John 2:1-11
January 7, 2001
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church of San Francisco.
Very soon after Jesus called his disciples, Mary, Jesus, and the disciples are invited to a marriage at Cana, not far from Nazareth. Marriage feasts were lavish affairs to which the entire village was invited. They lasted for about a week. When the wine ran out, Jesus turns a great deal of water into wine—about 120 gallons!
We call this a miracle. How many of you have witnessed a miracle in your life or in someone else’s life? I know that every Sunday night at 8:00, you can watch miracles happening on Touched by an Angel. But the truth of the matter is that our routine lives are in the arena of the expected, the predictable, and not the miraculous.
If we begin with the assumption that miracles don’t, can’t, won’t happen, they never will. A minister told of a story of a woman whose badly burned hand was instantaneously healed overnight. The interesting thing is that she doesn’t believe in miracles. She dismisses it as a “quirk of nature” or a “psychosomatic reaction.” She didn’t believe in God-given miracles before, and she does not now. For her, healing was not a sign of anything other than the natural processes of the body at work. Here’s a woman who had something wonderful happened to her, could not see anything miraculous.
When we see something that doesn’t fit our expectations of what we ought to see, we dismiss it as mere illusion, wish projection, hysteria, paranoia, or maybe just too much food and drink the night before! The modern world has given us a lot of resources for explaining the unexpected.
If Jesus reappeared as a rabbi and touched an educated, logical executive who was disabled at birth and made him walked, I am sure that the man would credit his healing to positive thinking. If Jesus reappeared as an orthopedic surgeon and instantaneously healed the man, the man would attribute his recovery to a well-managed HMO.
As modern people, we find it awfully difficult to believe that miracles can happen. Our preconceptions and prejudices of what ought to happen affect our openness to see miracles.
Seeing the Expected
Now we tend to perceive ancient people like those who lived in the Middle East believing more in miracles than we do because they expected them. We think they anticipated divine intervention. For them, seeing unexpected events in their daily lives was the way of explaining the world.
Surely there is some truth to that understanding and ancient people might even have been wrong in attributing so many events and happenings to the gods. But when we look closely, they were more like us than we think.
When Joseph, the carpenter, was told that Mary his wife to be was pregnant, he didn’t immediately say that God was to blame. He assumed like any confused fiancee might think that she was “with child” in the predictable but human way.
When people witnessed Jesus healing people, most people were speechless, some even said he was an agent of Satan. Only a few said he was from God. Most people wondered where he got his powers.
When Jesus turned the water to wine in Cana, the bartender suspected he had switched the labels in the wine cellar. He didn’t say, “God must have something to do with this.”
The people in the Bible saw what they expected to see. Just like us. We tend to think that biblical people were naïve and more opened to believing what they saw. They didn’t. They were just like us.
Generally speaking, the miracles that Jesus performed and recorded in the Gospels didn’t dramatically change many people’s faith in God. Rarely did anyone move from seeing a miracle to believing that Jesus is the Messiah. Seeing doesn’t always lead to believing. The woman whose burned hand was healed overnight still didn’t believe in miracles.
How Can We Believe in Miracles
As modern people, how can we begin to believe in miracles? C. S. Lewis says that in order to believe in a miracle when you see it, you have got to have (1.) a belief in the regular, patterned, predictable course in the world and (2.) a belief in some reality beyond ourselves.
First of all, if you don’t believe in the predictability of the world, then you would never know a miracle when you see it. Everything would be so chaotic and undependable that nothing would amaze us. But neither is the world some independent, clockwork mechanism wound up and then left to run according to laws. Rather the world is a creation of God that is constantly revealing the love of the Creator.
Secondly, if you exclude any activity in the world other than the natural occurrences that you are able to experience, then any miracle or sign of the unexpected that does happen, you would never know to call it a miracle. When a tree falls in a forest, it does make a crashing noise because all of God’s creation was there listening even though you and I were not there.
Why all this talk about miracles anyway? You might be saying, “I like the world just the way it is: predictable, sensible, and expected.”
Season of Epiphany
We have just completed the season of Christmas that features all kinds of sensory experiences that point to the miracle of the incarnation. The gold and silver decorations, angels who proclaim peace in the world, candles that wipe out the darkness, and hallelujah choruses that shout out Jesus is the Lord of lords and King of kings. But now that Christmas is about to be over, what do we have to point to God’s creativity in the world?
In the church calendar, we have the season of Epiphany. This is a Greek word that means “manifestation.” As Jesus is the Light of the world, we lift up Christ as the manifestation of God’s light of the whole world.
While Christmas is the celebration of the presence of the Christ, God made flesh, Epiphany is the celebration of the light of God’s Son and saving presence, made known to the whole world.
The challenge for us modern people today is to discover the epiphanies in our lives. To believe that the light of God’s Son, Jesus and his saving presence is continuing to be made known in the whole world. Our problem is that even if miracles are happening all around us, we can’t or won’t or don’t have the faith to believe it. Let me try to explain.
Signs Point the Way
When the wise men from the east set out to find the child who has been born king of the Jews, they observed a star at its rising. The star was a sign that led the wise men to Bethlehem where the child was. Without the sign of a star, the wise men would not have been able to warn Joseph and Mary of the dangerous threats to Jesus’ life. A sign pointed the way. Here’s another example.
San Francisco is a great tourist city. We have these street signs that show you how to get to your destination. There’s a crab to get you to Fisherman’s Wharf; a picture of Italy for North Beach or a Chinese street light to come to Chinatown. The street signs are directing you to your destination where you will discover to your heart’s delight a wonderful place to be. Without these signs, you may not find the way.
How about all the “window shopping” that we did? We say we are just looking but the retailers are showing you in their window displays while you’re walking by what are some of the great bargains that you will discover once you come inside. The merchandise in the windows points you to unlimited possibilities to do a complete makeover on you. The windows point to something bigger and better.
When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding banquet, he performed a sign. Jesus’ miracles are signs pointing to God’s power in the world. Most of the time, we can’t see the big picture of God’s power so we are given first a sign to see for ourselves.
Just like the star points the way for the wise men or the street signs show how one can get to Chinatown or department store windows that show what consumers can get inside, miracles are signs pointing to God’s power in the world. We can’t see it all at once, so we get the chance to see a sign that points to God’s glory.
These signs in John might best be thought of as windows through which we glimpse an unrestricted sight of God in the flesh, among us. Just like “window shopping,” we don’t just linger outside on the sidewalk only looking at the displays, but we come in to see the whole store. The signs and miracles that Jesus performed are like windows that we see through to the presence of God who is being revealed to us.
The world that God is creating is so awesome that we as humans cannot fully comprehend it all at once. We witness this divine creativity everyday, though as modern people we have ways of ignoring it. Even with Christ in the world, we can’t or won’t allow ourselves to see the epiphanies, the manifestations of God’s presence in the world to be part of our everyday living.
According to C. S. Lewis, the miracles done by Jesus were signs of God’s creativity at a different speed and on a smaller scale so that we might see and believe.
In miracles, we might witness the wonderful work of God in a more noticeable speed, on a more conceivable scale so that when we witness God at work on a larger scale, we might be filled with wonder at the sign that points toward that one who moves the stars.
When Jesus stilled the storm and made the angry waves to be stilled, nine out of ten who witnessed it wondered, “Who is this?” To a few, the wonder became a sign that in Jesus they were witnessing, at a different speed and on a different scale, the very God who created the wind and the waves.
None of us can see the whole world. Even astronauts far out in space can only see the earth from one side. When we go out on the beach we can only see as far out there until the globe begins to bend. We want to see China, but we can’t. That is what God’s creative splendor is like. We can’t see all of God’s creation all at once so God provides us with signs and miracles in more manageable sizes.
C. S. Lewis says “miracles are retelling in small letters of the same story that is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” Miracles are God doing something locally that which God has done and continues doing universally.” So in these miracles, we are actually seeing signs pointing to God’s presence in the world.
We See the Signs
Let’s get back to our Scripture for today. Notice that even in John’s writing, it includes signs of pointing to who Jesus is. When Jesus answered his mother that his hour has not yet come, he took six jars to symbolize that his ministry is not yet complete since seven is the complete number.
Jesus used stone jars for Jewish purification rites and filled them with water to show that he will replace the old purification ways with a new way. And when the bartender tasted the superior wine, we realize that the miraculous wine symbolizes Jesus who has come to save the world. At the wedding, Jesus not only saved the party, but he is coming into the world to save the world. John wrote about the wedding at Cana with all these signs to point us to see who Jesus is.
We think that it’s a miracle that Jesus turned water into wine. But if you think about it, God does this all the time in California. God causes the rain to water the vineyards and the sun to mature the grapes. We don’t call a gallon of Gallo a miracle, but perhaps we should.
Every day, in our hospitals, the blind see, the lame walk, bodies are made whole. We have spent a fortune teaching you to call it medicine, or technology, or a well-functioning health care delivery system. Perhaps we should call these miracles.
Every Sunday, our church school teachers and advisors open the Bible to their students and when they discover that the lesson makes sense in their lives, they grow closer to knowing the living God. It’s not luck that everything came together or that the lesson plan was particularly good today. It’s a miracle.
Today’s gospel calls us to see the whole world as a miracle—God is continuing to actively love us and care for us. And on those occasions when we unexpectedly experience the hand of God moving among us and a sign points to God’s creative splendor, we give thanks to see God’s glory. Our eyes are opened and we can see momentarily through a window the presence of God.
In such moments, we see a sign, and a manifestation of God’s glory shone around us. And we, like the disciples, believe.
Let us pray.
Lord, the signs and miracles of your creation and grace are everywhere. Help us to see you in the world so that we may believe. Shine your face and your glory so that the whole world may come to know your love and peace. In the name of Christ, we pray. Amen.