Scripture: Isaiah 62: 1-5; John 2: 1-12

“Jesus performed this the first of his signs in Cana of Galilee and thus revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.”

-- John 2:11

We follow the series on the OT prophets with this series of 10 sermons on the Gospel of John. John’s Gospel, also commonly referred to as the “Fourth Gospel,” makes the highest claims in the NT for the status of Jesus. Jesus is not merely prophet, Messiah and Son of God, he is the pre-existent Word of God who descended from heaven and returned to heaven by way of the Cross. He is the perfect incarnation of the Word that the prophets we have been hearing have imperfectly spoken all along. He is the climax of the prophetic tradition, the Truth all the prophets tried to reveal to us. John’s Gospel therefore, is the source of the orthodox Christian doctrine of Jesus Christ the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and for that reason alone is worth our serious attention. We begin with what the Gospel calls the first “sign,” but before we look more closely at the account of the wedding at Cana we must register some important general facts about this Gospel.

Our story calls itself a “sign” by which Jesus discloses his true identity of divine glory. At its end, the Gospel tells us what it understands itself to be, namely a selection of such “signs” recorded for us to read and in reading come to believe and in believing attain eternal life. “Jesus also gave many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which have not been written in this book. These, however, have been written in order that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ the Son of God, and thus believing have life in his name (20:30-31).” How might we find eternal life? Read this book, follow the signs to Jesus and worship him. Thus at one level the signs are simply signs, pointers to the right way and indicators of where the one important destination is. It is as if life is a way along which we travel hoping to arrive safely at our destination, and at last picking up signs that point us to where we want to be. The destination is union with Jesus Christ the divine source and goal of my life, and when I reach it I have eternal life.

The specificity of this claim is hard to accept; why Jesus, and only he? We readily accept the experience of spirituality in general, which we experience through great music, literature and the visual and performing arts, through human love in all its authentic forms. We readily identify significant moments or oceanic feelings as points of contact with God, or whatever name we give the higher power.  Many people who attend Christian worship are celebrating and seeking to renew those kinds of feelings.  How much of these feelings, I ask, is in fact a sign not of the glory of the divine but of the aesthetic capacity of the human? (I make this sharp distinction for the sake of the exposition only; clearly in the right circumstances the aesthetic is a powerful conductor of the divine). John’s Gospel makes the specific claim and issues the specific promise, ‘Read this book, follow the signs to Jesus, believe that he and no one else is the Christ of God, and you will have eternal life.’

At the beginning the Gospel, in a position that corresponds roughly to the summary of purpose at the end, John writes, “The Law was given through Moses, but Grace and Truth came into being through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God (at any time or any place); the only-begotten God who sits in the lap of the Father, he has expounded him (1:17-18).” Since it was bedrock of the Moses mystique that he had seen God on Mount Sinai when he received the Law, John is directly contradicting those, whom we meet often in the Gospel as the “disciples of Moses (9:28).” No one has seen God, but the only-begotten God, Jesus Christ, has, and here the verb is instructive, “expounded” him. The Greek is the word used for the explication of a text, translated inelegantly as “exegeted,” as in “biblical exegesis.” So John tells us if you want to see God pay close attention not to the Law of Moses, but to my text, the Gospel of John. If you read this aright you shall have eternal life. Discovering life is a matter of the right explication of this text.

So let us turn to the text of the Wedding at Cana and try to read it aright, and let us bear in the front of our minds that we are in search of eternal life. Another preliminary digression: why are we here today, in this service of worship? Some of us at least are here because we want eternal life, and that is not just a quantitative term but also and chiefly a qualitative term. How many of us could bear the thought that our lives would drag on forever just the way they are now. We want new life not just an endless continuation of our present life. We know that there is more to life than what we have now. That desire for more out of life is the desire for God that is built into our beings and that we still can access by the grace of God that enables us to rummage beneath and behind all the trash that sin has heaped on to hide and distort it. Bernard of Clairvaux describes our situation of desire perfectly in his lovely hymn, “Jesus Thou Joy of Loving Hearts, Thou fount of life, thou light of Men, From the best bliss that earth imparts, We turn unfilled to thee again.” Earth’s best bliss leaves us unfilled, only Jesus can satisfy us. He is the fountain of life, he is the light of the world.

At the Wedding at Cana Jesus gives us the drink that renews our life, and it is not cool, clear, water (that he does by the well in Samaria in Ch. 4), but unbelievably good wine. We all know that red wine is good for you; recently it was announced that women who drink red wine are more fertile, and before that we were told that it has general benefits for hearts and arteries. John is not as prosaic as the wine marketing agencies that put out such medical “information.” John’s message is quite different; the wine marketers focus on the wine while John focuses on the wine maker. Operating at the level of the sign, the symbolic level, John says not that red wine is good for you, but that faith in Jesus will change your life and make you feel like you feel half-way through a bottle of really good wine, and not temporarily but forever. In the wine his disciples saw not a commercial opportunity, as Judas did later with the ointment, or as most of us Silicon Valley entrepreneurs would today, but a symbol of the difference Jesus makes in the life of someone who believes in him, specifically, exclusively and passionately. His disciples saw the event as a sign of his divine glory and believed in him.

That invitation to believe in Jesus as the incarnate God resounds throughout the Gospel. If we ask why we should believe in Jesus we get in reply not general and abstract reasons but stories like the one we have just perused. The substance of our salvation cannot be described univocally but only symbolized. These stories, called signs, are like poetry, or painting, or music; they depict one central image, and then set it free to wander in our minds and souls, as images the Spirit uses to heal us and restore our lives. Wine of gladness not water of sadness, laughter not tears, new love, young love, a young bridegroom’s family saved from the shame of running out of drinks, the water rites of cleansing used by the Jews and symbolized by the pots in the story, replaced by the wine of celebration, that is, the emphasis shifts from cleansing of the contamination incurred in social interaction to the careless togetherness of a party, from religion to life.

This is what the prophet of Isaiah 62 envisioned: “…no longer are you to be named ‘Forsaken,’ nor your land ‘Abandoned,’ but you shall be called ‘My Delight’ and your land ‘The Wedded;’ for the Lord takes delight in you and your land will have its wedding. Like a young man marrying a virgin, so will the one who built you wed you, and as the bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so will your God rejoice in you…Never again will foreigners drink your wine that you labored for…Those who gathered the grapes will drink in the courts of my sanctuary (Isaiah 62: 4-9 passim).” This is an early version of the hope for what in Revelation is called “the marriage feast of the Lamb (Rev. 19:7).”

Do you feel that you are spiritually forsaken and abandoned? Read this Gospel, heed its signs, and when you arrive at faith in Jesus you will hear God call you, “My Delight,” “The Wedded.” As a man rejoices in his bride so will God rejoice in you, and you will drink wine in the courts of God’s house. The wedding and the wine are the signs of Christ’s glory, in himself, and the signs of his saving presence, in us. Go, read and ponder; this Gospel of John holds  “the words of eternal life (John 6: 68-69).” If you want the benefits of God’s work in Christ, then work yourself to “exegete” this Gospel, to explicate its text, and to believe the one to whom its signs point. It’s as simple and as demanding as that.