The Word has become flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), and John the Baptist has revealed the Incarnate Word (Jesus) as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), even sending his own disciples to follow after Jesus (John 1:35). Then, in the last stage of his preparation for ministry, Jesus has gathered to himself the beginnings of his disciples (John 2:2). Without further preparation, Jesus now begins the course of work that he has come to do. While we still might expect that Jesus would choose to make some kind of a big a splash for his launch into public ministry, Jesus nevertheless performs the first of his miraculous signs to manifest his glory (John 2:11) not from the top of the temple in Jerusalem, but in secret at a wedding feast in backwater Cana in Galilee, where the (likely poor) bridegroom has run out of wine (John 2:3).

John’s purposes in relaying us this story go far beyond simply providing us an anecdote of Jesus’ getting someone out of a problem. Instead, this miracle of turning the water into wine is a sign that symbolizes and signifies something about Jesus, both in his identity and his mission. Let us turn our attention to John’s narrative with an ear carefully attuned to hear how Jesus manifests his glory through this, the first of his miracles.

Our sermon text is from John 2:1-12. We'll read our passage together first as we get started.

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. 3 When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

6 Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8 And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So they took it. 9 When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

12 After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days. John 2:1-12, ESV

This is the word of the Lord. The passage we are looking at today is a passage that is about inadequacy. It's about incompleteness. The passage is actually filled with symbols that point to the incompleteness of the situation that these people found themselves in. Which makes us ask the question as we come to this text, Do we feel inadequate?

I remember when I was a little boy, maybe 10 or something like that, and when you're 10, you're your street cred is earned by your athletic prowess usually. I had none to speak of. So, I remember specifically in PE one day trying to run my hardest at the 50 yard dash, only to not break under eight seconds, which is appalling. I even had my PE teacher say, now you weren't really trying your hardest, were you? Which was devastating for a chubby, slow boy.

I remember many other points in my life where I felt inadequate. I remember moments before my wedding began thinking, my goodness. What am I getting myself into? Am I up to this? I remember when my daughter was born about five years ago coming up, I had literally no idea what I was supposed to do. The first picture of me is of me standing away from her and with two fingers holding her foot because I was terrified. Was I up to this? A little over a year ago when I stood before many of you and took vows, installation vows, at the time, I was smiling a whole lot, but inside my head I was thinking, my goodness, am I up to this?

I also look back over the course of my life, and I don't just see a history of someone who just needed to maybe read the right book or go through the right training course, or maybe need a shot of energy in the arm, drinking a Red Bull or something like that. I see not just someone who is weak, but someone who's broken.

I see places in my life where I have sinned. Where it hasn't just about been me, just boy, I don't know if I can do this. But me fully consciously knowing exactly what I was doing that I was sitting against the Lord and I was sitting against other people, hurting people. Knowing exactly what I was doing and yet doing it anyway, because I thought that by doing that, I would get something that I thought I really wanted. I see a legacy of that incompleteness and inadequacy and my confidence to stand before people and claim to be righteous, claim to have those spotless robes of my own.

So, I want to ask, do you feel inadequate today in some way? Is there incompleteness in your life? Are you missing something that your heart breaks to have? If so, this passage that we're studying this morning, I pray God will use as a balm of the gospel to your soul because we see Jesus walking into this incomplete situation and nothing is the same.

This is a story about a real miracle that happened. This wasn't just a tall tale or something like that. This is a real miracle that Jesus performed at a real wedding feast at a real place. Yet Jesus uses this miracle not just to put on the Ritz and have a raw display of his power. He uses this miracle to tell us something about who he is and why he has come into the world. Namely, here it is, Jesus came to address the inadequacies of our circumstances, by overcoming the inadequacies of our remedies through the superabundance of himself..

Like many good stories, this story begins with a word about the setting where this story took place. Right off the bat, we learn when this happened, we read that this was on the third day. We read what happened, there was a wedding going on. We read where it happened, we read that this happened at Cana in Galilee. We read about some of the people involved in the story, the mother of Jesus was there, in verse two we read Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. So, we have the beginning of a good story.

Now, in my sermon notes, there's a little bit more going on here that I try to tease out. If you want to read those. For the moment, I'm just going to focus on this phrase right at the beginning, on the third day. Now, if you've been here the last two weeks at all, I've talked to each of those weeks about the sequence of days that John is setting up here. The first day begins in John 1:19, when the religious leaders from Jerusalem send an envoy to go to John the Baptist out in the wilderness to ask him, Who are you? And Why are you baptizing people? They were worried that they might ruffle the feathers of the Romans by this kind of a thing, so they wanted to know who exactly this person was. That's day one.

Then very carefully, John tells us, verse 29 the next day what happens where John the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him and says, "Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Now, John the evangelist John, the writer of this book, doesn't explicitly tell us that this is the day that John the Baptist baptized as Jesus, but we know from the other gospels that that's the point at which the Holy Spirit descends and remains upon Jesus like a dove. That's what happens here. That's the high point of John the Baptist's ministry. This is day two.

Then in verse thirty five, the next day again, day three, we read that John the Baptist was standing with two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he walked by and said, "Behold, the lamb of God." The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. So, Day three, John the Baptist sends his own disciples to follow after Jesus instead. John is very careful about the narration of the sequence of days so that in verse 43, the next day we're now on day four. Jesus, we read decided to go to Galilee, and Jesus met some more of the people who would become his disciples.

So, we're on day four and now in John 2:1, we read on the third day. Now in our modern Western minds, we hear three days and we think, OK, so we have three periods of twenty-four hours, that's how we count days. So, if this is the fourth day, well, then the twenty-four hour period after that would put us on the fifth day and a twenty-four hour period after that would put us on the sixth day and a third twenty-four hour period would put us on the seventh day. But that's not how the ancient mind counted days.

The way you know this is true is when you talk about Jesus being raised up from the dead on the third day. Well, again, if you count in terms of twenty-four hour periods, which is the way we count, not the way the ancient world counted, then what you have Friday and twenty-four hours after that, it's Saturday, twenty-four hours after that. It's Sunday, twenty-four hours after that, you're at Monday. In fact, the ancient people counted with what was called inclusive counting. So, the first day, the end of something was considered, the first day the day Jesus died, that was the first day after he had died, with the next day, Saturday being the second day and the third day after that being Sunday. So that we say Jesus was raised on Easter Sunday. On the third day, he was raised up from the dead for the forgiveness of sins.

Well, here again, we have three days that start on the fourth day, which puts us the second part of that series on the fifth day and the third part of that series on the sixth day. Now I'm sorry, I don't usually count this pedantic in a sermon in this boring of a way, but it's really important because we're at six days, we're on day six. This is probably Friday if the sequence of days started on Sunday.

This drives Bible commentators crazy because they're like, Why on earth would John give us a sequence of six days, six days? That's nothing. Why not give us a period of seven days? If it's seven days, then there's a clear symbolism. The God created the heavens and the Earth in seven days, right? Maybe this seventh day, the turning of the water into wine, maybe that's to tell us something about the seventh day the Sabbath. That Jesus eventually later in this gospel will have a lot to say about. But John gives us six days.

Six, one short of seven is a symbol of incompleteness. It's not the only symbol of incompleteness, like I said a little bit earlier. This passage is filled with symbols of incompleteness. One of the reasons John tells us what day we're at that we're on day six is to tell us there's a lot of incompletion, of inadequacy happening here. This is the sixth day, not the seventh day.

Then we read in verse three, the center of the conflict where the real inadequacy happens. When the mother of Jesus says to her son, "They have no wine." Talk about lacking something. Now this wine, let's not kid ourselves, this wasn't grape juice, non-alcoholic grape juice, this was actually wine. In the ancient world they didn't have the technology, the refrigeration technology, to keep grape juice from fermenting to become wine. However, they also didn't drink the stuff straight. In fact, in the ancient world, they called straight wine strong drink. They thought it was really, really dangerous as it was. The ancient peoples really didn't have a problem with wine in general, but they were very cognizant of the abuse of wine. They talked about the goodness of wine as a symbol of joy and feasting, just as much as they talked about the potential dangers of wine and drunkenness in its abuse.

So here we have no wine. They're at a party, you might just say, well, maybe they just need to shut the party down. Parties wedding feasts in the ancient world lasted about seven days. This was a big time party and if you were the groom, you were financially responsible to provide enough and adequate supply of wine. Well, the groom failed at his job, which some people speculate, maybe because he was too poor to provide enough wine.

The problem was this was a shame culture. If you didn't provide enough wine, you were really looked down upon. Not just look down upon, that could sincerely, in significant ways, affect your social standing in that society. So much so, that the bride's family who would also contract this shame from providing the bride who was at a wedding party where the groom couldn't pony up enough money for enough wine, the bride's family actually had standing to bring you into a lawsuit to sue you for the damages of the shame that they incurred because you couldn't afford enough wine. This was a really big deal to not supply enough wine.

I'm blessed with great in-laws, including a mother-in-law who comes up very frequently. She's not here today, she's sick. My mother-in-law who helps my wife with our squirming children in the pews. That's not everyone's story. Even if you have a rough relationship with your in-laws, I doubt any of you have been sued out of the gate by your in-law’s family. I hope not. My goodness, come talk to me if that's the case.

Jesus here is told by his mother that there's this shortage of wine, it's a big deal. There's shame involved, there's incompleteness. There's inadequacy here involved. The groom is going to be exposed and the bride's family is going to be embarrassed. Jesus, we read in verse four, says to her, "Woman, what does this have to do with me?"

Now the word woman here sounds kind of rude because we don't have a really good word that kind of compares to this in English. You might think of the word lady if that if that helps sort of soften the blow. We don't use lady to refer to our mothers. Most of us probably don't. So, there's not really a good word that corresponds here. Jesus uses the same word when he's dying on the cross later to make sure that his beloved mother has someone to care for her and provide for her and transfers her under the care of the beloved disciple John the Apostle. He calls her woman at that point in time, it was just as tender at that moment with Jesus's last breaths as it is here.

However, Jesus then does rebuke her a little bit. He says, "Woman, what does this have to do with me" Or literally, "Woman, what to me and to you?" What does this have to do with us? Then he tells her why she can't just come to him and tell him, Hey, why don't you perform a miracle? We don't really know what exactly Mary expected, but Jesus says, I can't necessarily do this because he says, "My hour has not yet come."

So, the circumstances here are there is an adequacy of days, six days. There's an inadequacy of wine. Now Jesus, the one person who could perform a miracle and just smooth out all the problems here, says, well, I have an inadequacy of time. My hour hasn't come yet. I can't fix your problem just yet.

The coming of the hour of Jesus is a central theme to the gospel of John, this is the first place we see it, but it won't be the last by any stretch. The hour of Jesus properly refers to the crucifixion of Jesus. It's the hour when Jesus is lifted up to be glorified, not at the resurrection, but at the cross. Because in the gospel of John, the clearest place you see the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ is not after he's overcome everything. It's in the self-sacrificing, loving way that Jesus gives himself on the cross. That's the glory of God in Jesus.

Jesus says, my power hasn't come yet, which doesn't mean that he thinks that maybe he'll have to go directly to the cross if he performs a miracle here. The hour in a fullness sense refers to the cross, but in a more complete sense, the hour refers to the entirety of Jesus's ministry, his public ministry. He says this will kickstart, launch, begin my public ministry. What he's saying to his mother is, Mother, you can't look at me as your son, you must look at me as your Lord. As your lord, you must recognize that I am a man under authority, that I came to do the works of my father who sent me. I can't respond to every request you have. I must obey the timetable that my father has laid out for me. Even my own mother can't ask me to speed that up by even a moment.

Some of you are in desperately painful circumstances. Desperately difficult, desperately painful inadequacies, that you can't live a moment of your life without recognizing. Even if you forget about it for a little while, they pop back up. Inadequacies and incompleteness that raised the question from Satan, are you enough? Do you have enough? Do you have what it takes?

Satan wants to come after you with this question. He wants you to doubt. He wants you to worry that your inadequacies somehow disqualify you from joy, from life, from peace, from security, from satisfaction. The problem with this lie, as with most lies of Satan, is that it has a kernel of truth. The whole story of the Bible tells us that we are not adequate. That's true. We're not enough. We have inadequacies. We are broken people. We live in a situation where we just don't have enough to get the job done, to get what we need. What Satan wants to do is to keep you in a prison where you have stopped waiting for the appointed hour and you collapse into worry and fear and shame.

Jesus came to address the inadequacies of our circumstances. The question, though, is how does Jesus exactly approach this? How do we approach these inadequacies? We try to cover ourselves, right? Just like Adam and Eve in the garden, where there's shame, where there's something to be covered? Boy, we're going to grasp it whatever fig leaves we can to cover ourselves up. That's what happens most of the time, but Jesus came to address the inadequacy of our circumstances by overcoming the inadequacies of our remedies. What we do will never be enough.

That takes us to verse five, where we read that, "Jesus’ mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells you." Now, this is not much, but it's a really interesting verse because she's quoting an Egyptian pharaoh from Genesis forty-one, where there's going to be seven years of famine in the land of Egypt. Pharaoh tells the entire Egyptian nation pointing to Joseph, whom he is just elevated to be second in command, do whatever he tells you. Do whatever he tells you.

The similarity, probably whether Mary was aware of what she was saying or not, is that just as Joseph addressed the issue of the inadequacy of food during the famine, so Jesus is going to address the inadequacy of this wine. Also, if you remember the story of Joseph. It was through the famine relief that Joseph oversaw, that he manifested his glory to his brothers, who had sold him into slavery. Just as we read in verse 11 that through this sign, Jesus manifested his glory to his disciples who believed in him.

So, Mary says, do whatever he tells you to do. What's fascinating in verse six is that there is the least likely source of an answer possible in verse six. John just sort of slips in oh, by the way, there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons. Now again, we see the number six come up. Six is one short of seven. There is an incompleteness to these water jars. But also, these water jars themselves spoke to a purification process that was notoriously inadequate, notoriously incomplete.

For those of you who are kids. Does it drive you crazy when your parents ask you to take a bath again and to wash your hands before yet another meal? I remember when I was a little kid, I took a bath last week, what on earth do you want from me? What your parents know is that there are these microscopic, so small that you can't see, invisible things called germs. That no matter how clean you get, there is not a soap that will perpetually clean you. There is not a soap that can perpetually make sure that not only you can wash the germs away, but that they can't come back. That soap doesn't exist in modern science. So, as you go through normal life doing the things that I know you do, crawling across floors, getting into whatever filth is outside, all kinds of things are happening where germs just flock to you. Even though they're invisible, and so your parents rightly recommend that you wash your hands again.

Now, the ancient Israelites didn't know anything about germs. They didn't have the technology to build a microscope to see things that small. The idea was the same spiritually. They believe that there was spiritual defilement because God had told them there were. That living in a fallen, broken world, you were going to naturally contract unclean, grossness that defiled you, that made you unclean and icky.

So, before you could enter into worship at the temple, before you could eat food, you had to wash yourself ceremonially. Then just as now, there was not a soap, there was not a water pot that could perpetually cleanse you. This was an incomplete process that had to be performed again and again and again and again. It's partially symbolized by the fact that there aren't seven jars, a complete number of jars, there are only six here.

So, Jesus says to the servants fill the jars up with water. This is fascinating. This is the first point in the story. We see anything complete. We see anything done to the fullest level possible, and we even read the detail that the servants filled the jars up to the brim. There's not any room left for water is completely filling these in totality.

If these are the Jewish laws of purification, water pots for the ceremony and cleansing of the law. Well, what we've already read in the gospel of John is that Jesus came to give grace and truth instead of the law that Moses gave. John 1:17, "For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." So what Jesus is doing, notice he doesn't cast aside the water pots, get rid of these water pots I'm going to I'm going to just start from scratch and make some make some wine on my own here. No, he doesn't do that. He enters into the old covenant, he says, fill these jars up to the brim. Fills them up completely. That's where we have to leave our cliffhanger.

You see, here's the issue. You probably have in your mind an action plan for success. You probably have in your mind, if I could just accomplish this, if I could just continue doing that well enough, if I could just get this promotion, if I could just have this relationship, if I could just lay out the steps to my success, then I could be complete. I could be whole. You may be able to fill up the jars of your own life purification process, but understand, you can't transform it into wine. You can't make it something that it isn't. That's what Jesus came to do.

Your remedy, whatever you think it is, and maybe some of you, your story is not that you haven't been able to reach the heights that you wanted to reach, the success plan for your life. Maybe your story is that you've already arrived and you look around and you realize that you're still inadequate, still incomplete, and you have no idea where to turn now. You may be able to fill up your jars. You can't turn it to wine, because Jesus came not just to address directly, right away without making us wait or depend on him and faith, the inadequacies of our circumstances. He also came to overcome the inadequacies of our remedies.

These things that we do perpetually time and time again. Jesus comes into this and we read. That he comes to give us the fullness of himself. The symbol of wine is a symbol of joy. If you look at Psalm 104, it's one of the things that the psalmist praises God for in creation. In John 2:8 here we read, "And he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” So, they took it. When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

The good wine is a picture that we read about in our call to worship this morning. In Isaiah, 25:6, it's a picture of the feast that God will call all of his people to at the end of time. A feast filled with rich food and well-aged wine, at a particular kind of party, specifically the wedding feast of the Lamb. Where Jesus Christ will return to call his bride to be with him forever. Jesus, our bridegroom is preparing a feast for us where we will drink the good wine of him.

He's not going to give us something else, he's going to give us himself. The imagery is complex, but what Jesus saying, I came not to just give you a new law, not to give you a new process, not to give you a new magic elixir that will fix your problems. I came to give you the superabundance of myself. I will overcome the inadequacies of your circumstances; I will overcome the inadequacies of your remedies. I'm going to give you me.

I'm going to transform the water of your life into wine, but here's the thing. There's this issue of time here, and it applies not just to this story, although it does apply to this story in the first coming of Jesus, not everything happened all at once. There was about a 30 year period where Jesus was just a carpenter, just a normal guy, just living and serving his mother. Probably most people think Joseph, his adopted father, had already died by this point. He's just living doing his life until his hour comes.

When Jesus turns the water into wine, Look at verse eight, "And he said to them no draw some out and take it to the master of the feast." That's a detail that John doesn't want us to miss. The hour has come. The incompleteness of the old covenant purification system, the incompleteness of this party, the incompleteness of the hour of Jesus, that all of creation throughout all of history up to this point has been waiting to arrive. It's here.

Jesus bursts onto the scene into his public ministry. It's still a little veiled, only a few people know what Jesus is done here. Yet from this point on, Jesus will not turn his back on the ultimate direction of what he came to do, which was to go to the cross for me and for you. Where Jesus Christ came to fill up all of the law, the blessings, but particularly the cursing. Where the law demands death, where the law demands the curse of God for anyone put on the tree, Jesus came not to avoid that, not to sidestep, but not to say, well, that seems mean and inappropriate. But to embrace it and to take it upon himself so that we might live. To give us the new wine that has to go in new wine skins of faith for us.

Where are your inadequacies? I mean, all of us have these things that when we're tired, when we're when we're nervous, when we start to get anxious about life, we start reaching for things that we think will help us. Whether we're talking about substances that will either dull the pain or maybe we think will give us a boost to get things done. Or whether we're talking about relationships that we tap into or whether we're talking about achievements that we seek out, or whether we try to ingratiate ourselves to other people, whatever it is. What are those places that you look to for completeness?

What Jesus says in his gospel is that you won't get that there. As you look to him, as you look to him in faith, as you, as you turn from your sins, as you recognize my incompleteness is a curse, but it is not only a curse, it's also a gift to get me beyond myself to recognize that I'm broken and need a savior. So that you can look to him and the new wine that he gives.

This the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee and manifested his glory and his disciples believed in him. All of this is given to us as well that we can see the glory of Jesus manifested in the scriptures to us and believe in him.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray for grace that you would. Give us Jesus. God, we are tired of being on the treadmill and the hamster wheel of fulfilling our own inadequacies. Because we can't do it, no purification is going to get us to where we need to be. We need the new wine that only Jesus can give us. So we ask Father that you would do far more than we could think or imagine. That through your Holy Spirit, speaking in your word and in a moment in your sacrament, you would give us the new wine of Jesus. We pray this in your son's name. Amen.