University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

The Reverend Anna Pinckney Straight

University Presbyterian Church

January 14, 2007

“Wine, Women, and Jesus.”

John 2: 1 – 11

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.  Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.  When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."  And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.  Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

There are a few texts in the Bible of which, it would be fair to say, I am not a fan. 

Today’s text.  The story of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding in the town of Cana, is one of them.

I have a hard time wrapping my arms around it and welcoming it into my life.

One of the reasons for this is the way in which this text has been used, or I would suggest mis-used, to claim that Jesus’ presence at a wedding gives us some conclusive evidence as to Jesus’, and therefore God’s, opinions about marriage, who and when and where.

Online commentator Sarah Dylan Breuer writes, “the focus of this bit of John 2…isn't about commending marriage any more than it is about commending drunkenness.”[1] 

So there’s that.

And there’s the way Jesus treats his mother.  It’s not that he calls her “Woman,” a term that is abrasive to our 21^st century ears, but doesn’t seem to have been out of line for the time.[2]  It’s not the way he greets her, it’s the way Jesus dismisses Mary, minimizes her hopes and requests.  “Woman.  You shouldn’t be worrying about the wine supply, and anyway, how dare you suggest what I, Jesus should be doing something about it!”

Jesus is separating himself from his mother.  Establishing that he is his own person.  This must have been one of those moments for Mary when she was reminded, oh-so-bluntly, that this child was more God’s than hers.  And I can’t help but think,  couldn’t Jesus have softened the blow a little?

So there are these things.   But I’m also unhappy with this sign, this miracle, being the first one given to us after Jesus’ grand statement about what wonders are ahead, just a few verses earlier.  Jesus is talking to Nathanael, a new disciple, who already thinks Jesus is amazing, just because Jesus knew his name.   Jesus tells him, "Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.…Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."[3]

He’s saying, “You think this is something, just you wait!  I’m going to blow the lid off of this place pretty soon.  Watch out, here we come!”

I hear Jesus’ declaration and I am geared up.  I’m ready for the radical, social justice Jesus I love and of whom I am more than a little bit frightened.  The Jesus who is going to turn over the tables outside the Temple.  The Jesus who is going to tell me I need to worry less and let go of my stuff.  The Jesus who can see right through me, my flaws as well as my possibilities.   The Jesus who is going to befriend the lowest of the low- tax collectors, talk to un-clean women, talk to women at all, for that matter, and tell us that we are all accountable for each other, regardless of our zip codes.   

I know that I am not alone in having expectations for Jesus .  The people of Jesus’ time were looking for a Messiah who would lead them out of Roman oppression.  When they began to hear that a Messiah might be among them, they no doubt began to hope that secret strategy meetings were already taking place in order to plan the revolution that would return their homeland to self-rule.

We’re prepared.  We’ve been forewarned.  Awesome things have been foreshadowed.

And this is what we get?   Jesus changing water into wine at a wedding.  Anticlimactic to say the least.  Hardly an action of social justice.  The wine goes to the guests.  Not an act of revolution.  There’s no sticking it to the Romans here.

So.  I come at this text with a few biases.  I am reluctant. 

But here’s what I know.  We don’t come from a long line of text abandoners, we come from a long line of text wrestlers.  Those who are not content to let texts go but insist that in each passage God is speaking a new and relevant word.

So, over the years I have wrestled with this text, tried to find the Word God is speaking.

What I have learned is that while this may be, for me, a disappointing act, what Jesus does in Cana isn’t the point.  This text is no more about wine and women than it is about what Jesus does.  This text is important and instructive not because of what happens but because of what it reveals.  About Jesus.  About us.

It’s so easy to focus on the act, the bigger the better, and miss the point.  $40 million dollars for a school in Africa, only why is there so much poverty and disease in the 2/3 world?

Hurricane Katrina’s massive destruction and the overwhelming rush of donations which followed, all covering a sad reality in America reminding us we still have significant issues of race and poverty with which we must deal before we can move forward into a better, more faithful future.

It’s so easy to focus on the act and miss the point. To be concerned with how something appears rather than on how faith, caring and devotion leads us to live. 

Why did Jesus turn water into wine when there were starving people?    Why did the woman waste the perfume?   

Jesus does it because that’s what the people he is with truly need.  To practice hospitality.  To celebrate fully.  To strengthen community.  And Jesus meets them where they are.

It’s so easy to focus on the act and miss the point, and so, we are warned from the beginning not to do it. That warning arrives in this text and is highlighted in one carefully selected word:  signs.  John doesn’t call these amazing things that Jesus does miracles, they are signs.

John specialist Gail R. O’Day writes, “John uses the term sign to refer to Jesus' miracles, because for John the significance of the miracle does not rest solely in the act of the miracle itself, but in that to which the miracle points. That is, the deed reveals the doer and points to the significance of the deed as an act of eschatological salvation and God's abundance.”[4]

And there’s another important watch-word for this text: abundance.

When I am able, even for a moment, to let go of my self-righteous disappointment in this text I realize just what an important thing Jesus is modeling here.  Abundance. 

Jesus doesn’t make just enough wine to get them through this night of the party, until the host can head out to his local wine shop, Jesus makes plenty of good wine.  More than enough.  Somewhere around 150 gallons.  Abundant wine, and in doing so reminds us he isn’t here to share a Good News Lite, it is the Good News, full of abundance and truth.  Jesus provides with abundance.   

Walter Bruggemann, in his already classic article on scarcity and abundance tells us, “The conflict between the narratives of abundance and of scarcity is the defining problem confronting us….. The gospel story of abundance asserts that we originated in the magnificent, inexplicable love of a God who loved the world into generous being. The baptismal service declares that each of us has been miraculously loved into existence by God. And the story of abundance says that our lives will end in God, and that this well-being cannot be taken from us. In the words of St. Paul, neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor things -- nothing can separate us from God.

What we know about our beginnings and our endings, then, creates a different kind of present tense for us. We can live according to an ethic whereby we are not driven, controlled, anxious, frantic or greedy, precisely because we are sufficiently at home and at peace to care about others as we have been cared for.

Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between our attraction to the good news of God's abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity -- a belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly. We spend our lives trying to sort out that ambiguity.[5]

Said in a slightly, but only slightly, more poetic way, the words of Richard Wilbur:

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That the world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.[6] 

Wow.  Maybe it is a great message after all. Maybe this is an amazing act. Not in its glamour or wow-factor, but in its message.  God came to give life and give it abundantly.  Do we embrace that abundance, not as a message for someone else, but as a message for all of us?  Or do we try to ignore this gift or modify the message to meet our own needs.

It’s not about wine.  It’s not about women. Those are the detours.  It’s about Jesus, the sign, pointing us in God’s direction. And that means that the text, Jesus,  does things we don’t expect, things that call us to look at life and faith with new eyes.  To act in ways that even we find surprising.  The Gospel is not a foregone conclusion.  Not a reliable, predictable friend.  It is surprising and new and open, shocking and challenging, to those who are willing to stop telling the text what to be.  To those who are willing to wrestle with it in order to obtain a blessing.  To those who are willing to listen and receive God’s abundance.