The Best Till Now Series

Good morning. If you have your Bibles, please open up to John 2:1. We have been looking at the book of John. We are actually trying to get through the entire book of John. We are actually succeeded in getting through chapter 1, so we only have about 20 more chapters to go and we will be finished. The last few weeks we have been looking at the calling of the first disciples. Last week, Chris looked at the calling of Philip and Nathanael and this week as you may have suspected from the video, we will be looking at Jesus’ first miracle, the turning of water into wine. As miracles go, this particular miracle is really not all that impressive. In other words, even a contemporary magician today could probably do a pretty good job of imitating it fairly easily without even really impressing the audience. We have to remember the purpose of Jesus’ miracles was really not to impress. The purpose of Jesus’ miracles was to increase the faith of the disciples or rather to be a sign of something that would point to a greater revelation of himself or a greater revelation of his mission. We will see that in today’s reading. I will be reading from the New International Version starting at chapter 2:1. (Scripture read here.)

The context of this miracle is a wedding in Cana. We are told that from the very first verse. Cana is a small town about 5-8 miles from Nazareth. We are also told in the first verse that Jesus’ mother was there and in verse 2 that Jesus and his disciples had also been invited, which kind of gives us an indication that maybe Mary was really the first one to be invited. Mary was on the A-list of guests and Jesus and his disciples might have been on the B-list of guests. I have never put together a guest list for a wedding and I have been told by Debbie that there is oftentimes an A-list and a B-list. A-list would be the people that you definitely want to be there. The B-list would be the list of people that can come if people from the A-list can’t show up. I really think Mary was possibly on the A-list. She might have had a close connection to either the bride, bridegroom, or the parents. Maybe possibly even a relative of sorts. Jesus and his disciples were kind of an afterthought. Whatever the case, there was this wedding in Cana and Jesus’ mother was there and Jesus and his disciples were there. Weddings back then were big occasions. They may not have been as big as they are nowadays and as expensive, but they were big occasions. I think the video was pretty historically accurate. There would have been a lot of entertainment. There would have been a lot of food. There would have been a lot of celebration. There probably would have been a lot of wine. Contrary to what some may say, the wine did contain a certain amount of alcohol. Wine back then by the nature of being wine is going to be fermented so there would be alcohol in the wine, but it wouldn’t be artificially instilled into the wine. In other words, it would be the natural alcohol that would come through the fermentation process. Though the wine’s alcoholic would be diluted by the amount of water that was added to the wine. At the wedding celebration, there would be somebody in charge of regulating the amount of water that was added to the wine really to control the amount of alcohol but even more so to make sure that they don’t run out. In this case, as the story goes, they ran out of wine. That would have been a major problem back then. It would be on par with running out of food today at a wedding. It would be a major social blunder to run out of wine because wine back then was a staple of society. It was the common beverage. More common than water. To run out of wine at the wedding was not a good thing. I guarantee if Martha Stewart was there, she would not be pleased. In fact, it could actually put an abrupt halt to the wedding. Somebody would have egg on their face. It wouldn’t be a good start to the marriage because wine back then represented prosperity and peace and joy and all the good things. To run out of the wine early on in the wedding festivities would mean the marriage might not go so well. So it is not a good thing to run out of wine at a wedding. We get the sense that maybe Mary was feeling a little bit of uneasiness. Maybe she was friends with somebody in the wedding party. Maybe she was a relative of somebody in the bridal party or the parents of the groom or the parents of the bride. So she was feeling a little embarrassed about this situation. Maybe she was embarrassed because she might have been the one to pressure her relative to invite Jesus and his buddies. It could have been the reason they ran out of wine. After all, they were fisherman and they might have liked to drink. It could have been they were not expecting to have that amount of crowd there so they run out of wine.