Drink To Your Cleanliness

Morning, church.

Morning.

Going high tech this morning.

Reading from the Gospel of John, chapter 2.

John 2 · chapter mention

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.

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 you 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 rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty 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 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, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine, but you have kept the good wine until now.

This, 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.

Please be seated.

For those of you that don't know me, I am one of the lay elders here at redemption.

Can you guys hear me?

Am I on?

Oh wow.

Nice.

Um technology is amazing.

Um we're gonna take a quick break from Colossians this week, and uh I'm standing in.

So let me pray, and uh we'll jump into John.

Father, I thank you that uh we can gather here as your people.

Uh I want to ask as I speak and preach your word to all of us here, that you keep me from saying anything erroneous or wrong.

I stand here as a man under grace, justified by you, asking you for your help.

Father, I pray for the listeners here today, that uh your spirit is working in their hearts to convict them, to encourage them, to do what needs to be done.

I pray that you take my feeble words and use them powerfully to bring about your will and your purposes in our hearts.

We ask this according uh to your grace in Jesus' name.

Amen.

All right, John 2, well-known passage.

Uh, hopefully uh it hits us anew this morning.

Uh but I want to start by asking you guys, uh, everyone here, a question.

I say you guys, that's like the Californian you guys, okay?

That's like y'all.

Yeah.

So is it Midwestern too, Pat?

Yeah.

That's what I mean by you guys.

It's it's everybody.

So um, if you were gonna change the world, uh, how would you do it?

That's a big question.

Um, if you wanted to, you know, start a revolution for mankind, how would you do it?

Would you invent a new piece of technology that maybe transforms the way that we interact with one another?

You know, maybe humanity is lacking the ability to empathize and understand each other.

So what we really need is another social media platform.

Maybe start a political revolution that uh turns society upside down, you know?

Maybe the wealth gap, the ruling class, however you want it, uh we need a revolution to shake things up and bring humanity back on the right course.

A political revolution.

Maybe your plan could be, I'm just gonna become incredibly wealthy, easier said than done, but hey, if that's your plan, uh then you can give away everything to the poor, right?

Uh you could eliminate world hunger, do whatever you want.

Maybe you could take the medical route.

You could invent a cure for cancer or malaria, all the all the countless lives that were lost because of these diseases, you could you could solve and save.

Maybe you could start a new form of meditation, like a new religion.

We all need to go on pilgrimages or whatever and reconnect.

Well, a bit grand, but but what if we step down maybe to the more personal level with you?

Um how would you begin to change yourself?

And we ask this question a lot of ourselves.

How would you change yourself if you could?

How could you change the things about you that you don't like?

Don't worry, I Googled this, and it depends on the website, but it's usually five, ten, or about twenty steps.

Super simple.

Whatever you decide needs changing in the world or yourself fundamentally, what you're trying to do is you're trying to fix a problem.

You're acknowledging that things are not as they should be, and you are identifying the problem or problems, and you're trying to fix them.

I know that there isn't a person in this room that would say, actually, I think everything's perfect in my life and in the world, there's nothing that needs fixing right now.

That's not true.

We look out in our own lives and in the world, and we could acknowledge there's a lot of problems, and depending on what you think the main problem is, that's going to be where you start for your solution.

Well, Jesus has a lot to say about the world's problems, and he has a lot to say about the answers to them as well.

In fact, he would start by telling you that the biggest problem with the world is actually right here in this room right now.

He would tell us that it's our hearts.

The human heart is not a piece of the problem, but it's actually the origin of all of our problems.

All of our thoughts, our interactions with one another, our intentions, the things we say, these is kind of the cradle of all of the evil in humanity today.

It starts with us.

And Jesus would say that the answer to our heart problem is that we need to be given a new one by being right in right relationship with God.

And today Jesus is showing us that he's going to change how we relate to God.

He's taking this thing that we call sin, guilt, shame, whatever you call it, and he's going to transform how we deal with it.

And he shows us this by changing water into wine instantly.

Now, has anybody ever made wine?

I'm actually curious.

Has anybody made wine before?

Nope.

I Googled it.

It's pretty easy.

Yeah, 20 steps.

Um it turns out you need, if you get like five gallons of grape juice, some sugar, some yeast, in a few weeks you could have some wine.

I don't think it's going to taste good.

I heard people saying it tastes a lot like vinegar, but you could make wine.

Well, Jesus makes wine instantly.

And the master of the banquet says it's the best wine.

Not a mix between vinegar and gasoline, but a fine wine that is sweet and delicious.

This is John's way of saying Jesus is changing the way of how we interact with God, and it's going to be delicious and sweet, and better than anything you've ever had before.

So let's dive in.

I'm going to read verses one through five again.

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

Jesus was also invited to the wedding with his disciples.

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 has not yet come.

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

So Jesus and his disciples with his mother get invited to a wedding.

And weddings in Jewish culture in Jesus' days at that time tended to last around seven days.

Could you imagine that?

Seven-day wedding?

I can like I can party like once every two weeks from like seven to nine p.m.

And then I'm then I'm done.

Like my I'm I'm I'm filled up, but for like seven days of feasting and drinking and all that stuff, that's a long time.

Um well everything's going good.

Uh sounds like everybody's, there's lots of food, there's people.

I don't know how they celebrated their weddings back then.

I'm sure there's dancing and music.

You know, I don't think we reinvented the wedding in the 20th, 21st century by bringing music in.

So I'm sure all of that existed with them.

Um, but a crisis develops, they they run out of wine.

To run out of wine at a wedding was actually a very severe problem, way way so, way more so than now.

It was known back then that a groom could have been fined if there was not enough food or drink for the people at his wedding.

So it's more than just a social embarrassment.

Uh, it's actually breaking the law.

So Mary says, Jesus, they don't have any more wine.

You need to do something.

We don't quite know what Mary expected Jesus to do.

Jesus hadn't done a miracle yet at this point, but she knew he was something special.

You know, she remembers the virgin birth.

It's not something you forget.

So she knows that Jesus is somebody incredibly special, God's promised Messiah.

But what she's asking of him, we don't understand because what Jesus says is, why do you involve me?

My hour has not yet come.

Um Jesus isn't being rude by calling her woman, by the way.

Um, but uh but what he's saying is, you know, mom, don't try and force me to do something that I'm not yet ready to do.

I'm working now on a clock with the hour in mind, is what he says.

And the hour is referring to his death.

So he's working on his schedule now.

His life has taken a turn where he's saying, everything I do for the next three years of my life is going to be intentional and is going to be moving towards that hour that I have planned.

Jesus has a tight schedule with the Father, and whatever Mary was suggesting that he do to fix the situation isn't what Jesus had in mind.

So Mary says, okay, servants, do whatever he tells you.

I think that's a very humble response from Mary, right?

Okay, okay, Jesus, servants, just do what he says then.

What I was suggesting wasn't in the plan.

So do what he says.

I think that's uh, I think Mary acts with great humility there.

So verses six through ten.

Let me read that.

Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty to thirty 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 some 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, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine.

But you have kept the good wine until now.

So Jesus tells the servants, Take those six stone water jars that are used for ceremonial washing, and fill them to the brim, anywhere from 120 to 180 gallons.

It's really hard to do math standing in front of people.

I'm not gonna lie.

It's like really difficult.

It's simple math.

It's a lot, right?

It's a lot of water, a lot of a lot of wine that's about to be made.

Um, now I I want you to imagine uh you're one of the disciples here about to watch Jesus turn water into wine.

Now, let's get into their minds because you've grown up your whole life in Jewish and you know the Old Testament really well.

And you know what it says about washing and being pure before God.

You know that it says if you were to touch a dead body or blood or a skin disease, you'd have to wash before you could go to the temple and worship God because you'd be unclean.

In fact, if you go through the Old Testament, you'd find that most, if not all, of the purity laws are somehow associated to human mortality.

Blood, skin disease, dead bodies.

Welcome to Sunday.

Uh uh, childbirth.

These are all visceral reminders that things on earth are born, they bleed, and they die.

All of those things are very opposite to Yahweh, to God in the Old Testament.

God is immortal, he has no beginning or end.

He was never born and he never dies.

God is a spirit, he is pure, he is holy, he is without blemish.

To come into his presence as a mortal required you to be cleaned.

It was a reminder that God is very different than us.

Well, if you're a disciple, you know those laws, but you've also grown up going above and beyond them.

Mark 7, 3 tells us that the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders.

That's really key there, what Mark's telling us.

Again, they take the Old Testament laws and then they have the tradition of the elders and they put it on top of it.

They are going above and beyond what God asks for ritual purity.

They do this when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash, and they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles.

So instead of washing after touching one of the ritually impure things, you washed all the time before you ate, because who knows?

What if you went to the market and you touched a coin, and the person before you had touched that coin, they actually touched a dead body, but they never washed.

So now you go to the market, you have a coin, somebody that touched the coin before you touched the dead body, now the coin's unclean, and then you go home and you make dinner and then you eat it, and now you're impure because of that long process of ritual impurity being passed to you.

So just to be safe, they invented all of these things on top of what the Old Testament asked and these traditions of the elders.

So now you understand their life.

Well, you're sitting there and you see the scene beginning to unfold, and all of a sudden Jesus orders these jars to be filled with water.

And you'd be thinking, how that's interesting.

I wonder why he would do that.

The problem is that we're out of wine.

The problem is not that we need to start washing.

Mary's probably watching, thinking, I asked him to do something.

I didn't think it was going to be this.

This is weird.

I think my idea was better.

And while you're seeing this, you see Jesus command one of the servants to dip a cup or a bowl into the jar and orders them to take it to the master of the banquet.

And you'd be thinking, what's he doing?

No Jew would drink from that, right?

That's that's our that's our jars that we fill for washing ourselves that we don't drink from those.

And while you're trying to figure out what's happening, you suddenly hear the master of the banquet say, This wine is amazing.

I've never tasted such good wine this late in the wedding.

Where's the groom?

I gotta go compliment him.

And you're sitting there thinking, the servant drew out water, and now the master of the banquet is drinking wine.

Good wine.

The water that I used to wash myself in to make me clean is now wine.

All the water's gone.

I now have nothing to wash myself with.

All that's left is wine to drink.

So, what's Jesus doing here with changing water into wine?

Well, this is such a big sign.

It's huge.

In fact, it's it's stating what Jesus was about to do with his mission, with the hour in mind.

But it's so big that what does verse 11 say?

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.

This is more than just a simple magician's trick.

This is Jesus, as John is saying, showing his glory.

This means he's showing his disciples and all who were there.

He was showing them his divinity, he was showing them his godness, his godhood.

This was a sign showing them to the disciples that Jesus is worthy of the same worship, adoration, and discipleship, just as God is.

And it says the disciples believed him.

They saw the miracle, and something turned on in their hearts.

They saw Jesus in a different light than they'd ever seen him before, and their hearts were filled with trust and faith, and they thought, this is him.

This this guy is on par.

He's the Messiah.

He's the king.

I'm going to follow him.

So, what is Jesus showing them that would make them put their faith and trust in him?

What's Jesus even showing us here now?

This is Jesus' subtle way of saying to his disciples, the way that you used to become clean by washing is gone.

And it's replaced by me.

You can no longer wash to be pure.

You have to have me to be pure.

And it's not something you wash in, it's something you drink.

It becomes a part of you.

It goes inside of you and it transforms you from the inside out.

Where do I get that Jesus is going to deal with cleanliness from this passage?

Well, we just talked a lot about it, but it's in verses 16.

He takes the six stone jars that are used for purification.

John is very deliberate in naming these stone jars, and he changes the water that's used for purification into wine.

Now remember, Jews went above and beyond what was required to cleanse themselves in the Old Testament.

They used water incessantly to make themselves extra clean before God.

They did the cleansing rituals to go above and beyond what God had asked them to do.

They want to make sure I'm really clean.

I'm going to do extra to make sure that I'm approachable to God.

I want to feel great about myself.

So I'm going to do loads of extra things that God does not command.

What about us, though?

This concept of ritual purity.

I mean, how many of you talk about ritual purity on a day-to-day basis?

Yeah, that's what I thought.

This concept is foreign to us because we don't really talk about ritual purity in modern-day America, even as Christians.

Yet we wash our hands before we eat, but our washing isn't done with a mindset of being pure before God.

You're washing your hands to kill the germs on your hands so you don't get sick.

We may not be aware of it, but I assure you that we practice ritual purity to the extent that the Jews did.

We just don't call it out.

Dr.

Peter Lighthart says we moderns like to think that we've outgrown all these primitive taboos, but modern society, philosophy, and culture is motivated in many ways by a drive for purity.

The goal of much of modern philosophy has been to isolate an area of pure reason, uncontaminated by the uncertainties of language, history, and religion.

Modern politics is founded on the imperative to avoid mixtures of religion and politics, church and state.

Modern urban design purposes, sorry, modern urban design pursues geometric clarity and cleanness and resists the organic messiness of ancient and medieval cities.

We sequester sick and dying people in hospitals even though they aren't contagious.

Why?

Perhaps the question isn't whether a culture will have standards of purity and defilement, but it's what those standards will be.

Let me read that again, that last sentence.

Perhaps the question isn't whether a culture will have standards of purity and defilement, but it's what those standards will be.

In your own life, if you want to understand what your standards of purity are, you need to ask yourself, what makes me recoil?

That's the whole point of the ritual purity laws in the Old Testament.

If you see a dead body, you you recoil from it.

You don't touch it, you don't want to become defiled.

So what in your life do you recoil from?

Who do you recoil from?

One of the big things about Old Testament purity was leprosy.

If you had a skin disease, you had to shout unclean and you had to stay away from people.

Again, who do you recoil from?

Maybe it's a person's belief that grosses you out.

I want to separate myself from them to remain pure.

What if it's their political ideology?

They defile you with their beliefs and they say their opinions and you feel gross.

So what do you do to purify yourself?

You get away from them and you go back to your specific news sources and you read them and you reinforce exactly what you wanted to hear, and you've become pure again.

What about parenting?

Oh my gosh.

There is so many unspoken laws of ritual purity with parenting.

I had no idea existed, and then I had a kid.

And I was like, wow, there's a lot of unspoken ideas amongst parents on what is ritual purity with my with our children.

I remember I was in the UK, and uh we were with another family at church, and they began to speak behind another family at our church, behind their backs, and they were saying, Did you see what they fed their children for dinner?

It was chicken nuggets.

I love chicken nuggets.

It was chicken nuggets.

I eat adult chicken nuggets, they're called boneless wings.

But they were saying, Did you see what they fed their kids?

Chicken nuggets, full of full of preservatives.

Nothing those kids ate was organic or healthy.

So they probably rushed home away from that filth and cleansed themselves by drinking kombucha and eating kale, right?

They had food laws.

Those are food laws.

Do you understand that?

They had food laws that would make an Old Testament Jewish person's head spin.

It was so strict.

You thought kosher was strict.

Well, now they've invented a whole new list.

Can't eat this, can't eat this, can't eat this, can't eat this, can't eat this, can't eat this.

That's that's ritual purity.

Do you get that?

Now I'm not saying, hey, eat healthy food.

If you want to eat healthy food, go crazy.

I'm not gonna stop you.

But if you use it as a standard by saying, I eat this food, and these people don't eat this food, therefore I'm better than them, you have invented a system of ritual purity by which you can look down on them on.

We do this all the time.

We do it with people that don't look like us or dress like us.

If a homeless person approaches you on the street and you can smell them and they're dirty, what do you do?

You recoil.

People that don't think like us.

You know if somebody dresses a certain way and you avoid them?

Right?

You you've you've come up with the system of saying if you dress like this, you're kind of ritually impure.

I'm only going to be around people that dress like me and think like me and talk like me, and that's how I'm going to keep myself pure.

We don't use those words, but that's exactly what it is.

If somebody had leprosy in the Old Testament, you avoided them.

But now what we do is we say, you know, if somebody doesn't dress like me, I'll avoid them.

It's the same thing.

Do you see how our culture and we as individuals have a very robust theology when it comes to ritual purity?

We have things in people we avoid, and then when we come into contact with them, we have our ways of purifying ourselves.

This miracle that Jesus performs has the exact same effect on us as it did as his disciples.

He identifies their system of ritual purity and he takes it away from them.

He's saying, you know how you used to wash your hands with water to be extra pure?

You know how you used to go above and beyond the laws of God to make sure you were never defiled?

That's gone.

You can't use it anymore because the water jars are filled with wine.

You can't wash anymore.

What he's saying here is that our man-made systems of ritual purity mean nothing because they only have an outward effect on our lives.

Washing with water to the disciples only cleaned their skin.

It did not have a lasting effect on their hearts, as God desired.

Let me explain this.

Because Jesus is really interested in purity, but he's not interested in our rules of purity.

Matthew 15, Jesus is in an argument with the Pharisees over ritual purity.

He called to them and said to them, Hear and understand, it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it's what comes out of the mouth.

This defiles a person.

Then the disciples came and said to him, Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?

He answered, Every plant that my heavenly Father has planted, has not planted, excuse me, will be rooted up.

Let them alone.

They are blind guides.

And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.

But Peter said to him, Explain the parable to us.

And he said, Are you also still without understanding?

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled?

But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person.

For out of the heart comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, and slander.

These are what defile a person, but to eat unwashed hands with unwashed hands doesn't defile anyone.

Jesus is telling his disciples, your system of ritual purity is busted.

Your problem is your heart.

Your heart is impure.

Because it's what you do that makes you impure.

It's what you say that makes you impure.

It's what you think that makes you impure.

It's not your organic diet.

It's not your political party.

It's not where you're from.

It's who you are that makes you impure.

Is Jesus concerned with purity?

Absolutely, he is.

But not a superficial purity that can be attained by avoiding certain people or foods.

To quote Dr.

Peter Lightheart again, this guy nails this stuff on purity, by the way.

He says, many Christians think that Jesus rejected all concern for purity.

That purity was an old category that no longer pertained to his disciples.

That's not what Jesus says.

Jesus was just as concerned with purity and defilement as the Pharisees were, just as strict about avoiding defilement and maintaining and recovering purity.

What's different isn't the role of purity, but its content.

What defiles?

For Jesus, it's not a matter of foods or bodily omissions or touching dead bodies.

Instead, it has to do with what flows out of the heart.

Once we make that transposition, we can see that Israel's purity laws are still instructive.

Someone defiled by murder, adultery, and slander spreads defilement, much as blood could be communicated defilement under the law.

Jesus wants us to react with revulsion to murder, slander, and adultery and lust like a Pharisee around a person who had a flow of blood or a skin disease.

If you're defiled by what comes out of your heart, you do need cleansing, not by washing your hands, but with confession and the blood of Jesus.

So imagine again, you're in the room with the disciples, and your world has just been turned upside down in a matter of seconds.

All the things that you did that you thought made you pure are gone.

There's no more water.

Instead, there's Jesus with 150 gallons of good wine.

And what he's showing you is that this miracle is a foreshadowing of how he's going to make you pure when he dies.

Jesus strips away even our standards of purity, our ways of measuring how good and clean we are compared to others and to God.

And he points at our hearts and he says, I'm gonna make that pure when you believe in me.

I love the master of the banquet.

He said it without realizing the impact of his words, but he said, This is this is good wine.

Everybody serves the good stuff first and then the bad stuff second, but you serve the good stuff first and the better stuff now.

The master of the banquet unknowingly calls out that this new way of purification and staying pure is better than any of the old systems you could have ever imagined.

Remember what I said at the beginning?

What would you do to revolutionize the world?

You had to identify a problem and its solution.

Jesus began a revolution at a wedding.

And how did he kick off this revolution?

He started by saying, your heart is the biggest issue.

And I'm going to change the way you become clean and pure.

He did this by showing his disciples that in the future his death was going to be the answer to giving them a new heart.

Our reactions should be the same as the disciples.

What Jesus did here in Canaan of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.

Believe in me.

Not these systems and these rituals that you perform.

You know, I love that we do communion at the end of a sermon.

Because when we drink the wine and we eat the bread, that's a physical representation of a spiritual reality.

And just as Jesus turned water into wine and wanted his disciples to drink it, this is what we're commemorating today.

Because Jesus, on the night when he's betrayed, took the bread and he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which was for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

When you take communion today, what you're declaring is, Jesus, you've made me pure.

My system has been destroyed.

You've taken that away from me.

I have no reason for boasting anymore.

I have no way to look out at other people and say, I'm better than them because I follow these systems of ritual purity.

What we're saying is, Jesus, it's you that's cleansed me.

Let me pray.

Jesus, thank you that this was the first miracle you chose to show your glory to the disciples.

And it's it's so transformative because it changes everything in how we react and interact with each other and how we interact with God.

Thank you for making us pure when we believe and trust in you.

Amen.