Reverend Jonathan Waits
Helping Us See (John 2:1-12)
March 2, 2025
Who is Jesus? That’s one of the most significant questions that anyone could ask or answer. The only one with potentially greater significance is the question of whether or not there is a God in the first place. Literally everything hinges on the answer to that question. And that may sound like somewhat of a grandiose claim, but think about it. Let’s say someone protests our claim here by pointing to science. “The question of the existence of God or the identity of Jesus is irrelevant,” they might argue, “because science does for us all the things our ignorant ancestors naively relied on some made up god to give them.” Okay, but why do you think science as you know it exists in the first place? Because of a belief in God on the part of some really smart men and women in the past. Actually, that’s not quite right. They didn’t merely believe in God, they believed in a specific and historically unique understanding of God that made their efforts to study and strive to understand how the world works in an organized fashion reasonable in a way that no other worldview had ever done. And, honestly, they only believed in God as they did because they and their forebears had a certain answer to the question of who Jesus is; an answer that was at least mostly consistent with the broadly orthodox position on it dating back to the very first believers. So, yes, the question of who Jesus is really is the most important question anyone could ever ask.
That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t answer the question. Who is Jesus? Not unsurprisingly, there have been numerous attempts at answering the question over the centuries of church history. In the last couple of centuries in particular, thanks to modern ideas of understanding history, there has been a quest to answer the question by discovering the “historical Jesus.” To this end, lots and lots of books have been written during this period whose authors have all assured readers that they have conclusively discovered the “real” Jesus of history. It is not even a little surprising that all of these different pictures of Jesus have Him taking on the political, cultural, and theological biases of His discoverers. Go figure.
For all of the efforts to uncover an historical Jesus or to clarify His identity based on some set of modern criteria that amounts to little more than unhelpful speculation rooted in confirmation bias (that is, we wind up finding exactly what it is we are looking for and then use our discoveries to justify our initial assumptions), there is one source for answering the question that does offer a bit more in terms of a substantive response. I’m talking about the Gospels. The Gospels are far and away our most detailed account of the life and ministry of Jesus. No other source comes anywhere close to what those four historical biographies have preserved for us. If we are going to answer the question together of who Jesus is, there’s no better place to start than that.
We are now just eight weeks from Easter, the celebration of what makes the Christian faith worthwhile in the first place: the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The historical event of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead was the spark that launched a movement that has transformed the world in more ways than we could even begin to count. The resurrection opened the doors to a new way of relating to God and eternal life for those who are willing to walk in this new way. More than even that, the resurrection proclaimed definitively the identity of Jesus. It answered the question of who Jesus is with more volume and emphasis than anything else ever did. We’re going to give some focused and direct attention to that in a few weeks. But as important as the resurrection was in terms of defining for us who Jesus is, it wasn’t the only thing that did. In fact, Jesus had spent the previous three years of His public ministry dropping hints and clues as to His real identity. Each one of these revealed something important about who He is and what He came proclaiming to us regarding God’s plans for His world.
With this in mind, over the next few weeks, and in parallel with our current Sunday school series (which means, by the way, that if you are not currently connected to one of our excellent Sunday school Bible study groups, this is a great time to fix that), we are going to be looking at some of these clues Jesus dropped of His real identity over the course of His ministry, and why these matter. In particular, we are going to look at what the apostle John identified as seven signs of Jesus’ identity in His Gospel. As John weaves together his Gospel narrative, these signs serve as pointers to who Jesus really is before the most important and final two signs of His atoning death and life-giving resurrection. Together with John we are going to see just why All Signs Point to Jesus.
If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, find your way with me to John’s Gospel. The first sign John presents to us arrives right at the beginning of chapter 2. Take a look at this with me. “On the third day, a wedding took place in Cana of Galilee. Jesus’s mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding as well.”
Weddings were a big deal in first century Israel. We think that our weddings have become large, expensive, and extravagant affairs. We’re amateurs compared to them. For starters, we only celebrate on a single day with perhaps the night before thrown in as a bonus. Theirs lasted a week. And they feasted and partied the whole time. It was the hosts’ job to make sure the food and wine flowed in abundance throughout the affair. Often the host would hire someone to manage the festivities for him so that he could focus his attention on entertaining guests and otherwise enjoying the party. There was great honor ascribed to a host who put on a good event. There was great shame, though, if things didn’t go according to plan.
For Jesus and the disciples to be invited to this wedding that His mother was also attending suggests that this was probably a family friend. Because of that, an invitation like this was not something that could be turned down. So, when the invitations arrived, Jesus and the gang dutifully headed to Cana for the party. Now, the group with Jesus probably did not yet consist of the full twelve disciples. His public ministry was still in its infancy, and He hadn’t yet performed any significant miracles. He was just a charismatic teacher with a message unlike what anybody else was teaching who had a few interested students hanging around. And all of them showed up for the wedding.
Well, all these folks were gathered at the wedding, having a great time, when suddenly, tragedy strikes. A social tragedy. The wine ran out. This would have been enormously embarrassing to everyone involved in putting on this massive shindig. This was a potentially future-defining moment for all these folks. They were on the cusp of being remembered forever in their community as the family who couldn’t put together a proper wedding ceremony. If only they knew who they had invited to the party. Thankfully, one person does. Mary finds out what is going on and promptly lets her Son know about it. “When the wine ran out, Jesus’s mother told him, ‘They don’t have any wine.’”
Have you ever had somebody put an expectation on you that you didn’t want, but which you felt like you had to honor because of who was doing the expectation-placing? Maybe it was a parent who said to you, “I’d like for you to do this.” You really didn’t want to do whatever it was, but you also wanted to honor your father and mother. In the end, you leaned in that direction even though, again, you didn’t want to do it. Jesus understands.
When Mary came to Him to let Him know about the potential social tragedy facing their friends, Jesus didn’t want anything to do with it. Look at v. 4 now: “‘What does that have to do with you and me, woman?’ Jesus asked. ‘My hour has not yet come.’” In other words, “I know what you’re asking me to do, and it’s not time for that yet.” Sometimes, though, we need a little push to do something we are hesitant to do, but which we need to do. God occasionally gives us those, and they often come from sources we don’t expect. The eternally preexistent second member of the Trinity who had taken on flesh to become fully human in order to reveal the plans of God to the world was encouraged to get the truly public phase of His ministry started by His mom. Ladies, don’t ever doubt that you matter. Mary’s generous and gracious spirit lit the fuse that would burn from here to Calvary.
I should note that the language here is awkward and perhaps more than a little offensive to us. If you don’t believe me, try referring to a significant woman in your life as “woman,” and see how that goes for you. Yet on Jesus’ lips and in the context of a culture very different from ours when it came to thinking about how to respectfully address people, this was actually a respectful way to address his mother and women generally.
In any event, Mary hears His protests…and promptly ignores them. Without even responding, she immediately sets things in motion. “‘Do whatever he tells you,’ his mother told the servants.” At this point Jesus, the good and faithful son that He was, was committed. So, He lovingly obeyed His mom.
What happens next is incredible, but also incredibly subtle. And think for just a second about how remarkable that is. This was the first public miracle Jesus had done. This was the chance to really put Himself on the map. He could have taken this as an opportunity to define His ministry going forward. This could have been the spark that put Him on everybody’s radar so that He could easily proclaim the reality of God’s kingdom to the fawning masses. That kind of an approach would have only made sense in the mind of anyone in His shoes. If you’re trying to start a movement, more attention is better than less.
Yet look at how all of this actually unfolded. Keep reading in the text with me at v. 6: “Now six stone water jars had been set there for Jewish purification. Each contained twenty or thirty gallons.” Pause there for a second. Most archaeologists are fairly confident that Cana has been identified as the excavation site, Khirbet Kana, which is just a few miles north of Nazareth. They have excavated some 20-30 gallon stone water jars from that site as well as in various other places around the region from this time period. What John describes here fits the period.
So, there were these six big water jars handy that weren’t being used for anything else at the moment. Jesus puts them to use. “‘Fill the jars with water,’ Jesus told them. So they filled them to the brim. Then he said to them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the headwaiter.’ And they did.” Again, notice the reserve in both Jesus’ actions and John’s relating the miracle to us. It’s the reserve that adds credibility to the story. All Jesus does is to tell the servants to fill some jars with water, and then to take that water to the man in charge. For his part, John doesn’t even try to play up the wonder of what happened. He presents the story with not a shred of fanfare. This was all Jesus did. It was all anybody saw Him do. When the actual miracle happened, we don’t know.
“When the headwaiter tasted the water (after it had become wine), he did not know where it came from—though the servants who had drawn the water knew. He called the groom and told him, ‘Everyone sets out the fine wine first, then, after people are drunk, the inferior. But you have kept the fine wine until now.’”
Let’s just make clear what’s happening here: no one has any idea what’s going on. The groom was clueless. So was the bride. The headwaiter—the guy who was supposed to be in charge of the whole affair—is completely in the dark. He figures the groom has simply planned a wildly unexpected and extravagantly generous surprise for all the partygoers. Perhaps the disciples had some sort of a clue, although they don’t get mentioned in any of the details. The only people who were even somewhat in on the secret are Mary who seems to have known what Jesus was capable of the whole time, and the servants who filled the jugs and delivered what they had drawn to the headwaiter. This actually fits with the pattern of Jesus’ ministry that would be well established before it was all said and done. It fits with how God has always operated. It is always the ones who are least expected to be in the know on His grand plans who He chooses to put right in the center of them to their delight and wonder and the shame of the higher ups who should have known.
Practically speaking, we don’t have any idea what happened here except that somehow Jesus converted the water that was used to fill these large stone jars into wine. I’ve seen various attempts to explain how this could have happened, but most of these serve to downplay the utterly miraculous nature of the whole thing. This was a miracle, plain and simple.
But John goes one step beyond merely telling us what happened, incredible as that was. And this is where we find the connection point here for us. John gives us a context for understanding Jesus’ actions here through a lens bigger than what anyone at the time had to use. This wasn’t just about doing a miracle to help out a friend, although Jesus certainly did that and, honestly, didn’t need a reason better than that to do what He did. This was about pulling back the curtain on who He was. Verse 11: “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee. He revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.” What Jesus was doing here was opening the eyes of His first disciples to see and understand that He was something more than just a compelling teacher. Once He had done that, He went on to His next thing. “After this, he went down to Capernaum, together with his mother, his brothers, and his disciples, and they stayed there only a few days.”
Okay, so, that’s what actually happened here. Jesus did a miracle. His first miracle. A miracle whose impact was limited, to say the least. It is entirely likely that outside of a handful of people, no one had any idea this happened, and without John’s telling us about it, it would have been lost to history entirely. It would have been one of those many, many volumes’ worth of things Jesus did but which never got reported that John talks about at the end of His Gospel. So, why tell us about this one? Because this one was special. This one was special because it revealed Jesus’ glory. Understanding that is the key to understanding why we should care about this story and how it informs our answer to the question of who Jesus was.
Now, in order to grasp this, we’ve got to understand what we mean by “Jesus’ glory.” Jesus’ glory, God’s glory (same thing) is often pictured as a kind of luminosity. Really, though, God’s glory is just all of the things that make God, God in one overwhelming package. It is His goodness and love and mercy and compassion and justice and righteousness and holiness and wisdom and strength and foresight and power and so on and so forth. It is His majesty combined with His humility and applied to our world and our lives in ways that allow us to get a real taste of who He is and what life in His kingdom is really like.
This is all just what we see here. Look again with me at how. Jesus didn’t have to do anything to help this couple out of the predicament they were facing. This wasn’t His problem. They didn’t plan properly. Or perhaps the headwaiter didn’t ration things properly. Either way, this was their issue, not His. But He helped anyway because His mother asked Him to, yes, but also because He is good and generous and kind. He entered into a potentially troublesome situation and completely transformed it from the inside out.
But Jesus didn’t just solve the problem here. He unleashed the abundance of God’s kingdom into it. I don’t have any idea how much wine the partygoers had already been through, but it was probably a lot. And it was expensive. At least, the first of it was. Then, as the headwaiter noted, once everybody was drunk and didn’t care anymore what the wine tasted like, it was less expensive. That’s when they broke out the cheap stuff. Jesus could have somehow produced a little bit of bad wine and left them to it. But He didn’t. He miraculously produced well over 100 gallons of really good wine. The headwaiter marveled over just how good this wine was. Somewhere in his comments to the groom was a bit of scolding that he hadn’t been informed of this unexpectedly delightful surprise.
This is how God’s kingdom works. It operates on the principle of abundance. There is no lack with God. That’s part of His glory too. He has access to all the resources in the world. And when we are willing to trust in Him, that abundance is put at our disposal. This doesn’t mean He is looking to make a big scene on our behalf. He certainly didn’t here. And this doesn’t mean we are always going to have all of our desires satisfied when we place our trust in Him. But He will make sure there is enough for us to meet our needs and share with someone else. And, when we are willing to use the abundance He has shared with us to meet the needs of those around us before worrying about our own, thus using it after the pattern of His kingdom, He’ll always have our back.
In this miracle—this sign of His identity—Jesus revealed His kindness, His compassion, His mercy, His generous spirit, His humility, the abundance of His kingdom, His power. In short, He revealed His glory. And He didn’t do it to make a big splash. The people who most directly benefited from His actions were the ones who knew the least about what had happened. This is because Jesus didn’t ultimately do it for them. He did it so that His disciples would believe in Him. He did it to provoke faith in a certain group of people. When Jesus reveals His glory, it’s so that we can know Him because He wants to be known by us. And He wants for us to know Him because He knows this will result in greater kingdom growth than any public spectacle will. A few people who know Jesus and are willing to live life His way because of it are powerful. Indeed, a group of people who knew Jesus because they had witnessed and experienced His glory who numbered about as many as we do in this room changed the world. Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is.
This is still what Jesus is in the business of doing today through our lives. And He often does it in the same subtle ways He did here. But for those with eyes to see, the revelation of who He is is undeniable. His glory is undeniable. Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is. He reveals it to us and through us to the world around us.
Let me give you an example. A few weeks ago, Sherry Edwards shared her story of God’s surprising and wonderful work in her life. Her cancer was turned back when her doctors were not comfortably confident that was going to be the results of her treatments. Sure, they were hopeful, but it wasn’t a kingdom hopefulness. It was the kind of generic hope that’s all the world can produce. But in ways no one expected or could have precisely detailed, she’s cancer-free right now. As she told us, she is, in the words of her doctor, a miraculous case. I hope you could hear as well as I could the faith that produced in her. Yes, the doctors were shocked and amazed, but like the disciples, she saw something different. She experienced Jesus’ glory. And perhaps some of you saw it too. I know for a fact that was her intent in sharing it. Jesus worked and is working in her life to reveal His glory so that she could see Him, and so that we can too. This is what He does. Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is.
This means we need to pay attention. We need to pay attention to the big things, sure, but more so the little ones. Jesus’ glory-revealing work often unfolds in ways that are unassuming and unexpected. He is humble and surprising. But He’s also powerful and generous. If we are looking for a certain kind of thing, we just may miss what He actually does. And we have to make sure our vision isn’t clouded by distractions that could keep us from seeing it. If you’ve got unresolved bitterness and hurt in your past, there’s a good chance you’re not going to see much of Jesus’ work in your present. This is not because He’s not doing anything, but because you’ve got blinders on to it. Sometimes His greatest work is found in simply helping us to remove those blinders so we can see Him for who He really is. Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is.
He reveals His glory to us just like the miracle of turning water into wine revealed His glory—who He is—to His disciples. He also reveals His glory through us. John and the other disciples believed in Jesus because of what He did. And because they believed in Him, they began to live like they believed in Him. They obeyed His command to love one another after the pattern of His own love for them. They proclaimed the truth about Him to anyone who would listen. They let His power flow through them as they sought to love the people around them in practical and meaningful ways. They saw Jesus and helped the world around them do the same. And things have never been the same since. Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is.
So, where do you see Jesus’ glory in the world around you? Are you even looking for it? Are you looking for it only in the big and the flashy, or are your eyes peeled in the mundane and unassuming moments of life when His glory is simultaneously the clearest and the hardest to see. If you have experienced Jesus’ glory, what are you doing to help others see that as well? Are you sharing it with other members of the body to encourage them? Are you sharing it with friends and neighbors so they can see it too? Are you sharing it only in words, or are you sharing it by your actions, by your loving like Jesus loved. Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is…and so we can help others see who He is too.
Imagine if as a church we were entirely committed to that. Imagine the impact that could have on this community and beyond. Imagine how people would be drawn to that light as we together shined like a city on a hill. Believers would come to be a part of growing God’s kingdom. More importantly, people who aren’t following Jesus yet would come so they could experience the transformation God’s glory always brings. And God’s kingdom would grow. The more people who know who Jesus is, the bigger God’s kingdom gets. And that’s the goal. Jesus reveals His glory so we can see who He is. Let’s see and help all the world see as well. Let’s be a part of revealing His glory to the world.