The Bridegroom Gives An Abundance Of New Wine

When you meet someone new, it can take a while to get to know them. Maybe you’re starting at high school or university, and you’re meeting all kinds of people for the first time. Or you just gained a few new colleagues at work. Well, it’ll take a while to get acquainted. You chat together on and off, you notice how they act, and you slowly get an idea of what they’re like. Some people are easy to warm up to: they’re open, friendly, straightforward—while others are closed, reluctant to let others in.

Jesus Christ is someone who wants to be known. He wants us to come close, and learn what’s important to him, and know his words. That’s not just true of Jesus, of course—this is the will of the Triune God, that we know him: “Let him who boasts boast in this,” says God in Jeremiah 9:24, “that he understands and knows me.” For to know God is to love him, to enjoy being near him, and to want to do his will. All of Scripture is God telling us about himself.

Today we open a Bible book which features Jesus revealing his glory. He wants to be known, we said, and in the Gospel of John, He unveils himself in two particular ways: by signs and by sayings. The seven sayings are when Jesus says things about himself, like “I am the Light of the World,” or “I am the Good Shepherd.” And just like when a person introduces himself to us on the first day of school, we should pay attention. What does Jesus want us know? Can we trust him? Should we follow him? We’ll know if we listen to his sayings.

And the signs are his miracles, amazing displays of power and grace, like giving sight to the blind man and raising Lazarus. The trouble is when we hear about these miracles, we miss the point sometimes. We get so impressed by the special effects that we stop paying attention to the plot. But signs move us to take action.

So for the seven signs in John. They point away from themselves, to something else: to Jesus. Listen to what John says near the end of his gospel. “And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name” (20:30-31). Jesus did many signs, and this is their point: to bring you to faith in him, the Son of God, the source of true life. So I preach God’s Word to you,

For his first sign, Jesus transforms water into wine at Cana:

1) a wedding feast on the brink of failure

2) a glimpse of the Bridegroom’s glory

3) the disciple’s response of faith

1) a wedding feast on the brink of failure: It’s sometimes nice to have a glass of wine. On festive occasions like birthdays and weddings, we enjoy it too. As the Psalmist puts it: “Wine makes glad the heart of man” (104:15). This is as true today as in the time of Jesus. Already then, wine was a part of most weddings. When a man and woman entered into marriage before God, it’s a joyful occasion—so bring out the wine!

In the background of our text is a wedding. Now, John says that it happens “on the third day” (v 1). The third day of what? If you look back into chapter 1, you see it’s the third day of Jesus’s public ministry. John the Baptist has just announced him as the Lamb of God, baptized him, and Jesus begun calling his disciples: Andrew, Simon, Philip, and Nathanael. These men have just started to learn who Jesus is. But we’ll see that this story ends with these new disciples putting their faith in Jesus.

So Jesus, together with at least four of his disciples, goes to a wedding in the small village of Cana. We don’t know why exactly He was invited. Maybe it was a second cousin from Galilee who was getting married. Or perhaps it was because Jesus was already known as a local rabbi, someone to honour with hospitality.

In that time, the tradition was to invite to your wedding feast as many persons as you could afford to feed, even distant associates and friends of your friends. A wedding was an opportunity for the family to show their generosity.

And as you’ve probably heard before, weddings back then went on much longer than ours today. It wasn’t unusual to have a wedding feast that lasted for several days. And a long feast, of course, with a lot of guests, is going to require a lot to drink, even assuming that people aren’t getting carried away and drinking too much.