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If you’ve ever had the privilege of paying for a wedding reception, then you’ve probably wished you had the ability to turn water into wine. It’s expensive. Weddings are big, joyous occasions and it would seem odd if there was no wine to lift the spirits a bit more; or, at least just loosen everybody’s inhibition a bit…a bit. We’ve all been to a wedding or two where we wished the wine would run out. But anyway, a wedding is a time for joy and for celebrating. It’s good to have some wine around. And if you’re going to have it don’t run out. It can be a bit embarrassing.
That would have certainly been the case with this wedding at Cana and worse. Their culture was a very hospitality-based culture. It was the host family’s responsibility to spare no cost to welcome and lavish their guests with delicious food – the fattened calf, the finest lamb – and of course, fine, aged wine. The best you can find, none of that home-made, Winexpress stuff. Running out of wine would have been taken as an insult by the guests. Even if the guests were just “hittin’ it” too hard, you should have been prepared for your guests. As the head-steward at the wedding in Cana noted, it was the tradition to serve the good wine first and then have plenty of the boxed wine around for when the palates were less discriminate. You just don’t run out.
Unfortunately, at this wedding the wine ran out. The host family was soon to be shamed over what should have been a very joyful, God-is-Good kind of occasion. You see, wine at a wedding back in that day had some religious meaning to it. It wasn’t just the juice that sparked the life of the party. In ancient Jewish faith wine was symbolic of God blessing his people with abundance; symbolic of life transformed from mundane (or even sorrowful) into joyful and full; life full-filled – filled full – with God’s presence. And…a case can be made that in Jesus’ day under Roman occupation most people were expecting a great wedding feast at the coming of the Messiah who would liberate God’s people and establish the reign of God so that God’s people may worship God in freedom. Wine at the wedding was symbolic of God’s saving and abundant presence.
We would be remiss if we missed these theological undercurrents in John’s story of the wedding at Cana. John says this event was the first of Jesus’ signs (there are seven in John’s Gospel) by which Jesus revealed who he is. This wedding wasn’t just a wedding in which the groom’s family miss-planned the wine. It stood representative of the point to which God’s people had come in their life of faith. Their faithfulness, their relationship with God should have been like a joyful wedding feast abundant in food abundant in wine, but the wine gave out.
It’s like those six big jars standing empty off to the side that John talks about. Jars capable of holding twenty to thirty gallons of water that at one time would have been used for everyone to ritually clean themselves before the gathering and the feast. Just a historical note here, back at that time many among the Jews had become nearly fanatical about ritual bathing as a means of “symbolically” keeping themselves clean before God. Many houses had small bathing pools just inside the door in the foyer for people to dip in to wash off the “uncleanness” they would have taken upon themselves by encountering other people who weren’t as observant.
John the Baptist was the culmination of this bathing movement. He brought to this ritual bathing the idea of being washed in the Jordan River where Israel first crossed into the Promised Land so as to start anew as the faithful people of God. This nearly fanatical need to ritually bathe likely arose as the result of people having lost faith in the Temple establishment and the sacrifices offered there by a priesthood that was largely corrupted. You know, how does one get rid of the stain of sin and be acceptable in God’s presence if the blood of the sacrifices you brought to the Temple got tainted by the sins of the priests? They apparently turned to trying to wash it off.
Well, those jars used for holding the water for ritual purification at the home of this wedding stood empty. That means something. Either in lost hope they had given up on that practise of bathing and didn’t care about their relationship with God anymore or they had gone into the river with John the Baptist and felt they didn’t need to ritually bathe anymore. We don’t know why they were put off to the side and stood empty. Regardless, these jars stood there like a vacant church on the side of the road where there was once a vibrant faith being practiced, but not anymore. The wine had given out at the wedding feast, so to speak. The jars of hope and faithfulness had run dry.
There were some folks back in that day who would have said that the family hosting the wedding was getting what they deserved. The wine had given out because the purity rituals were not being observed and so now, they would suffer the shame of being poor hosts at their son’s wedding. John’s Gospel is full of authoritative religious legalists who took that tone. They were the ones who orchestrated Jesus’ death. But as Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day, it just so happens that this wedding feast occurred on a third day. On the third day new life happens.
In steps this feisty, proud Jewish mother, the mother of Jesus, who knows her son can solve this problem. Ignoring his excuses, she gets Jesus on the job. She says to the servants, “Whatever he says to you, DO!” So, what does Jesus tell them to do? “Fill the water jars with water.” Fill those empty vestiges of faith with water. And that’s what they did. Let’s dig into this for there are some spiritual metaphors here. Water and Wine are more than just water and wine.
Water here, like wine, is a loaded word. People who study John’s Gospel soon realize that there’s a bit of the Genesis story of creation floating around. At the beginning John proclaims that Jesus is the Eternal Word by which God created everything become flesh. At the end, Mary Magdalene and Jesus resurrected are in a garden reminiscent of Eden and all that went wrong in Eden is now put right. Looking at Genesis, God spoke His creating word to the waters of darkness above which the Holy Spirit was hovering awaiting the Word. God began to speak and the waters separated and formed a bubble, a space, in which God made land and sea and sky and filled them with life. The basic or root symbolic meaning of water here is being the place that is open to God’s creating work.
Then, looking elsewhere in John’s Gospel where water shows up, we find there’s more meaning to read into what water represents. The water of the Jordon River was where the faithful were coming to straighten out their relationship with God. There, John the Baptist told them he baptized with water while Jesus would baptize them with the Holy Spirit. Water there is faithfulness. It’s the water of coming, seeking God with a sense of repentance, with wanting to do what God wants.
In another place, Nicodemus, a Pharisee (one of those authorities) came seeking Jesus under the cover of darkness to learn from him. Remember the waters of darkness from Genesis. Jesus told him that in order to enter the Kingdom of God one had to be born both of water and the spirit. The kingdom of God is the place where human faithfulness and God’s life-giving presence come together. Water is the place of living faithfulness where we encounter God.
In yet another place, Jesus met a Samaritan woman drawing water at Jacob’s Well in Samaria. Jacob was one of the ancestral fathers of the Israelites. That well was the well Jacob dug when he returned to the Promised Land and reconciled with his brother Esau. If you remember, Jacob had fled from Esau after having stolen Esau’s blessing from Isaac their father that determined which of the sons the family line through which God would fulfill his promise to Abraham would continue. The water from Jacob’s well represented the restoration of Israelite peace according to God’s promises to them. Jesus told the woman that the water of Jacob’s well, the water of the ancient faithfulness would still leave one thirsting for God, but he had living water to give, meaning the Holy Spirit, to take away that thirst.
There are two other places water shows up in John’s Gospel. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet with water at his last meal with them and that’s how he taught them what true faithfulness to him is: that they love one another by serving one another. As James said, “love covers a multitude of sins.” Then, while Jesus was hanging on the cross, a soldier pierced his side with a spear and water and blood came forth from the wound. Water is faithfulness. Blood is life. In Jesus, following Jesus is where our faithfulness encounters the living, life-giving presence of God.
Back to the wedding, Jesus told the servants to fill the empty jars with water and he turned the water into wine. And not just any old wine, but the finest wine; finer than the finest wine the host would have put out in the first place and ran out of. I hope you have put two and two together here and have come to see the deeper message within this act – the meaning of the sign of the empty jars of the purification rituals filled with water that Jesus turned to wine. Take the empty vessels of the old way of doing things and repurpose them, fill them with the water of faithful discipleship and Jesus will meet us there with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.
Those empty jars represent a way of faithfulness that simply didn’t stand the test of time and trial. The church in North America is at that point now. As congregations, if we are not in our twilight years, we are palliative. The world around us has changed and the ways of being the church that we grew up with and lived are just no longer applicable in a culture where Christianity is no longer the established faith of the land. We are told by the Census that the largest religious classification/practice is “None”. Those who regularly practice a faith of any kind number less than 20 percent. Active Christians are less than 10 percent. Probably the largest classification outside of “None” if it were on the Census would be “Done”. These are people who have fallen by the wayside due to the squabbling, judgementalism, and meanness that came up as a result of our not knowing how to handle Christianity’s cultural decline.
As individuals, in the church there are many who would be “done” if we could be, but God won’t let us go. For some reason, we keep coming back. We keep hoping against hope for God to do something new. Add to that, this pandemic has been tough on us, creating a real trial deep within us for which the only solution is to just patiently endure and keep the faith knowing “this too will pass”. These folks are, we are, the ones who are like the servants in this story; the ones who have to do what Jesus says to do – fill the jars with water.
David Fitch is one of today’s best and brightest for pondering what the church today needs to be and do. He approaches things from the perspective of planting churches rather than the church revitalization thing that was so popular a decade or so ago and didn’t work. There’s a widely held assumption now that if a church is going to revitalize it needs to plant new churches and not churches per say, but fellowships. Fitch says we just need to create spaces where Jesus can come and make his presence known and do what he does; the turn water into wine thing. Create space for relationships of love and trust to develop where people can meet Jesus at the point of their deepest need and not be judged, but rather be held up in prayer. This is something called discipleship – the space where we together can share our weaknesses without being judged, a space where we pray for one another. This space is the bubble for new creation like in Genesis. When we fill these spaces with the water of faith and hope and love that Jesus has poured into us we realize that the shape of the old jar, the purpose of the old jar – the way we’ve always done “church” – just doesn’t matter.
Being able to come together as friends who believe in Jesus, who follow Jesus, is more important than the religious traditions we’ve got wrapped up in our ideas of what “going to church” are. Location doesn’t matter either. Whether it be the sanctuary, the church basement or kitchen, or our living rooms and kitchens, or Tim Horton’s, Church is anywhere the followers of Jesus can gather and practice hospitality and friendship with one another, and with our neighbours, and with strangers in his name, which means in the foot washing kind of way. Let’s take the empty jars of the way we’ve always done our faith and fill them with the fresh water of faithful discipleship and let Jesus make his wine.
Lastly, it’s ever so important that we continue to give Jesus space in our individual lives as well. We must continue to live, each of us, as his followers distinguished by the way we love and treat others. Practicing hospitality, generosity, unconditional love, working for peace and healing in relationships. We know that and we do that. We must also take time to read a few chapters of the Bible daily and give God space to speak to us. I like reading two Old Testament, 2 New Testament, and 2 Psalms daily. Pray for people. Try to develop a mindedness of prayer. Like, instead of grumbling about how long that person is taking to pick out a carton of eggs at the grocery store, see that as moment God has given you to pray for them. Finally, actually give space for God’s presence to be with you. Take some time to sit with Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Give Jesus an empty chair to sit in and just be with him. Just be still and know you are God’s beloved child. Fill the empty space with the faithful act of just being open to God. God will come and make wine. Amen.
