READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Exodus 33:12-23
Romans 12:6-16
- St. John 2:1-11
Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you.
Who speaks to you today saying:
“This, the first
of His signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.
And His disciples believed in him.”
Today’s Gospel is included in God’s Word to wake us up,
according to the 3rd Commandment. God plops down in front of us and
starts working, urging us to sit, rest, and receive the fruits of His eternal
labor. He has created Love, He has created marriage, and He has created the
wine of gladness, the Gospel, which invites to an eternal rest in Him. He
works, we believe and receive.
In the Wedding at Cana incident, there have been many words
said. Most of those tend to remain in the “miracle” category, as in, wow Jesus
can do Wedding tricks too! And thus, the depreciation of this wonderous act
begins, in our hearts. We cannot understand it fully and so we make jokes about
it and file it under Jesus’s “well, that’s nice for that wedding, at that
time”. Not mine.
Though we can dive deep into the meaning of this first Sign,
as Jesus calls it in our Gospel today, on the surface it seems rather plain. I,
too, laugh at the jokes of people switching supermarket signs of the wine and
water aisles. Its funny. Laughing at ourselves is a good thing. But, turning
water into wine is just…too…natural for someone as awesome as Jesus, right?
My wife and I went to a wine store, one day, to get the
“chemistry kit”, they called it, to start making our own wine. The Owner felt
the need to explain from the very beginning, what wine is. So he took a grape.
Placed it on the table. Smashed it and said, that’s wine.
St. Augustine has said such about this Sign from our Lord.
“This miracle of the Lord, in which He made wine from water, does not astonish
those who know that God wrought it. For on that day, He made wine in the water
jars, Who each succeeding year makes it in the vines. But this latter through
familiarity loses its wonder. So, God made use of unaccustomed means to rouse
men, who were now as sleepers, to the worship of Himself; for which reason the
Evangelist says: and manifested His glory.”
That is, God works miracles every day. The fact that there
is such a thing as grapes and that there is such a thing as fermentation is a
miracle. But since this, and other such natural occurrences, happen so often,
we look down on them and pay them no mind. Everyone loses their minds when one
dead man comes back to life, but no one bats an eye at the birth everyday of
those whom, nine short months prior, did not even exist!
The point is not to go out and recognize miracles in your
life every day, though you can do that and be better for it. The point is to
show that God is putting everything at His disposal, in all creation, to wake
you up. And it is not just the apparent parlor tricks. God will use His gifts
He gives to you to rouse you to His Word. Whether its water into wine, a near
death experience, loss of a job, or a husband or wife. The normal humdrum is
filled with His sermons.
Witnessing water turned to wine is an epiphany moment. What
would you do? I would probably stare at the water-turned-wine in disbelief.
This isn’t supposed to happen this way. What…? How…? Where…?!
It would be the kind of moment where you stop in your tracks
and evaluate what you have been doing with yourself up to that point. If
someone is here that can change water into wine, then what else can He do and
what does He have to say. Someone important is around and you need to pay
attention.
Repent! It is not the water-turned-wine, it is the slap in
the face it gives you. You have become comfortable with the belief that God is
on your side and accomplishes His will according to your will. How you like,
when you like, and who you like.
And God cannot be any other way. He has come for me, so He
is going to make me happy. He cares for me, so He is going to work miracles in
me and through me. And we will list those miracles, which just so happen to be
the same as when we count our blessings.
But this miracle and all others are not just blessings. They
are a shaking. A trembling. “Therefore I will shake the heavens”, saith
the Lord in Isaiah 13:13, “And the earth will move out of her place, In the
wrath of the Lord of hosts And in the day of His fierce anger.”
The shaking is that God is using creation to accomplish
salvation. For not only will He unnaturally produce wine, still storms, and
heal, but He will enter time and space to be made flesh. The angels stare in
disbelief as the infinite God is fed at His mother’s breasts, suffers, and dies
on a cross. It is the Lord’s doing.
St. Chrysostom says:
He manifested His glory, in so far as this depended from His
own act. For if all did not hear of it then, yet they would afterwards come to
hear of it. Then follows: and His disciples believed in Him.
For they were obliged to believe in Him, and also, more
readily and with more diligence pay attention to the things that were being
done.” (Homily 22)
And the things that were being done, the acts that shake the
heavens and the earth, the event of the Lord’s wrath is Jesus, for He has come
to absorb that wrath fully, in the common flesh. He has taken the Cup of
Salvation and found the whole wrath of God in the dregs, drinking it all.
From Psalm 75:8, “For in the hand of the Lord there is a
cup, And the wine is red; It is fully mixed, and He pours it out; Surely its
dregs shall all the wicked of the earth Drain and drink down.”
And Isaiah 51:17, “Awake, awake! Stand up, O Jerusalem,
You who have drunk at the hand of the Lord The cup of His fury; You have drunk
the dregs of the cup of trembling, And drained it out.”
Jesus must remind His Apostles in Gethsemane, “Put your
sword away! Shall I not drink the cup the Father has given me?” (St John 18:11)
“Thus says your Lord, The Lord and your God, Who pleads
the cause of His people: ‘See, I have taken out of your hand The cup of
trembling, The dregs of the cup of My fury; You shall no longer drink it’”
(Isaiah 51:22).
Jesus must remind them that He has come to perform and
accomplish the sure and certain sign of God’s blessing. Not just
water-into-wine-that-normally-happens blessings and miracles, but a Son. A Son
come to shed His Blood and give His Body for the salvation of the world. This
man, this son of Joseph whose father and mother we know, “How does he now
say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (St. John 6:42)
The water into wine is not the end. It is the first sign the
Lord gives to inaugurate His entrance onto the battlefield. Water into wine,
healing the royal official's son in Capernaum, healing the paralytic at
Bethesda, feeding the 5000, walking on water, healing the man blind from birth,
and raising Lazarus from the dead are signposts. This way to the Son of the
Most High.
But, sorry to disappoint, He is both God and man. He
humiliates Himself in the flesh. He suffers evil to be done to Him. He rises
again and causes His work to continue on earth, through earthly means: Word and
Sacrament. You may bore of His things, but that is on you, not Him.
We follow and we believe, just as His disciples did.
We believe, as our Formula of Concord presents:
“On account of this personal union and communion of the
[two] natures, Mary, the most blessed Virgin, did not bear a mere man. But, as
the angel testifies, she bore a man who is truly the Son of the Most High God
[Luke 1:35]. He showed His divine majesty even in His mother's womb, because He
was born of a virgin, without violating her virginity. Therefore, she is truly
the mother of God and yet has remained a virgin.
He did all His miracles by the power of this personal union.
He showed His divine majesty, according to His pleasure, when and as He willed.
He did this not just after His resurrection and ascension, but also in His
state of humiliation.
(a) At the wedding at Cana of Galilee [John 2:1-11]
(b) When He was twelve years old, among the learned [Luke
2:42-50]
(c) In the garden, when with a word He cast His enemies to
the ground [John 18:6]
(d) In death, when He died not simply as any other man, but
in and with His death conquered sin, death, devil, hell, and eternal damnation
[Colossians 2:13-15]
The human nature alone would not have been able to do these
miracles if it had not been personally united and had communion with the divine
nature.” (SD VIII:24-25)
Neither could the Church be His Bride, were she not
personally united and in divine communion with Her Lord and Savior. So it is
that the world sees Christ as common, unimportant, water. To the eyes of faith,
the veil is lifted and the wine, hidden in the water, inebriates us to
salvation and the forgiveness of sins, found in the cup of the New Covenant,
given and shed for you.
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