The Aha Moment

January 19, 2025

Rev. Mary Erickson

Hope Lutheran Church

John 2:1-11

The Aha Moment

Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.

“Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee… and his disciples believed in him.”

Jesus turned the water into wine. It was a miracle. But John doesn’t call it a miracle. He calls it a sign.

What’s the difference between a miracle and a sign? We call something a miracle when, by human standards, what happened just isn’t possible. Like, for instance, it would require a miracle for the Minnesota Vikings to win a Super Bowl. Just kidding!

You hear stories when someone has cancer. They have it bad. But then they go for a checkup. The scans reveal no sign of cancer. The cancer is just gone. There’s no medical explanation. It’s a miracle.

We had a miracle here in Eau Claire back in the year 2000. There was a man named Renay Poirer. Ten years previously, Renay was jolted in an electrical accident where he worked. When he came to, he couldn’t see. He went through schooling to be retrained as a physical therapist assistant. Ten years went by. He worked at Sacred Heart Hospital, and one day, he was on the 9th floor, the physical therapy floor. He was at the far end of the hallway, by the big windows overlooking the chapel below. Suddenly Renay felt an extremely sharp pain in his head. He grabbed his temples and then he just felt numb. Light flooded his eyes and he felt like he was floating. And then he realized that could see the chapel below him. There was no medical explanation for what occurred. He was blind and then he could see.

So that’s a miracle. It’s something that just cannot be explained. But a sign, a sign is something different. A sign points beyond itself. By calling what happened at Cana a sign instead of a miracle, John is indicating something even more compelling. This miracle is pointing beyond itself. It’s communicating something about Jesus, about who he is.

This miracle of the wine occurs at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He’s attending a wedding with his mother and his disciples. They’re in the nearby city of Cana. Cana is about four and a half miles from Nazareth. At the feast, the supply of wine runs out. And somehow Mary finds out about it.

You can tell that Mary and Jesus have their own communication system. She tells him, “They’ve run out of wine.” She’s not just reporting news. The implicit message is: you need to do something about it. Jesus speaks fluent Mary. Her message comes across loud and clear. Jesus tells her that it’s not the time to launch his movement.

But Mary won’t be stopped. This is going to happen. Mary is determined! Jesus is going to take care of the wine situation, period. Mary tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Jesus points to some very large stone jars used for holding water. He instructs the servants to fill them with water. They each hold about 25 gallons of water, so about 150 gallons altogether. How long would it have taken them to fetch all that water? They fill the jars right up to the brim.

Then Jesus directs them to draw out some of the liquid and give it to the chief steward. When they do so, what they ladle out isn’t water; it’s wine.

And this is the “aha moment” for his disciples. It’s the epiphany moment: this man, their friend, he’s something greater. Humans can’t do this; they can’t turn water into wine! Only God can do something like that.

The miracle of the wine at Cana points beyond itself. It reveals Jesus for who he is. It’s a sign. It revealed Jesus’ glory and led the disciples to faith.

Aha Faith Moments didn’t just occur then. We have them, too. At our church council meetings, we begin each meeting by sharing what we call “Glimpses of God.” Where have you seen God? Where have you seen the hand of God at work since our last meeting? Where have you seen a sign, something pointing to the wonder of God? We’re sharing Aha Moments.

The God moments we share frequently manifest some awesome event in nature, like a beautiful snowfall or the Northern Lights. Or they revolve around an event at church, like a Christmas Eve service. And sometimes they’re about a dire situation, like a health crisis, where all the pieces fell into place and the outcome was resolved. But sometimes they’re about a tragic situation: a death in the family, the wildfires in California.

Where do we see God? What signs of the kingdom are presented to us? I’d like to address a couple of facets in this story about the wedding at Cana and how they shed light on the grace-filled signs that are given to us.