy that turns wine into water uh in order to kind of get you to kind of calm down and stop you from uh from having a good time.

Maybe that's what you think that Christianity is about.

And to be fair, uh you'd have evidence for thinking that, uh, because Christians uh can be fairly joyless from time to time, they can be fairly miserable.

Uh I come from uh Northern Ireland, which is the home and epicenter of miserable Christians.

Um and uh and so it's good to be here in Dublin's Fair City talking about Jesus turning water into good wine.

Uh, because that's not the picture that we have of Jesus in the Gospels.

He's not the old austere killjoy ant that you don't want to sit beside.

He's the guy that at the party that everybody wants to be around.

He's the first guy on the dance floor when the Grease Megamex starts.

Jesus' first miracle in John's Gospel was to take 120 gallons of water and turn it into about a thousand bottles of really good wine.

What does that tell you about the kind of Jesus that is being revealed in the Gospels?

What does that tell you about the kind of Jesus that we worship?

What does that tell us about what Christianity should look like?

Surely it should be a thing of joy, a thing that is marked by celebration and gladness.

If nothing else, it tells us that Christianity isn't a, it's not a rationed religion.

When Jesus loves you, he loves you up to the brim.

When he gives you his grace, he gives you his grace up to the brim.

And you, in our response to him, we don't just take a measure of faith.

We follow him, trust him, believe him, love him up to the brim in response.

That is the kind of Jesus that is revealed in this passage.

That's the kind of Jesus that we follow.

Now, a quick word about miracles.

Because I'm sure that some people will be sitting here going, yeah, no, this is like he watered it down, like there's a bit of wine there, and this is a this is a parable about sharing.

Like people say that about the feeding of the 5,000.

You know, everybody had food, and if they only shared.

No, no.

Christianity is necessarily a supernatural religion.

We believe that supernatural things how we believe that Jesus was raised from the dead.

That's not a metaphor, that's not an illustration.

That's something we believe as Christians actually happened in history, right?

The miracles in the Gospels are not illusions or metaphors.

They are presented as extraordinary things that actually happened in space and time.

But what is a miracle?

Well, a miracle, at its most basic, is a suspension of or a tinkering with the natural order of things, the natural laws that govern the world around us, the laws of physics.

It is a suspension of or a or a changing of, a tinkering with those laws.

Now, if you're somebody here this morning and you believe that we live in a closed universe, you're very welcome.

Thank you for coming and exploring with us.

But if you believe that we live in a closed universe that has no outside forces acting on it, then of course a miracle is by definition something that cannot happen.

But as the Christian worldview would put forward, we believe that behind the laws of nature stands a lawgiver.

And so it is reasonable to assume, therefore, that that being, what we call God, has both the power and the prerogative to tinker with those laws that he made in the first place.

And when you tinker with them, or when he tinkers with them, don't know what water you've turned into wine recently, when he tinkers with them, what you see is a miracle.

John in his gospel calls the miracles something else.

And this is significant for the rest of our study.

Look down at verse 11.

Please have the Bible open in front of you, either on your phone or uh on a hard copy.

If you need to grab a hard copy, there's no shame just running down and grabbing one from the table.

But if you cast your eye down to verse 11, you'll see that John calls the miracle a sign.

This, the first of his signs that Jesus did at Cana in Galilee.

What do signs do?

Well, they point to something, don't they?

They direct our attention away from the sign to the thing that the sign is pointing to, the thing that the sign indicates.

It would be very silly, wouldn't it, if you were driving along and you saw a stop sign and you were like, oh, what a fascinating sign.

No, you're supposed to look at the thing that the sign's pointing to, i.e., you should stop.

And so it is with the signs in John's gospel.

The signs point to something.

And John there gives us the answer again in verse 11.

What do the signs point to?

Verse 11, this is the first sign, uh, the first of his signs that Jesus did in Canaan of Galilee, where he manifested his glory.

What do the signs do?

The miracles of John's gospel, they point to Jesus' glory.

If you've been tracking with us over the last four weeks, you'll remember in chapter one, where John writes, and we have seen his glory.

The glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

We have seen his glory.

A glory is something like it's something like God's God's character, his authority, his presence, his love, his goodness.

And in a sense, what John is saying is that when Jesus turned the water into wine, it's almost as though the curtain was just pulled back a little bit, that we we glimpsed his glory for the first time.

We saw his character and who he truly was.

And now John says to us this morning, he says, Let me show you.

Let me show you that glory as it was manifested in this miracle.

So I'm going to point us to four ways that this miracle shows us the glory of Jesus.

Okay?

First, see the glory of the joyful bridegroom.

See the glory of the joyful bridegroom.

It's not an accident that Jesus first displays his glory at a wedding.

Presumably the significance would be uh quite different if his first miracle had been at a funeral or at a business meeting or at a sports match.

It would kind of put a different feel on it, wouldn't it?

But it's kind of significant that Jesus first displays who he truly is at a wedding.

Because after all, what is a wedding?

Or what should a wedding be?

A place of joy and a place of celebration and a place of love.

And that's where Jesus chooses to show us who he truly is.

Let's not miss the context here.

He attends and he reveals his glory.

And in doing so, he in effect is saying to the wedding, saying to the idea of marriage, he's like, yes, that's the kind of thing that the kingdom of God is like.

I want to show my glory at a wedding because the kingdom of God is like a marriage.

That's how the Bible often describes the relationship between God and his people as a married relationship.

Why?

Because it's supposed to be a relationship of joy and of intimacy and of knowledge of one another and of love.

God designed marriage to be that sort of relationship.

And in doing so, he gave us in the world a picture.

That's what marriage is.

It's a picture of what he is doing in the cosmos between his people, those who trust in Jesus, and the true bridegroom, that is Jesus Himself.

It is not insignificant that the actual bridegroom in the wedding at Canaan in Galilee goes nameless.

Because we're supposed to be fixing our attention on the true bridegroom, that is Jesus.

When Jesus displays his glory at a wedding, he is giving his seal of approval on this image.

The marriage is a picture of the loving, joyful reality that every Christian, whether married or single, enters into when they become a follower of Jesus.

Marriage is a great thing.

We want to celebrate marriage, we want to encourage that, but some Christians we can get kind of obsessed about making sure that everybody gets married.

Maybe you're sitting here going, oh, it's a sermon about marriage and I'm single, I hate this, right?

Yeah, some of you, okay, fair enough.

Right?

Marriage, marriage is a photograph.

Your relationship with Jesus is the full technicolor 4K reality.

And that is true whether you're married or single.

Marriage is a played-out image in space and time of what your relationship with Jesus should be like.

And so everybody gets to enjoy the full-throated, full-bodied, to use the wide image, reality of what G that's what Jesus invites you into.

If I could just say a quick word to uh to the married couples, just forgive me for for a moment.

That if you are married, what you need to realize from this is that your marriage is a pulpit.

Every marriage is preaching something, it is saying something about what you believe.

Your marriage is designed by God to display love and joy and intimacy and self-sacrifice, self-giving, selflessness, patience, grace, kindness.

That is what your marriage is designed to proclaim because that is how it will best image what everybody is invited into when they believe in Jesus.

Your marriage, married people here, and with this I will stop single people, okay?

Married people, your marriage is a pulpit.

What message is it preaching?

Is it preaching one of joy and self-sacrifice and love and intimacy and kindness and grace and patience?

Is it preaching one of rancor and selfishness?

I mean, nobody would want to be invited into that relationship.

The second way that Jesus displays his glory then is see the glory of the obedient son.

See the glory of the obedient son.

We get mention of Jesus' mum.

Have a look with me, the first uh uh five verses.

On the third day, so we're kind of at the end of this first week of Jesus' public ministry.

On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus, we know that to be Mary, right, from gospel.

She's not actually named in John's Gospel, she's just referred to as the mother of Jesus.

Uh, also, just by the by, if you maybe came from a uh from a Roman Catholic or from an Orthodox background, you might just want to note verse 12 that he returned to Capernaum with his mother and his brothers.

That Jesus had other children.

Or it's not Jesus had other children.

Dan Brown.

Jesus had brothers.

Just something to reflect upon.

Well, she's there.

Uh the Mary of Mother uh the mother of Jesus was there.

Uh Jesus, verse 2, also invited to the wedding with his disciples.

Uh, when the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, They have no wine.

And Jesus said to her, Woman, what does this have to do with me?

My hour is not yet come.

His mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells you.

This interaction is strange on a number of levels.

First of all, the very fact that there's no wine left.

This is a major problem in the ancient world.

This is a huge faux pas.

You imagine going to a wedding in Ireland and the barman looking over and said, There's no Guinness left.

It's either, or like, there's no mash.

You're like, what?

What kind of wedding is this?

There's no Guinness, there's no mash.

A huge cultural faux pas.

And Mary seems to be kind of close enough in the inner circle, close enough to kind of to know what's going on behind the scenes that he kind of comes up to Jesus and goes, There's no wine left.

That we don't want to get out publicly.

What are we going to do?

There's no wine left.

The other surprising thing is Jesus' response to her.

Where he turns to her and he says, Woman, what has this got to do with me?

My hour is not yet come.

Could I just say?

That is not how you would speak to an Irish mummy.

You would get a clip around your ear.

If I turned to my mother and went, Woman, what is this to do with me?

She was, excuse me.

Maybe you also know other mothers like that.

You would not speak to your mother like that if you wished to tell the tale.

So what's going on?

It's strange, isn't it?

The word woman here, it sounds much colder and much harsher to our ears.

Jesus actually uses the same term when he's on the cross and he makes provision for his mother.

Uh in in a sense, kind of handing her over to John, because in that day, if if uh if a woman had no husband or and no male children, that sort of thing, she was destitute.

And so he says to her, Woman, behold your son, pointing at John.

It doesn't quite carry that sense.

So while Jesus is not being rude, he is being abrupt.

And this is interesting, because you kind of wonder, well, why?

Why is he being kind of abrupt with her?

Now, Mary was told from the beginning that this child was no ordinary child.

She was visited by an angel.

You know, she sang in Luke chapter 2 that he would be the one to bring down kings and raise up the lowly, that he was going to upset the whole apple cart, the whole system.

Luke 2 · chapter mention

His father, Joseph, had been told that he should name him Jesus because he would ultimately save his people from their sins.

And then Jesus says, My hour has not yet come.

The hour in John's Gospel is the hour of salvation.

The hour in John's Gospel is the cross.

The cross is the fullest revelation when the curtain gets ripped back and you see the glory of Jesus stretched out on a Roman instrument of torture and execution.

That's what the hour is.

So Jesus says, My hour, the hour of salvation, the hour of the full disclosure of the glory of God has not yet come.

And we learn in John's Gospel that it will only come by his obedience to the will of his heavenly father.

Not even his earthly mother can dictate the terms of when Jesus' glory will be revealed.

That must have been massively hard for her.

She'd borne him, nursed him, fed him, taught him to walk, taught his fingers, those initial bits of dexterity.

And now, in a sense, she must step back and let him go to his public ministry.

That he she can no longer approach him kind of on the inside track as his mother, that she must learn also to come to him as a disciple.

Do you see?

And everything would be submitted to that mission, including family ties.

You see that throughout the Gospels.

There's another incident, the Mark's Gospel, where uh where his mother and brothers, again, brothers, uh, come to uh to take Jesus away because they think that he's a bit cracked.

And the crowd say, uh, Jesus, your mother and brothers are here.

And he doesn't go outside.

He says, My mother's, my mother and my brothers are those who do the will of God.

Everything gets submitted, even family ties.

It's quite striking.

Maybe it makes you feel a little bit uneasy.

At various points in John's Gospel, we will see Jesus shrink back because the people want to propel that hour.

They want to kind of make him king by force, they want to exalt him, they want to push him into the limelight.

Jesus has none of it.

Jesus withdraws before the appointed time because he will submit to the will of his heavenly father.

That is the controlling driver of his purposeful life.

See, Jesus is the obedient son who came to do the will of his father, to become that bridegroom, that true bridegroom who enters us, enters into that love relationship between his followers and himself.

And he does so by willingly laying down his life.

Nevertheless, Jesus is not so cruel and so callous that he doesn't listen to the request of his mother.

Nevertheless, Jesus goes to meet the need that is presented by her.

But he does so in a private way.

Did you notice that?

So the master of the banquet doesn't know, the other guests don't know what's really going on.

It's quite a private little circle who see his glory.

The disciples certainly, and maybe even the servants as well.

They know what happened.

They saw the glory of the obedient son.

Third, see the glory of the uncorked kingdom.

See the glory of the uncorked kingdom.

Now we come to the miracle itself, verses six to ten.

Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.

Like I said, about a thousand balls of wine.

Jesus said to the servants, fill the jars with water.

And they filled them up to the brim.

And he said to them, Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.

So they took it.

When the master of the feast tasted the water, now it became wine, and did not know where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew, the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, Everyone serves the good wine first, when the people have drunk freely, that is, when they are not really in a mental place to care about the quality of the wine.

And then they serve the poor wine, but you have kept the good wine until now.

The question here why so much wine?

Why not just kind of meet the need?

And Jesus go, how many bottles do you think it will do?

Like there's fifty people here, and there's glasses, you know, 75 mils.

No.

Why so much wine?

It's because in the Bible, wine is synonymous with blessing.

Wine means goodness and blessing and joy from God.

So let me give you some Old Testament references.

Proverbs 3, 9 and 10, honor the Lord with your wealth and with the first fruits of your produce, then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats bursting with wine.

Right?

Honor the Lord, vats bursting with wine.

Sign of blessing coming from God.

Or Psalm 104, verses 14 and 15, uh prayer of praise to God, where it says, You cause the grass to grow for the livestock, and plants for man to cultivate, that he may bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the heart of man, and bread to strengthen his heart.

Psalms 104:14

What does wine do?

It's a sign of blessing from God that gladdens our heart.

The prophets then in the Old Testament pick up this idea of wine being a thing of blessing, and they they say that basically when the Messiah comes, that's God's appointed king, that when the Messiah comes, he'll bring lots of good wine with him.

Then one of the signs will be that God's people will be restored and the wine will flow.

Listen to the prophet Amos.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when the planeman shall overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes, him who sows the seed, the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and the hills shall flow with it.

I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them and inhabit them.

They shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, they shall make gardens and eat their fruit.

I will plant them in the land, and they will never again be uprooted from the land that I will give them, says the Lord your God.

Or one more, just to indulge me from the prophet Joel.

So you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who dwells in Zion, my holy mountain, and Jerusalem, my holy hill.

Strangers shall never again pass through it, and in that day the mountains shall drip with sweet wine, and the hills will flow with wine.

Wine will cascade in abundance down the mountains like rivers from snowy peaks.

And in that day the people will sing and be glad of that glorious kingdom that has come, that he has restored his people, never to be shaken, never to be uprooted again.

And so when Jesus makes a thousand bottles of the best wine, he is announcing the uncorking of the kingdom, that that abundance of that messianic age is coming, that God's abundant blessing is about to be poured out, not in material blessing.

Don't think about it in those terms, not in material provision, but in God's spiritual provision of forgiveness and adoption and life in all of its fullness.

The master of the feast is right.

The best wine has been saved till the end.

The new outstrips the old.

Jesus is saying, when he makes this wine, and he is saying to us this morning, raise your glasses to the coming of the kingdom.

The kingdom of God's abundant blessing and forgiveness.

Finally, fourthly, see the glory of the surpassing purifier.

See the glory of the surpassing purifier.

What Jesus uses to perform this miracle is not incidental.

We read uh down in verse 6 that he uses these large stone water jars that had a different purpose.

They were used for ritual washings.

What would happen is that you would come in from your dusty road and uh from your journey to the wedding, and the first thing that you would do is you would draw cups and you'd wash your hands and you'd wash the dust off your feet.

You might even wash the bowls and the cups that you're going to eat with, because there was all of this ritual around making sure that you were pure.

When Jesus turns them into wine boxes, he makes them obsolete.

He is saying both that now is not the time for ritual, but the time for celebration.

And he's also saying that these water jars could never really take away what makes you impure.

You see, the Jews thought that uh that that sin was kind of like bacteria or a virus that you would get on your skin, and so you had to kind of sanitize it off.

But one of the things that Jesus tells us in the Gospels is that's not the way sin is at all.

Sin doesn't attack you from the outside, it manifests from the inside.

It comes from your heart.

It's the fact that your heart is selfish, it's that your heart is self-loving and self-seeking, it's that your heart is greedy and covetous and prideful and lustful.

That's the problem.

And so who's going to purify that?

What's going to make that clean?

Because it ain't going to be a stone water jar.

Jesus is taking away this old ineffective purification ritual.

And he's replacing it with something that will decisively make you clean.

Because that is what his hour will fully achieve, right?

The hour of salvation, the hour of the glorification of the Son of God on the cross as he dies for the people of God to do what?

To make you clean.

And so John, who wrote this gospel, writes again at the very end of his life in the book of Revelation.

He talks there about the people of God.

And he says this of them in Revelation 7:14.

Revelation 7:14

He says that they have washed their robes, that image of being clean.

They have washed their robes and made them white.

How?

In the blood of the Lamb.

This idea of washing in blood or washing in wine in order to be clean is a common image in the Bible.

And here the people of God wash their robes and have made them clean with the blood of the Lamb.

The water in those large stone jars looked up and saw its maker.

And on the day that it did, it blushed blood red.

It satisfied and gladdened the hearts of those who were at the wedding, but it was also a sign pointing beyond itself, pointing to the son, who would take the cup on the night before he was betrayed and give it to his disciples and say, drink this, all of you.

This cup of wine is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this in remembrance of me.

And then the following morning, in obedience to his father, would die to purify our sins.

And in the words of John again, this time in his first letter, to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

We all need to be made clean, do you know?

Some of you know that more than others.

Some of you know that that kind of defiling sense of sin.

And so you come in with kind of with guilt and shame and anxiety.

Do not leave.

Still carrying that guilt and that shame.

Lay it down at the feet of Jesus and know his cleansing.

He is the abundant and eternal purifier, the one who makes you clean forever.

And then you live into the implications of that cleansing throughout the rest of your life following him.

This is how Jesus showed his glory.

Jesus showed his glory at this wedding.

And what was the response of those who saw it?

End of verse 11.

And with this we draw to a close.

That is the only appropriate response when you behold the glory of God.

To place your trust, your faith, your love in him.

There are many reasons in this life to lament and to be sorrowful.

And the scriptures face those head on.

But core to Christian living, core to Christian belief is joy.

Joy is the hallmark of the Christian.

For every Christian knows the things by which we can be joyful even when we are overtaken by sorrow.

The joy of knowing the bridegroom who loved us and gave himself for us.

The joy of the Son who willingly went in obedience to his father to that hour, to his death.