The First Sign - John 2:1-11

So I know there are some in our congregation who don't appreciate sports.

So I was going to try really hard not to mention the Super Bowl today because we're here, but Pastor Ricky blurted it out from back row.

So here we are.

I am not intentionally keeping it short for the sake of the Super Bowl.

We have plenty of time.

In fact, we have to be out of here by two for the next congregation, so that still gives us an hour and a half.

So that means I don't have to keep it short for that purpose.

But, that being said, we are going to look at John chapter two, starting in verse one, and so you can open there, if you would like, john chapter two and verse one.

I'll read this text in a moment, but before I do get, before I do read this text, I'm going to read the whole text and then we'll go into explaining it.

I just want to remind us where we are here.

So we are studying this book that when I kind of gave our introduction, I said this is a biography of Jesus.

It tells his story from a unique perspective, and here so far we have been hearing about who Jesus is.

We first of all heard it from John the Apostle, who gave us in that prologue kind of, the foundational statements about who Jesus is as the Creator, as God, the Son, as the Word, as the one who brings light in these various ways.

And then we heard John the Baptist in his ministry and how he proclaimed Jesus.

And then we saw disciples beginning to follow this Jesus who had been revealed in various ways.

But so far Jesus hasn't really spoken for himself.

So far it's been others testifying of who he is, and so what we're going to look at today is really what John the Apostle, the author of the book, refers to as a sign.

There are, depending on who you look and how you outline the book.

There are potentially seven signs in the book of John to testify of who Jesus is, to testify that remember what we're trying to learn that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that we would believe and by believing, have life in his name.

John 20, that big purpose statement.

So these are seven signs that are given so that we would believe what that Jesus can turn water into wine, as we're going to see today.

No, that's not what.

That's not.

His purpose isn't to make you believe.

That Is his purpose to make you believe even that he rose from the dead.

No, but you need to, but that's not the purpose.

In fact, it's quite interesting that today, being Transfiguration Sunday, it's quite interesting to make this kind of introductory point right here.

The purpose of John is that we would see Jesus the way the disciples saw Jesus at the Transfiguration, that we would see that he is the Christ, the Son of God, and that we would just believe and, by believing, have life on his name.

That's the point.

And so John gives depending on the count, depending on how you divide it all up, seven signs, and this is the first of those seven signs.

In fact, this is as we have recorded in all of Scripture.

This is depending on how you line up all the timeline.

Pretty much everyone would place this as the first, what we might also call a miracle, the first miracle of Jesus, the first time he displays his miraculous power.

So we're going to read this text.

I'm going to read this text to you in just a moment, and when we read this text, I want you to notice that we have the story recorded, but then we don't really have much discussion afterwards.

It just kind of happens.

There's kind of one verse that John gives as an editorial comment at the end, and that's going to be significant.

That's verse 11.

So you can pay attention when we read verse 11, and we'll get to that.

But the truth is, when you prepare a sermon on a passage like this, it's interesting when you start reading different commentators and people talking about it.

There are a lot of different ideas about what this could mean and everything like that.

But what I really want to stick to in this sermon is what it means, within the context of the Gospel of John, for our purpose of seeing Jesus revealed as the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

That's what I want us to see, and so that's what I think is revealed to us here in John, chapter 2, at least a part of that and so we're going to read this now.

John 2 · chapter mention

So follow with me as I read, starting verse 1.

On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples, and the wine ran out.

The mother of Jesus said to him they have no wine.

Jesus said to her woman what does this have to do with me?

My hour has not yet come.

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

There were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rights of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons.

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 out and take.

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 become wine and did not know where it came 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 people have drunk freely, then the poor wine, but you have kept the good wine until now.

This is the first of his signs.

Jesus did at Cana, in Galilee, and manifested his glory, and his disciples believed in him.

This is the word of the Lord.

I noticed in the bulletin it said I was preaching through verse 12, but I really only prepared through verse 11.

So we'll see how we fit that in.

So I called the sermon today the first sign Jesus reveals his power.

You see, the thing is here.

With this first sign Jesus' power revealed.

This begins a shift in Jesus' life.

Jesus, at this point now, does something that will make people talk.

Right, so we talk about his public ministry.

Before this moment in time in Jesus' real physical life on the earth, there were people who knew kind of the story behind his birth and they knew the miraculous nature.

They may have even known that he was the Messiah, but they didn't know what the Messiah was, what he was going to do, and they still don't know all of that.

But up until now it was all just talk.

It was all just.

You know, oh, this miraculous thing happened 30 years ago with the virgin birth and all of that.

But nobody really knows any of that.

Nobody could actually see anything that had happened.

It was all kind of just word of mouth.

You know speculation, who knows what's going to happen?

But here these servants see Jesus do something that is miraculous, that is, see Jesus do something that can't be explained by any means other than supernatural intervention, that God has blessed him with power in some unique and miraculous way.

Do they understand the full extent?

No, they probably don't.

But here we have revealed that Jesus has power from God to do things that override the very laws of nature.

There's no way to do this other than through miraculous means.

This isn't taking a little bit, finding a little bit of wine and dumping it in, watering it down and passing it off as mostly water.

It's not that Some of the commentators say that, but that's not what happened.

That's not what the text says.

This is not simply Jesus giving water and the master of the feast says oh, you know, we're just going to call water good enough for wine, which is what some of the commentators also say.

Now this is actually altering the physical nature of water to make it wine, which doesn't happen.

You could put every chemical you want in water, but you can't turn it into wine.

I guess you could put grape juice concentrate and ferment it, but no, you can't.

You can't turn water into wine.

It doesn't happen.

But Jesus is able to do it.

So let's look at this text together.

So it starts off with saying on the third day, so the third day of what?

Well, if you think of Pastor Ricky's last two weeks, you have the disciples, and I'm not going to take the time to go through all of that, but basically the calling of the disciples.

You start off with John the Baptist kind of sending his first two who go and stay with him that night.

There's a series of days that you can follow through there, so that basically gets Nathaniel's event of that discussion on the fourth day.

So you have fifth, sixth, seventh day.

So this is seven days after that initial time where John the Baptist with his disciples pronounces Jesus as the Lamb of God.

Not necessarily the baptism there's, we know there's something in between there with the wandering and the wilderness, but this is a seven day period and so this marks the end of that seven day period.

So we have this third day and what happens is there's a wedding.

So Jesus, his mother and Jesus' disciples are all invited to this wedding.

This wedding is believed to be because of the fact that his mother and him were both invited.

This is probably a wedding in the family, like a cousin or something like that, or at the very least a very, very good family friend, and so in Middle Eastern culture at this time, weddings could last like a week, and so you have a long party, a long celebration, and the groom's family in particular is tasked with providing the food and the beverage, basically providing for everything, and the wine is supposed to last till the end and for the wine to run out before the end would be viewed as a significant, significant faux pas, a very shameful thing.

You're supposed to provide this thing and then you did it.

And remember this is an honor, shame culture.

It's not like our culture.

So this shame that it would bring on the family would be rather significant.

It would be something very embarrassing.

So what happens is they run out and it's probably, you know, there's probably still people out there with wine in their cups.

But people in the back kind of go and they're like, hey, master of the Feasts, we're out of wine.

And then the Master of the Feasts probably turns to Mary and says, who, remember, she's family.

So she's probably kind of running things.

We don't know that, but it seems that way and it turns to Mary and says, hey, they're out of wine.

And she knows what that means.

And so she goes to the back and she says, hey, jesus, come here.

And she takes her son to the back who at this point, as far as we understand Mary's husband, is dead.

And so Jesus has become kind of the head of the household.

He has been called himself not just son of the carpenter, but he is the carpenter he has been providing.

She has learned to rely on him as a provider, as the one who cares for his family, as the one who can take care of things, and she calls him to advise him of the situation.

And so that's where we get to this place, where we get to a first miracle, or a first sign of Jesus.

And so when we get into this first miracle I just want to point out we're going to make some several observations about this text that are going to lead us to the conclusion that we're going to be led to in verse 11.

The first observation that I want to make the text is this that Jesus' first miracle could be called frivolous.

It shouldn't be, but it could be called frivolous.

The coming kingdom is one of abundance.

We could call this frivolous.

So in our culture, in a culture where we have clean drinking water available just on a tap, where we don't have to literally pull water up by buckets out of a hole of stone and dirt which we would call a well Saying oh well, having to provide wine, this is just frivolous.

Why would Jesus, the Son of God, get involved in a situation like this?

This is frivolous.

This is not important, but here's the thing, and this is going to become important.

Jesus is going to make a statement to his mother in a moment.

That's going to point to something to come and ultimately it's going to point to what the coming kingdom is, and we'll explain that when we go through the text.

But let's make a note here the coming kingdom is one of abundance.

It's one where the wine won't run out, where the food won't run out, where provision is generous and unlimited and celebration and worship of God never ends.

That is something that is coming, and this first miracle, well on earth, right now, we might be tempted to call it frivolous is anything but, but in reality it's actually pointing to the way it's going to be, the way it is supposed to be, and so it's not frivolous.

It's not frivolous when people get together and celebrate a wedding.

It's not frivolous when we gather together and take joy in the blessings of God, which is ultimately what a wedding is.

It's why they celebrated for seven days.

Let's go in the text a little further.

Let's look at verse three.

When the wine ran out so this is rereading this section the mother of Jesus said to him they have no wine.

And Jesus said to her now we tend to read this next phrase like the way we hear it is.

We hear it like American English speakers and so it sounds kind of harsh.

But don't think of it that way.

But hear the words Woman.

What does this have to do with me?

My hour has not yet come.

So that opening phrase, woman.

We in our modern day culture view that as disrespectful For the mothers in the room.

If your child came to you and said, woman, why are you telling me to clean my room?

I don't want to see what would happen in your house after that.

But that's not what Jesus is doing here.

But what Jesus is doing here is he is choosing a word that's a little different.

He would normally respond with some version in our English of mother.

That would be the appropriate, normal response Woman.

Woman is what in that day was a respectful, courteous term to address someone.

So you could think of it like ma'am.

Not in the sense that children are taught to say ma'am.

But if you've ever been to the southern United States, you'll see that in the grocery stores people will refer to a woman that they don't know as ma'am.

That would be the same way that the word woman was used in this word to talk to a woman generally in a respectful tone.

That's how this is used, and he says what has this to do with me?

My hour has not yet come.

Now let me explain a couple things here, because when we read this, we struggle to understand all of the significance, and the truth is there's things that you could speculate on, and when you read some of the commentaries, people speculate about various things, but I want to focus on what we know.

So one of the things that we know about this text, with the phrase my hour has not yet come, my hour, from Jesus' perspective in Scripture is referring to something specific.

It is referring to the time leading up to including his death, his burial, resurrection and glorification.

That is the hour of Jesus.

So you'll see it throughout John reference to the hour.

And then when Jesus gets to the time where he's about to be arrested, he says my hour has come, okay.

So when we see this phrase my hour, where do we go?

Huh, oh, it's the other.

Okay, yeah, I see what you did.

My hour has not yet come.

So when we see that phrase, jesus is saying, hey, it's not time for my ultimate purpose to be fulfilled.

So I tend to read this phrase just like when I read it with basically just my quick read through.

I tend to read it as like because it's the first miracle.

It's like she's asking him to start doing miracles before he was ready to start doing miracles.

But that's not really what it's saying.

In fact, she doesn't ask him to do a miracle.

She might be asking him to, like, run to a friend and get more wine.

I don't know what she's asking him, but here's what he's saying.

He's saying my hour has not yet come.

What happens in his hour?

Well, death, burial, resurrection and glorification.

He ushers in the time of abundance.

And he is saying you're bringing this to me and you're bringing this very earthly, temporal concern for enough wine for this party to me right now, in this context.

But you should know what I am here to do.

I am here to bring around a time of abundance.

I am here to bring out a future time where a world is without sin, where the good things don't run out, where this is never a problem that occurs, because God is the provider and God never runs out.

And so what he's ultimately saying is hey, you are asking for abundance, you are asking for abundance, and abundance is coming.

That's what I came to do, but let me go ahead and give you a preview of that abundance, and that's ultimately what he does.

So the second point I want you to see that flows out of that is this that Jesus gives a gentle reminder about his purpose, but previews his ultimate glorification by providing an overabundance.

Jesus provides an overabundance.

I don't know if you did the quick math and I didn't write the actual number down, so I'm not going to embarrass myself by doing quick math.

I might call on our math teacher to do quick math, but maybe I won't.

But it's 20 to 30 gallons per jar and there's like what?

Six jars, something like that.

That's a lot of wine.

That's gallons and gallons and gallons, like 200 gallons.

There I embarrassed myself with quick math, but something like that it's a lot right, it's more than they need.

I mean you're talking, maybe there's 50 people here, maybe there's 100 people here, but it's the end.

And so he provides an overabundance.

We have that story recorded.

In the next verses it says six stone water jars, therefore the Jewish rites of purification.

Now a side note right here, these were purification jars.

Why does John include that detail?

This isn't going to be a major point.

This is just a subtle thing here.

These were tied with the old system, the old covenant, so to speak, with the purification that was going to have to happen.

Jesus is taking these purification jars and using them for a party.

He is saying there is a subtle hint here that hey, the old is done and I am bringing in the new.

So that's a subtle point.

You could go deep on that, but I'm really trying to picture this within the whole framework.

So they were for the Jewish rite of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons.

Jesus said to the servants fill the jars with water.

And they filled them 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.

So, basically, the master of the feast is like the head caterer in today's terms, like if you were to have a wedding, you would have a caterer and the caterer would be in charge of all this.

You pay the caterer, in fact, ultimately, yes, the groom's family would be the ones held responsible if this ultimate embarrassment did happen.

But the groom's family would hold the caterer responsible and say, hey, you're supposed to have this stuff worked out.

So he's kind of like hey, I hear we're out of wine.

Mary goes and checks on it and does all this, and then all of a sudden they come and they bring him some and something amazing happens.

Something amazing happens in that Jesus provides this Amazing blessing, he provides a miracle, he does something that can't be explained otherwise.

And so this is I want to make a small point here also.

So, notice, mary went to Jesus and all she did was tell him the problem we're out of wine.

Jesus says why are you bringing this problem to me?

But you know About, overabundance is coming, so I'll go ahead and and figure it out.

And she doesn't even know how he's gonna solve it.

She just trusts that he will.

She tells the servants do whatever he says, and so they're like okay, we'll listen, because she's the boss.

And so he tells them fill up these jars of water.

I Don't know about you.

If I was one of the workers, I would be like why am I filling these jars of water?

Like you gotta pull it up from the well and bring it over bucket by bucket and fill.

I mean, this is a.

This isn't like some minor task.

It's not like oh, take the take the bucket and turn the tap on.

That's, that's not the world they lived in.

This was a chore, this was a lot of work and they're like, what are we gonna do?

Give these people well water?

Like, is that what we're gonna do in that culture?

That's not.

You don't do that.

I mean, the well water is not necessarily clean enough.

So they they do all of this.

They do the workers do it out of obedience to Mary, but Mary tells them do whatever he says, because she has faith that he can get it done.

Now, I don't know what he's done in his life up to this point.

We don't have much recorded of that.

But Jesus proves her faith was placed in A worthy object in himself, and so that's a point I want to make for us.

The small point is this is that Jesus is the trustworthy object of our faith.

Jesus is the trustworthy object of our faith.

You know we struggle to trust.

I struggle to trust.

I get in hard situations and I think God is not going to provide.

But you know what I Personally like.

I've never spent tonight in the street.

I have never had a day without food.

I'm not saying that nobody here has ever experienced those things you may very well have, but God has always provided.

But so much more than that.

God has provided Life, salvation.

He has provided community and a family of believers to live life with.

He has provided so much more, and so it's an important, it's an important time to pause and take a reminder that Jesus is the trustworthy object of our faith.

It goes on, in verses 9 and 10, to tell us that when the master of the feast tasted the water, he didn't know where it came from, but he called the bridegroom.

So he's there, he, the servants bring him this, because that's what Jesus told them to do.

And he tastes it and it's wine.

But it's not just any wine, it's the good stuff, he says.

The master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him Everyone else, every other person, every other wedding, I cater a lot of events, and what they do is when people have drunk a little bit and you know they're, they don't care as much Then they bring out really cheap wine.

But no, you actually brought out the best wine, you brought out the excellent stuff, the good stuff.

And so that's another Observation that we can make from this text about Jesus and his coming kingdom.

Is that Jesus coming kingdom is one of Abundance and excellence.

As we think through what, what is it that Jesus is Is offering?

Jesus offers a life.

We say we, we are given eternal life.

But what is that eternal life like?

Is it eternal life of struggling like we struggle today?

This is an eternal life of of working by the sweat of our brow.

No, it's eternal life without the consequences of sin.

It's an eternal life in abundance and excellence.

It's an eternal life where God's blessings no, no end, and we see them and can Enjoy them and worship and respond appropriately.

Jesus coming kingdom is one of abundance and excellence, and so that's something that you're gonna see even throughout as we, as we keep going in John, we're gonna see that Jesus continually kind of previews what it is that he is offering, that there's there's sickness and Jesus stops and heals.

There's there's hunger, there's thousands of people hungry.

Jesus will, will provide food there.

There's death, there's death.

Jesus will raise the life Because in the coming kingdom there is no death, there is no sickness, there is no hurting, there is no hunger, but there is abundance and excellence.

And this leads us to this last verse, verse 11.

Verse 11 says and there's a key verse.

This is the first of his signs.

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

So it's a sign.

And what did the sign do?

What did it what?

What did it signify?

Signs signify something.

I had, peter this week.

He put a, put a sign on the wall over there, next to that door, that says that there's restrooms in there.

Okay, I wanted to put the sign to signify that, so that way if new people come on the property they say, oh, as they walk by, they make note there's a sign that means that there's a restroom in there.

Well, jesus gave signs To signal or signify something.

What does it?

What is this first sign Signify?

It says that it manifested his glory.

Now, didn't manifest his glory on the same level as the transfiguration?

No, certainly not.

But it revealed something about Jesus.

That is true.

It revealed that he is powerful, that he commands the very nature of existence, that he can take water and, and, and and turn it into wine, and so Jesus's power is revealed, that he can Modify nature, so to speak.

But even more than that, by revealing his power, there was a consequence to that.

There was a consequence to that revelation and that's seen in the end.

You see, he had disciples following him.

You see he had disciples following him, but did they know?

Did they know who they were following?

Well, it says now, his disciples believed in him.

You see, we say this was a public sign and it wasn't really public.

Even the master of the feast didn't know.

It says he didn't know that it had ever been water, only the servants and his disciples.

They were the ones who knew what he had done.

It doesn't mean that those stories didn't begin to spread.

I'm sure they did.

I mean, unless I was just worried people were going to call me crazy I would have started saying, hey, this amazing thing happened.

But here's the thing is that his disciples, who now saw that Jesus is much more than just, oh, you know, maybe he is the Messiah and maybe he's going to be a military leader and raise up people to do something.

No, he is something more.

His glory was, in some small piece, manifested, made real, made visible.

It was revealed.

And so Jesus's power here, jesus's power is not just power to transform water into wine, but Jesus is the one with the power to transform lives.

Jesus is the one with the power to transform lives.

You see, the disciples.

Yeah, they were following him.

They were excited about what he was going to do, but I don't know about.

Here.

I said I wasn't going to use a sports illustration, but let me give a sports illustration.

I'm not a 49ers fan, I'm a Raiders fan, and today's game is hard for me because as a Raiders fan, I don't like the 49ers and as a Raiders fan I really don't like the Chiefs, and those two teams are playing each other.

But do you know where they're playing each other?

They're playing each other at the Raiders Stadium.

So it kind of hurts.

It's like I'm going to watch this game today and I'm like, ah, can they, can everybody lose?

But here's the illustration.

So the 49ers and Dan would know this the 49ers have a quarterback named Brock Purdy and when he first came in to the league he was they called him Mr Irrelevant because he was the last draft pick in the whole thing.

But he came out and he started winning.

But here's the thing there were two other quarterbacks who got hurt before him, and they were winning too before they got hurt.

So I did not believe that Brock Purdy was a good quarterback.

I'm like, well, you had the starting quarterback and he was doing good.

And then you had the backup quarterback and he was doing good.

And I said this team is just so good that it doesn't matter who you put at quarterback you can put me in there and they're still going to find a way to win.

They're that good.

But what has transpired since then and even through this year?

It got to the beginning of the year and I was like, ah, I think they're going to the 49ers will fizzle out.

Well, they haven't fizzled out, and now here they are, going to the Super Bowl and I guess Brock Purdy is a pretty good quarterback, because that's what it seems like.

But here's the thing if you are a 49ers fan and you were looking at it logically, you probably thought the same thing.

You're like he hasn't proven himself.

I'm not ready to get excited about him because I don't know that he can get us where we need to go.

Well, he's now proven it.

Well, here we are in this passage and we've been seeing Jesus.

We've heard who he is from John the apostle.

We've heard who he is through John the Baptist, but now we have seen Jesus' glory revealed, manifested by the power that he has.

And so, when we think about the purpose of this book to reveal Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God, and that we would believe and have life in his name.

This is the moment where it says that his disciples believed in him.

They saw something new, something powerful, something different.

They saw his glory manifested.

So, as we continue in this book, know that Jesus is the one with the power to transform not just his disciples' lives, but he's the one with the power to transform your life.

So, yeah, we mess up, we do bad stuff, we sin, we fail, and you know what, in this life we're never going to get it perfect.

But Jesus got it perfect and his grace, applied to us, does ultimately transform us, allows us to partake in him with his glorification.

That's the ultimate end of salvation for us on a human scale is that in the ultimate end, we are glorified with him.

But also, he has the power to transform our lives on a day-to-day basis, not just because it's not that he's going to make us sinless, it's not that he's going to give us absolute victory in this life, but he is the one with the power to transform lives.

So trust in him, as Mary trusted that he could solve that problem when you face problems, when you face difficulties, that he is the one who can deliver you, who can transform your life, even as his disciples believed.

Here let's pray.