Amelia Church of Christ - Christian Church in Amelia, OH near Cincinnati in Clermont County

A lot of us have a particular view of Jesus that we have learned from religious culture and tradition. Maybe we think that Jesus was always meek and mild. Maybe we believe that he was always solemn and serious. Whatever our traditions have taught us, we’ve got to be sure that they measure up to what we know about Jesus from the Bible. And today, we’re going to check out a story from John 2 that may challenge some of our misconceptions about Jesus.

John 2, starting in verse one. “On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”

“Dear woman, why do you involve me?" Jesus replied, “My time has not yet come.”

His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.

Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.

Then he told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet."

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew.

Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.” (John 2:1-11, NIV)

So Jesus is at this party. It’s a wedding feast. To really grasp what is happening in this story you’ve got to understand what’s going on in Jesus’ cultural context. In first century culture, a wedding feast could last as long as a week.

Hospitality and weddings were taken very, very seriously in Near Eastern culture. A family’s reputation in that society could be devastated if they failed in the realm of hospitality. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the stigma from this kind of error could follow this family for the rest of their lives. It didn’t matter if the family was poor. It didn’t matter how limited their resources were. If they failed to provide properly for their guests, they were in trouble. And it wasn’t just social trouble. It could be legal trouble.

It was possible to sue someone if their party was not well-stocked with food and wine. Can you imagine that kind of lawsuit? But it actually happened. So the folks at this particular wedding were very worried. They ran out of wine! Running out of wine was just not acceptable at a wedding feast. No matter how long the festivities stretched out, you were supposed to keep an open bar. Because they ran out of wine, the groom and his family could have been ostracized socially, and they could have faced a very stiff fine as well.

Enter Jesus. Mary, Jesus’ mother, comes to him and says, “They have no more wine.” (John 2:3b, NIV) This was a real problem because you couldn’t grab a Visa, run to Kroger and pick up one of those cardboard boxes of wine. And everyone at the party understood the ramifications of running out of wine.

But it seems, at first, like Jesus is reluctant to do anything about it. He responds, “Dear woman, why do you involve me? My time has not yet come.” (John 2:4, NIV)

Many people have interpreted this to mean that Jesus really didn’t want to do anything about the wine shortage. But I just can’t buy that. If Jesus didn’t want to help, he wouldn’t have helped. Instead, it seems more likely that he is trying to make Mary understand that nobody writes in his daytimer. She may have been trying to dictate what he should do, and he simply needed to back her off a little bit. She simply needed to understand who Jesus was, and how he goes about his business.

And it seems that she understood the lesson, because the next thing she did was tell the servants at the wedding, “Do whatever he tells you.” In other words, “He’s the boss. Do what he says.”

And after that, Jesus jumps into action. He tells the servants at the wedding to fill six stone jars with water. These jars would hold somewhere between 120-180 gallons total. After these jars had been filled to the brim with water, Jesus told the servants to draw some of it out and take it to the master of the banquet.

The master of the banquet is also referred to as “the headwaiter” (NASB) or “the governor of the feast” (KJV) in other translations of the Bible. The master of the banquet was probably either a close friend or a family member who acted as a “master of ceremonies.” Such a position carried great honor.

So can you imagine how the servants felt when they were told to draw out water to serve to the master of the banquet? You didn’t serve Aquafina at a wedding. You served merlot or zinfandel. But Jesus, far from the watchful eye of the crowd, had miraculously changed this water into wine. And not just wine…he changed it into exceptional wine.

After the master of the banquet has a taste, he calls over the groom. Now, imagine how the groom is feeling. He is stressed beyond stressed because he knows what has happened. He knows they ran out of wine. And now that the master of the banquet knows, it’s all over. I’m sure the groom was shocked by what happened next.

The banquet master said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.” (John 2:10, NIV)

Jesus had changed water into the best wine that had been served at the wedding feast.

Isn’t that a cool story? But it’s so much more than that. It’s more than just a good story. We can’t walk out today just having learned a story. God has so much more for us than to just learn a story about Jesus. He wants us to encounter Jesus through some critical truths that we can pull out of this story. We’re going to spend the rest of our time unpacking some of these truths from the story of Jesus’ miracle at the wedding party.

And the first truth is that when Jesus comes to a party, the details catch his eye.

If you got to write the script of Jesus’ life, would you include this story? I’m not sure that I would. I especially don’t think I would have written this as the first miracle in the script of his life and ministry. Not the first.

Everybody in our city is buzzing about Josh Hamilton, the star rookie outfielder for the Reds. He has blazed a comeback trail to make a Major League team this year. In the past, he had squandered his incredible talent through drug addiction. His addiction left him so broke that he often went without food. He slept in his car. He was as broken as he could be. And he has now staged this amazing comeback. He put up numbers in spring training there were just absurd. At one point during spring training, a baseball writer yelled out to him, “Hey! This game isn’t that easy!” But Josh Hamilton makes it look easy.

So everybody was all geeked up for Hamilton’s Major League debut. It came this past week on Opening Day. Check it out.

He laced a liner that looked like a sure hit. You couldn’t have scripted it any better. A hit in his first Major League at-bat. But then Matt Murton spoiled it by making a diving catch to rob Hamilton of a hit. But the standing ovation was still there, because we make a big deal of debuts.

When something is a first, we pay special attention. So you would expect that Jesus’ first miracle would be something huge! A healing. Raising the dead. Something that would be a homerun in his first at-bat. But Jesus is rarely predictable. He almost always does the last thing you’d expect him to do.

Jesus’ first miracle wasn’t healing someone of a dreaded disease. He didn’t raise a dead person to life. His first miracle was done largely in secret. Only the servants at the banquet knew that Jesus had quietly changed water into wine.

At first glance, that would seem to be a rather inauspicious start to his ministry. But when you dig a little deeper, you learn a very special truth about Jesus. He cares about the details.

His first miracle was addressing a small detail. Sure, running out of wine was a big deal to the family that was throwing the wedding party, but it would seem to be rather inconsequential when you think of God’s perspective. You would think that God would say, “Yeah, this one family rain out of wine. Big deal.” But the amazing truth is that God did see it as a big deal because he cares about details.

We often think that God is only concerned with the big things. War, famine, disasters, huge issues of the cosmos…those are the things on God’s agenda. Those are the issues that consume his thoughts and take up his time. But this story destroys that misconception. God cares about a wedding that ran out of wine. He cares about the details.

Recently, I was out driving and I saw a church sign that just made me shake my head in amazement.

The sign said, “When all else fails, try praying to God.”

Can I ask a rather obvious question? Why would we wait until all else fails? The reason we do that is because of this misconception that God is only concerned about big, major issues. Therefore you can only tap into God’s power through prayer after you’ve already tried everything else. If nothing else works, then you can bother God with your issue. But if you can work it out for yourself, then you should. After all, the Bible says, “God helps those who help themselves,” right?

Actually, no. I don’t know where that old saying came from, but it didn’t come from the Bible. It’s just not there. And neither is this idea that God only comes into play when something big breaks loose.

We can understand it when someone prays after they’ve been diagnosed with cancer. It’s normal to pray when you’ve lost a loved one. Those are big things, so prayer is the understood response. We treat prayer as a sort of spiritual 911 call. “God, it’s an emergency. Help!”

God definitely is there when we’re in a crisis. No doubt about it. But he’s also there in the mundane, ordinary details of your life. He cares about the details of your life. When you’re stressed about a test at school, he cares. When you’re feeling the butterflies of a first date, he cares. When you can’t seem to figure out what’s wrong with your car, he cares. When you spend an average day at work, drive home in average rush hour traffic, and spend an average evening with your family, he cares. There is not a detail of your life that is out of his sight or out of his care.

That’s because attention to detail is a sign of love. My dad used to have an old truck that he loved. One day he was out cleaning and polishing his truck and a couple of his buddies were razzing him about it. Dad was meticulous in his approach to caring for his truck. Finally, one of his buddies said to the other, “Come on, let’s get out of here before Buck starts using a toothbrush to clean this thing.” My dad looked up, smiled, and pulled a toothbrush out of his pocket. He loved that truck, and attention to detail is a sign of love.

There has never been a greater love than the love that God has for you. It’s the story of Easter. Jesus died on a cross to pay the price for you sin. He rose again to seal the victory and give you the promise of salvation. And if he did all of that, what makes you think that your life is simply a detail to him? What makes you think he doesn’t care about your problems? What makes you think he doesn’t celebrate your victories? What makes you think that you are insignificant in his eyes?

God cares about the details. He cares about people who foolishly didn’t secure enough wine for their wedding. And he cares about me. And he cares about you. Not just in the big times. Not just during a crisis. But every second of every day of every year.

A second truth that we can learn from our story: when Jesus comes to a party, he changes the ordinary to the extraordinary.

There was nothing special about this water. It was poured into ordinary stone jars that the Jewish people used for a ceremonial hand washing ritual. Not the most appetizing container to use for winemaking. It was all very common, very run-of-the-mill. But transforming the common, run-of-the-mill is Jesus’ specialty.

It’s really interesting that Jesus chose to fill these particular stone jars with water. Jesus could’ve created the wine in other containers; he could have created new containers to hold the wine; he could have created it directly into people’s empty glasses. But he chose to perform his miracle in a way that affected the religious tradition of his day. To get this idea, we’ve got to understand this tradition of ceremonial washing.

This custom had nothing to do with germs and hygiene. It was a religious tradition, and it was not prescribed by God in the Bible. Instead, it was invented by religious leaders who had a profoundly wrong view of spirituality.

They believed that the main spiritual problem was the threat of contamination by contact with bad people—“sin cooties,” if you will. If you touched something that a Gentile, anyone who wasn’t a Jew, had touched (or even breathed air that they breathed), you could become ritually unclean. So the solution, the key to spirituality, the main way to approach God was through performing a ritual of cleansing or purification. Observant Jews had to wash their hands in very specific ways several times in the course of a meal. No wonder they had so many water pots on hand for the reception!

This type of idea sounds all too familiar in our culture. This mentality is at the heart of most world religions, including most people’s understanding of Christianity. You must clean yourself up if you want to relate to God. Whether by performing certain rituals in the right way at the right time, or by obeying a list of arbitrary rules, or by avoiding contact with certain kinds of people, etc. The assumption is that you have clean yourself up to come to God.

By filling these jars with water and then changing the water into wine, Jesus made it impossible for anyone at the reception to ritually purify themselves. They couldn’t do it anymore.

That’s because Jesus came to level the playing field.

Our culture recognizes, even worships, the extraordinary. Extraordinary plays make the highlights on SportsCenter. Extraordinary stories make the news on Fox or CNN. And extraordinary young pool players show up on YouTube. Check this out.

This kid is seven years old and he’s already turning some heads. He’s obviously an extraordinary talent.

But what about those of us who just don’t feel all that extraordinary…especially when it comes to this thing called church. A lot of people believe that church is reserved for people who can make all the shots. Their cue is always chalked up. They never accidentally sink the eight ball. They’ve got their spiritual game together.

And maybe that just doesn’t describe you. It seems like everybody is sinking their shots except you. Maybe you believe that there’s just no way. No way God could love you. No way you could ever be forgiven for what you’ve done. No way you’d ever fit in at church. After all, church is for church people, right? Church is for those extraordinary people who can sink the shots. It’s for those people who have their lives all together. I’m far too ordinary to ever fit in at church.

Jesus turns that mode of thinking upside down. He came to level the playing field. Jesus teed it up in the beginning of his ministry by changing ordinary water into extraordinary wine. And then he knocked it out of the park when he died on the cross for ordinary, sinful people. He didn’t die for religious people. He died for ordinary, messed up, sinful people like you and me. And then he rose again three days later to seal the victory and give us the promise of life forever in the presence of God. All of that is possible because Jesus changes the ordinary to the extraordinary.

When Jesus comes to a party, he totally changes the dynamic. When he comes to a party, the details catch his eye. Nothing goes unnoticed. He cares about the big and the small details.

When he comes to a party, he changes the ordinary to the extraordinary. Doesn’t matter who you are. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done. He can do an extraordinary work in your life.

The only question that remains is, “Have you invited Jesus to the party?”

Maybe you made a faith-commitment earlier in your life. You accepted Jesus as your Savior, you made him your Lord, but somewhere down the line, you’ve lost him. You’re not sure how you got here, but you however you got where you are, you don’t like it. Your wine has changed back into water. The great news is that God is a God of second chances. If you’re ready to stop running from God, then I encourage you to turn and look around. What you’ll find is that God has been chasing you all along. He hasn’t given up on you, even if you’ve given up on yourself. Even if you think, “I’ve muffed it so badly. I feel like I’m absolutely insignificant. Seems like everybody else is wine, but I’m just plain old water.” I’ve got some good news for you. You have a God who specializes at turning water into wine. Turing the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Maybe you’ve never accepted God’s gift of forgiveness for the first time in your life. You’ve been checking out this God thing, wondering if there’s something in it for you. Maybe you’ve come to church today with some misconceptions about God. God is not too busy or too big to concern himself with you. Just the opposite is true. The story of Easter is that he died for you. And he’s living for you. And he’s just dying for you to live for him.

In our story, did you notice that Jesus didn’t just change the water into better water? He changed the water into wine. A totally new creation. And that’s the exact work that he wants to do in our lives.

The Bible says, “…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV)

If you’re ready for a new start, that’s exactly what Jesus’ death and resurrection offers. And it’s not just a forgiveness of your past. It’s a water into wine experience. It’s a new creation. It’s a total recreation of your present and your future.

All of that can happen when you invite Jesus to the party. We’d love to talk and pray with you about your life and your relationship with Jesus.

Mike Edmisten

Tags: details, Easter, forgiveness, grace, John 2, love, miracles, second chance, water into wine