05-11-2025 -WEDDING AT CANA OF GALILEE - John 2:1-11

MESSAGE BY PASTOR ROB INRIG

   FROM BETHANY BAPTIST IN RICHMOND, BC

I invite you to pray together: O Father of mercies and God of all comfort, our only help in time of need: We humbly beseech thee to behold, visit, and relieve thy sick servants for whom our prayers are desired. Look upon them with the eyes of thy mercy (Gaby P, Vicky O, Nancy R, Tere G, Liz N, Stevie A, Socrates D, Sara's mom H, Margarita G, Fega G,  Rosy Ch, Patricia L. Lina J. Manuel D. C, Yuya N. Mercedes L. )   Comfort them with a sense of thy goodness; preserve them from the temptations of the enemy; and give them patience under his affliction. In thy good time, restore them to health, and enable them to lead the residue of their life in thy fear, and to thy glory; and grant that finally they may dwell with thee in life everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

You can add names from family and friends who need prayer.

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To all of you who visit this blog, I ask for a prayer for Gabriela Piña, a beloved friend who is battling cancer, she has been fighting against this disease with much positivism against this terrible disease, we have been praying for her but lately she is battling with the unpredictable, my heart is in great pain knowing this, but my great faith in our Lord remains that for Him there are no impossibles even when everything looks dark, He has a light waiting for her but I ask with my spirit and heart to give her that opportunity that He always has available for all, to know Him and be a living testimony that He is real and that He loves her infinitely as His adopted daughter, I ask for a prayer together so that He hears our plea, because I know that prayer is powerful. I humbly ask that you support me in this, at this very painful time for her, and for all of us who love her as a sister in Christ Jesus. With my broken heart, I thank all my brothers and sisters in Christ for your support in this. Amen!

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This morning I want to take you to a wedding – a celebration not much different than what we’d attend today.  A little less formal, a lot more dance and many more days for this party to last – a good thing that’s not the case today given the cost.  People coming to share in the joy of this young couple as well as spending time with friends. 

As we’re introduced to this event, we are told it is the 3rd day.  Whether it’s the 3rd day after Jesus’ baptism, the 3rd day choosing some disciples or a 3rd day of travel we don’t know but John saw fit to note that it was the 3rd day when Jesus steps into the celebration, He present doing what God does best on the 3rd day, bringing new life into situations needing hope. Consider:  

Esther – speaking life into certain death on the 3rd day of her fast when she risked death by stepping into the King’s court to save her people from destruction from Haman’s hand.

Jonah experiencing the hope of a new beginning when after 3 days entombed in the belly of the fish, he was regurgitated onto shore.

The Israelites stepping from a desert into the Jordan on the 3rd day to claim their new land. 

Even Jewish tradition notes the importance of the 3rd day, in their belief that a person's spirit remained with a dead body for 3 days before departing, ensuring death had come.  

And then there’s Hosea prophetic, Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after 2 days, He will raise us up on the third day that we may live before Him.  6:2,3  

Kind of makes you think God has something special in mind for 3rd days, don’t you think? These just shadows, layers if you like, that God was peeling away to reveal His greatest revelation to come.  

John places this event, the 1st of 7 sign miracles he records in his Gospel. There is the:  

1. Healing of a man who’s been paralyzed 38 years   Jn 5:1-15

2. Feeding of the 5000 men – meaning many, many more  Jn 6:1-15 

3. Jesus walking on water and calming the waves   Jn 6:16-24

4. Jesus giving sight to a man born blind   Jn 9:1-12

5. Raising of Lazarus who’d been in the tomb for three days   Jn 11:1-44

These miracles John refers to as signs, not events for us to look on in amazement, but miracles that direct us to where they point.  And where they point? - for God’s glory to be seen. 

To see Jesus – God come in flesh so that we can know Him.   If you consider the likelihood of God taking on flesh?  I mean really, what God does something like that?  Something like that defying belief – but the most amazing, it’s TRUE!  God’s incomprehensible, good news - God’s love for us is overwhelming – more, than that God’s love lavishly bestowed. He, humbling Himself. and coming to us - not us out looking for Him.

A love He offers to all.  A love not earned, but given.  A love not merited, but there to be received.  This love tripping up the Pharisees and tripping up so many today.  Because the religious tells us that what we get is determined by what we do, by how good we are.  But God pointing us in a completely different direction, that His love can never be earned because His standard of what is good can never be met by what we do or what we offer. 

And that is what Jesus was making clear to the religious.  It’s why the Pharisees wanted Jesus out of their lives.  They had too much to lose.  So their signs pointed to Jesus as a delusional individual who was surrounded by unsophisticated followers.  They had no intention of believing what Paul states in Colossians that, In Jesus, all the fullness of the Godhead dwells Col 2:9.  

Most here this morning have believed the signs God gave pointed to Jesus who came to give us new life however, sometimes we stumble in living out that new in our everyday. And among the reasons? not truly believing God knows us by name. That he knows my doubts and fears. Knows my insecurities and anxieties.  Knows, yet still loves in my less than good.  Knows my dreams and hopes.  In all of these, immensely loved.  God coming close, finding us. As 1 Jn 4:10 tells us, Not that we loved God but that He loved us.  The word used to describe God’s love for us is hesed, His covenantal: everlasting, merciful, kind, gracious, tender, never ending, unchanging, faithful, steadfast love.  It is a love He initiates, He situates and He activates.  This to say – it is His doing, His ‘presencing’, His empowering and His securing.  

HIS DOING - Because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, He made us alive together with Christ   Eph 2:4,5

HIS PRESENCING -  I have called you by name, you are mine.  Isaiah 43:1  

HIS EMPOWERING -  May you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is.   Eph 3:18 

HIS SECURING -  Nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord   Rom 8:39.

With that foundation, let’s return to the love story we are looking at this morning – a wedding, Jesus there as a guest.  Everything unfolding as it should.  Most at the wedding are party focused – food great, friendships solid, wine good.  

And then the tap turned off. Literally. People lining up at the buffet table only to find after plates were filled that the servers were no longer filling the wine goblets as they had in the early stages of the festivities.  Now the wine stewards looking every which way, except at the outstretched empty vessels held in front of them because they had nothing more to give.

Ever been there – oh I don’t mean at a buffet table, your glass left unfilled.   No, I’m talking about times when it feels as if someone has unplugged life and you are the one holding your empty vessel in hand – no provision in sight. Thirsty but your thirst   unquenched.

And no sign of Jesus coming into that place to fill your empty places.  But His reminder to us, the One who loves us is present.  Perhaps His hands not holding what you’ve asked Him to bring but there doing what He knows is needed and is best.  He wanting us to see Him and in our seeing Him, come to Him, having faith that His presence is what we truly need.   

It’s fitting that Jesus’ first miracle is in Cana, just a simple place where life is lived.  Nothing auspicious.  Nothing grand.  Nothing that distracts from the everyday. Archeologists aren’t even sure where Cana is.

Cana, just an ORDINARY place on the way to somewhere else.  But ordinary is where we so often see Jesus: on a hillside meeting those who long to hear His words; alongside a roadside where a beggar sits; at a well finding an outcast.  No spectacles.  No loud pronouncements.

God coming to ordinary places where you and I are – the places you sit, the situations in which you struggle, the concerns you deal with – your ordinary places.  My ordinary places.  Coming to these to show that He cares, that He is present.

Coming to people like us where His invitation still is to experience His love.  Wanting us to believe what He says is true.  His first miracle in Cana because Jesus wants us to understand His search isn’t reserved for the impressive, the attractive, the powerful.  Nor is reserved for places considered of no importance. Places easily passed by.  Ah but in places of the ordinary – Jesus comes to do the EXTRAORDINARY, often in ways we fail to recognize as extraordinary.  

In the ordinary of a rarely visited stable.  In the ordinary of a never ridden donkey.  In the ordinary of a barely noticed beggar.  

- In the life of a youth sitting in a math class trying to make sense of algebraic equations while her home-life is a mess.  

- In the life of a single mother struggling to make life work.

- In the life of a business person whose future is hanging by a thread.

But in the ordinary, God wanting to take us to a new place so we can experience celebration –celebration reflecting what God does and who God is. God:

• writing it in music - embedding it in the birds, whistling it in the forests, performing it with horns and strings  (sounds heard but most often missed) 

• expressing it in dance - rustling it through the reeds, whipping it on the oceans, orchestrating it in the creatures, planting it in hearts, expressing it in legs and feet 

• painting it in art - brushing it onto flowers, canvassing it on sunsets, dancing it on 

the Northern lights, ‘galaxying’ it in the heavens and imprinting it into chains of DNA 

• engineering it in technology – wiring it into electromagnetic waves of light and 

sound, lasering it into diagnostic systems that provide a second chance at health.

Celebration that surrounds us, that  tells of God and His loving care. That tells us of a God of joy  of laughter, of song. I think God also planting some of that celebration need in us that, in its own way, a sign to us that there is something more.  We live that out in the small: the concert, the game, the amusement park, the spectacle.  Those things that engage us emotionally – the thrill that excites, the celebration that explodes, the joy that helps us forget.

It’s to this, Jesus’ first miracle points.  Here in the surround of a Jewish wedding, joy abounds - music, dancing, laugher.  And in this, the wine Jesus will provide will be unlike any other.  Scripture using wine to symbolize a time to come that is also described as a wedding when Jesus one day will return to claim His bride, a time of joy and a great celebration feast to follow. 

Jeremiah foretold that in the Messianic age, They will rejoice in the bounty of the LORD - the grain, the new wine . . . Jer 31:12. Amos said that Israel, Will plant vineyards and drink their wine Amos 9:14. The Psalmist states that God gives wine, That makes glad the heart of men Ps 104:15.  The association of the Messiah with a time of plenty - including freely flowing wine - makes Jesus’ first miraculous sign all the more meaningful. This wine not signifying a loss of control rather a time of celebration and shared joy. 

That is why Jesus can do celebration – even in these places where celebration can be hard to find, where celebration can be hard to hold onto – HE KNOWS THE CELEBRATION THAT AWAITS.  

Jesus coming into the ORDINARY  inviting us into His CELEBRATORY.   But in this scene, two very different realities – those engaged in the party and those who surrounded by joy filled guests and a newly married couple, are very aware this party is about to turn badly.

Because behind the scenes, some know everything isn’t glorious.  The servants know it, the host knows it and Mary knows it.  We have no wine and they had no resource to get more.  This was far more than food and drink running low.  In their Middle Eastern context, a wedding without wine is a wedding without JOY; a wedding without wine is a wedding without blessing   

In western perspective, a problem but in their environment, a situation of great shame for the groom and his family, from which they could not hide – a shame in the moment but one that would linger for a very long time.   

Into this place, Jesus comes to do what they cannot do but that is not what Jesus wants you to take from this story.  What He wants you to know is that He knows you and wants to come into your hidden places, your, I have no wine - shame places.  Places others can’t see but are known to Him.  Places that He wants you to hear, You are loved, despite where you’ve been and what you’ve done. Despite your shame and failures you vowed would never happen again.  Jesus coming to heal and forgive and make you completely new.  Cana not a story of a long time ago but His love story to us right now.  

Jesus doing what He did, when He came to earth to find those who are in the INFIRMARY - where life hurts, where wounds have been taken, where the hidden continues to damage, where life is more empty than we dare admit.  

Though those assembled didn’t know it, Jesus providing wine so the lights could stay on and the dancing could continue.  This miracle not of the same magnitude as raising the dead or giving sight to the blind, but Jesus not saving Himself for the great, ignoring things we think too small for Him to enter into.  But this a very real need for a man, his wife and family.

A small need but His miracle given at great cost.  In order to cover their shame, Jesus knowing the price – Mother, you’re thinking wine; having no idea that what you are asking is Me taking first step into what will soon require blood. The price to meet their needs, to come into the infirmary and heal their shame and their pain is far greater than anything you can imagine.  

Woman, you don’t know what you ask!  And yet Jesus doing so willingly because it’s why He came

John captures it well, The hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified. .. Now is My soul troubled. And what shall I say? `Father, save Me from this hour'? No, for this purpose I have come to this hour. Now is the judgment of this world, now shall the ruler of this world be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to Myself.  He said this to show by what death He was to die.  Jn 12:23,27,31-32 .

If you had been able to film what took place next, you’d likely focus on Jesus, the water pots, a smile spreading across His face then the etchings of the reality soon coming.  All the price of rescue.  

Yet Hebrew 12:2 telling us that, For the joy that was set before Him, (He) endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Jesus stepping in, looking beyond the Cross, understanding there was CELEBRATION of great abundance ahead but that celebration would come at a great cost. 

The abundance of what Jesus provides is overwhelming 120-180 gallons of  wine far more than they could possibly drink.  You can bet that when the wine steward said, This wine surpasses everything yet tasted, people pushed to the front to fill their cups.  They holding onto to their small little cup failing to recognize that what they held to is so small compared to the abundance available.  

Yet most of still settle for small sips when what God offers is so much more.  Why?  Once again, because we truly don’t understand God’s love for us.  He coming into our ordinary to offer us His extraordinary.  Jesus coming to offer us the abundance of what it truly means to be loved by Him, for us to know what it means to live fully committed to Him.  

As Matthew 19:29 tells us,  Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields because of My name will receive a hundred times more and will inherit eternal life.  This sign, the first of many to come where Jesus would reveal His glory.  

As is so often the case, most at the wedding enjoying what Jesus provided but missing the One who gave the provision. 

Which is actually where I leave this account this morning wondering if you and I do the same?    

John concludes his description of the seven signs with the statement that, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name  Jn 20:30-31 

Jesus demonstrating the abundance of His love for you.  May this morning you know it far more than you have.  He  wanting us to drink deeply of what He has to offer.  All the evidence we need, given us on a blood spilled Cross - where His invitation is given you to come to a wedding celebration ahead unlike anything you have ever.

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