Does Jesus Know How to Party? (John 2:1-11) by Chelsea Page

At first glance it doesn’t seem like Jesus is much concerned with the partygoers running out of wine in this story. It is easier to imagine him being concerned about bigger things. “What concern is it to me?” he says. The Jesus we know from the gospels is one who is obsessed with God and justice and poor people, so it’s easy to imagine him pooh-poohing something as frivolous as a party. I can relate to this. After all, why on Earth would God, who has so much on God’s mind with all the natural disasters and accelerating, intractable suffering in the world, possibly be concerned with human celebration? Isn’t God’s role to focus on the big stuff?

But what if the “little stuff” is actually big to God? Let’s not forget what Jesus is actually doing in this story – he and all his disciples are guests at a wedding, the biggest social occasions of the year. His mom is there and Cana is close to Nazareth so I picture him there with all his friends and family. Possibly he was there just out of familial duty, but it is quite possible he was also having fun. Can you imagine Jesus and the guys getting down with the rest of them? I can!

So it may be that Jesus’s refusal to help with the wine was more about getting out of work, especially kitchen work. I can relate to this; growing up, I was never the girl who liked to help in the kitchen, and even now I’d rather eat rice with Parkview teriyaki sauce for every meal than actually cook. Jesus says in response to his mom’s request, “My hour is not yet come.” He hasn’t even started his public ministry yet in the gospel of John. Remember he’s got thirty years of just being himself behind him, and coming out as a prophet is going to completely change his life. Can’t he have just one more night to take it easy?

Well his mother Mary is having none of that. In imperial mother fashion, she takes Jesus’s “no” as a “yes” and sets him to work by calling the servants over. In Jesus’s time and place, making wine was women’s work. Can you imagine how embarrassed Jesus could have felt? But from the perspective of a caring woman, this running out of wine truly did qualify as a social emergency. In their day and age, running out of wine at a wedding party was a humiliating disaster for the hosts. It would be like having miscalculated the shopping for the breakfast buffet and running out of food halfway through. I mean can you imagine? After so much careful planning with meetings and huge lists of details and extremely committed leaders, at a big noisy event with hundreds of people and energies running high? It would be a letdown for all and a fiasco to be remembered for many years. So you can imagine what the hosts of this once-in-a-lifetime wedding celebration might have been feeling, but even more so in a culture where hospitality was an absolute mandate.

In the middle of this unfolding disaster, Mary, notices and tells Jesus to do something about it. Ready or not, he is being called upon to help out. So what does he do? Here’s what the story says. “Now there were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus told the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ So they filled them to the brim. Then Jesus told the servants, ‘Draw some out now and take it to the headwaiter.’ So they took it, and the headwaiter tasted the water that had become wine.”

I think it’s pretty remarkable that Jesus followed the initiative of a woman and got involved in women’s work. He allowed himself to be persuaded by a woman, even to the point of changing his mind right in front of his new disciples. We don’t often think of women as being leaders in the Bible, even though when you look around pretty much any church today you see very strong leadership and participation from women. In our letter from Philippians, Paul calls out by name two prominent women leaders of the Christian community in Philippi, Evodia and Syntyche. He writes, “They have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life.”

Jesus was initially resistant, even to the point of being rude to his mom, but once he changed his mind, he went far above and beyond the minimum of what the situation called for. Once he was in, he was all in; there was no skimping or holding back. We’re talking six jars, each holding twenty to thirty gallons, filled to the brim. That’s 200 gallons of wine, for a party that was already well underway! Remember the wedding guests had already drunk up all the regular wine by this point, how much more do they really need? Then the story adds, “Without knowing where the new wine came from (although the servers who had drawn the water knew), the headwaiter who tasted the wine called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one; but you have kept the good wine until now.’” Jesus’s wine was not only absurdly plentiful but of extremely high quality.

Now, we will be making a LOT of teriyaki sauce today. I mean, gallons and gallons of it, and it is the most delicious teriyaki sauce I have ever tasted. There is something about this abundance and excellence that is good for Christian witness. Paul speaks in these superlatives when he writes to the Philippians about their Christian witness: “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” When women and men get together to do the fun but hard work of church, we prove that getting together makes us accomplish far more than we could alone, to the point where it overflows and becomes a blessing to our broader community. At Parkview you work hard not just for yourselves or to have a good time, but because you are called to serve and nourish your community. Jesus, too, was witnessing beyond himself in this act of ministry. This is how the story ends: “Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.”

There is a point and purpose to our human celebrations. In Philippians Paul tells us over and over again to rejoice. Why? Because it is good Christian witness, because our celebrating points to our love for each other and the incredible hope we have in God’s glory. This glorious God wants us to believe in our own glory too, in our own ability to get together and make amazing things happen, because when we are at church we are in the middle of a truly great party. In God we have a reason to celebrate. God wants the best for us, personally and collectively, in ways that are small and large and sometimes even outlandishly extravagant. The “best” that God wants for us is better and bigger than we can even imagine. I pray that Jesus’s ministry of turning water into wine at Cana, and our ministry today of turning disparate condiments into elegant cuisine, will be signs that expand our imagination. The world thirsts to find out what is possible when human beings work together. Unlike wine which can run out, human cooperation is a truly renewable resource. This harvest season, let the work and play of our church be a sign of Jesus’s beautiful ministry, showing how God’s generosity permeates every aspect of our lives, the big stuff and the supposedly little stuff. It’s all big in God’s eyes. Amen.