A Wedding in Cana

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 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.

-John 2:1-11, ESV

By all accounts, this is the very first miracle Jesus did after his incarnation.  We acknowledge it often enough, but do we really ever stop to think about it.  Jesus's first miracle, the one which is said to have convinced his disciples and "manifested his glory" is supernaturally providing an enormous amount of alcohol to a party who's keg had run dry.

Read that again.  If you're like me and used to a Christianity that hates all forms of alcohol, this comes as a shock.  Most churches would only tolerate one consuming, perhaps, a single glass of wine in the privacy of their own homes.  Jesus brings somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of wine to this party.  That's an average of 757 bottles of the stuff!  How many people where in attendance anyway?  I imagine it was less than 700!  This is incredible and revealing: we cringe at a glass of wine and Jesus "manifests his glory" by bringing enough of the stuff to drown everyone at the party--and do note that they had already drunk through whatever their host had originally provided.

Some have argued that the wine Jesus produced was purely non-alcoholic, non-fermented grape juice.  They point out that the Greek word used for wine here can be used for alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.  Since they find such a quantity of alcohol morally offensive, they conclude that Jesus certainly could not have made alcoholic wine: he must have made the non-fermented kind.  But we should be careful of this kind of thinking.  Remember the Pharisees and their precious Sabbath.  Jesus delights in smashing people's ideas of what is religiously pious, right, and proper...ideas which they frequently hold in higher esteem than they do him.

Consider the words of the master of the feast.  He was expecting lower-quality wine than what Jesus had provided because this was the usual strategy: start the party off with good wine, and then after the guests had  "drunk freely" bring out the lower quality wine.  Would this strategy work at all if the wine in question was non-alcoholic grape juice?  Absolutely not.  If the first wine was non-alcoholic, the guests would immediately notice the introduction of a lower-quality beverage.  But if the wine was alcoholic...well, people who have "drunk freely" of fermented wine would have their senses dulled a little and substituting the cheep stuff at that point would be something the couple could safely get away with.

So we are stuck with the conundrum of Jesus' "glorious" miracle and our self-righteous rules.  We would probably not have provided the wedding feast with more alcohol, and certainly not in such a staggering amount.  But that was the point, wasn't it?  The couple had run out of the wine they'd had the first time, risking scandal, disgrace and--according to some commentators--litigation.  Jesus provides them with better wine in such a staggering amount that they won't run out of it for weeks!  But our rules would have hampered us from being so generous, were we in his shoes, just as the rules of the Pharisees prevented them from seeing the good in healing people on the Sabbath day.

There are other striking things about this story.  Did you know this is the beginning of Jesus' ministry?  That's right.  Jesus begins his ministry not in a stadium filled with crowds of hungry souls at a Billy Graham-like revival, not at the temple, not with the Sermon on the Mount...Jesus begins his ministry by accepting an invitation to someone else's wedding.  It seems so strange.  Compare it to the grand sweeping claims of the beginning of the book of John.  John proclaims Jesus to be the Word, God himself in the flesh, come down to live among us.  What do we expect?  What would we have done?  Myself, I think I would have descended from the clouds in glory over the temple, surrounded by angels and told everybody who I was from the start.  That would get a lot of worshipers right there!

But Jesus isn't interested in worshipers to subscribe to his religion, he's interested in people who will love him with all his heart.  So he comes in the most unassuming way, just as Isaiah 42:3 says he would, so gently that he wouldn't break a bruised reed or snuff a faintly-burning wick.  He starts out in John 1:29 by arriving at someone else's revival.  Though John the Baptist makes several startling proclamations of who Jesus is, Jesus doesn't respond.  He doesn't step up and take the spotlight.  He doesn't preach any sermons.  He goes off into the desert, endures temptations, comes back and is joined by a handful of John's disciples.  Then, he takes them to a wedding.  I don't know about you, but this doesn't sound like the advent of the world's most important religious figure to me--the advent of the only figure who could rightfully claim to be God.  It just sounds like an ordinary guy going about the business of living life, gaining and loving friends.  This is surprising, but also encouraging.  If this is how Jesus begins his ministry, by just living life, then it means that the first steps in our ministries may very well be the same.  Maybe we don't need to pack up right away and live in an African village with only six hundred Bibles for company in order to serve God--maybe serving Jesus is something we can do in our daily lives, here, now: at something as simple as a friend's wedding.

It gets better.  The party runs out of wine, a potential social disaster, and Jesus steps in and intervenes.  He "manifests his glory" by doing so.  But why?  Thousands of people were dying that day.  Millions were sick.  Many more were lost and in need of a savior.  Yet Jesus doesn't leave the wedding to care to all of these needs.  I believe he, through the Spirit, did care for them, but he doesn't neglect the party either, where the lucky couple is in danger of nothing worse than social embarrassment.  Jesus cares for even that and rescues them from it.

If Jesus manifests his glory by caring for something as "trivial" in the grand scheme of things as wine at a wedding, how will he care for us?  How does he care for us?  If the wedding at Cana is any guide, then he cares for us even in the details, even if we don't ask him to, and even if it upsets the religious conventions of the day.