Scripture reading: Isaiah 62:1-5.

Sermon text: John 2:1-11.

“Help me!”

No one prays like a desperate man. On 2 July 1505, a man returning to his university found himself in a terrifying thunderstorm. When a lightning bolt struck close to him, he cried, “Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!”

The rest is history. The man, Martin Luther, survived the storm and promptly became a monk. Luther left behind a law career and became an Augustinian monk. Later in his life, Luther’s belief in the importance of justification by faith led him into a direct conflict with the Roman Catholic Church and resulted into the Protestant Reformation.

Today’s sermon passage shows a different kind of desperation, but it still shows some resemblance to many of our situations. The story recorded by St John demonstrates both how people respond to desperation, how God cares about those who turn to Him for help, and how we should respond to God’s help in our lives.

Jesus, His mother, and His disciples attended a wedding in Cana, a city a few miles from Nazareth. Ancient Jewish weddings didn’t much resemble the weddings in our society. For one thing, the wedding celebration lasted far longer than ours; after the ceremony, the couple and their guests would party for a full week! Everyone would attend a banquet that would last for 7 days. Food and wine would both be free to all guests for the duration of the celebration.

Like our weddings today, the marriage couple wouldn’t ordinarily care for all the minute details of the celebration. Unfortunately, in the case of the wedding in Cana, someone seriously miscalculated the amount of wine the party would need. If word spread about the outage, the groom’s family would face serious embarrassment. In Middle Eastern cultures, losing face remains the ultimate humiliation.

We don’t know how Mary learned of the situation; the “master of the feast,” the man responsible for managing the banquet, would have tried his best to keep this information  secret. Regardless of how Mary learned of the wine shortage, she knew what to do. Mary went to Jesus, her Son, and said, “They have no wine.”

Jesus’ response to Mary remains a mystery. Most men wouldn’t address our mothers as “Woman.” As the oldest son, Jesus would have cared for His mother after Joseph’s death. Mary acted as she would act in any other situation; she turned to her Son and provider to fix the problem. In some way, this wedding feast marked a change in Jesus’ relationship with His mother. From this point forward, Jesus would focus His life on His mission, the revelation of the Kingdom of God. Jesus knew how He would handle this crisis, but He needed Mary to know He would resolve the wine shortage for His own purposes. Since Jesus’ “hour” had not come, the wedding crowd would see no public miracle.

Regardless of how Mary interpreted Jesus’ reaction, she clearly believed He would work to help the hapless groom. Mary told the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Notice that Mary felt comfortable giving orders to the servants, and that the servants found nothing unusual in doing whatever Jesus ordered them to do — regardless of the unusual nature of the order. When Jesus told the servants to “Fill the jars with water,” they did. Then, when Jesus told them to “Draw some out and take it to the master of the feast,” they did.

The jars bear mentioning themselves. These jars were carved from stone and held water for ceremonial washings. The guests would have used the water to demonstrate their religious cleanliness. Each of the 6 stone jars held about 20 gallons of water, so the servants found themselves carrying about 120 gallons of water to fill these jars. The fact the guests had gone through this much water gives us some idea of the size of the wedding party.

When did the water turn into wine? When the servants filled the jars with water? When they dipped it from the jars to take it to the master of the feast? Either way, I believe the servants’ obedience to Jesus played a key role in the miracle.

Notice the master’s reaction. The man called the anxious bridegroom and said, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” (By the way, this statement tells us that, contrary to what you may have heard (and, unfortunately, what some have taught), Jesus did create real wine; otherwise, it wouldn’t have mattered that the wine served last tasted the worst.) Jesus didn’t merely create enough wine for the rest of the feast; He went beyond anything anyone could have expected in the quality of the wine He produced.

St. John described this miracle as a “sign” of Jesus manifesting His “glory.” This “sign” demonstrated the power of the Son of God over nature. It also demonstrated Jesus’ mission to convert hearts as well as water. Many people want to know all the mechanics of conversion, but just as with this miracle, we cannot explain the exact specifics. When Jesus works in the heart of the new convert, He performs the unexplainable: He converts the spiritually dead into a spiritually living being.

We find several lessons in this story of Jesus at the wedding.

First, as I mentioned earlier, God cares about our problems in life. Mary saw a problem; she went to Jesus, the Son of God, for a solution. Christian, no problem is too small for your Father’s attention.

We also see a key point in God’s action for His people, a point we find in Mary’s words: “Do whatever he tells you.” Do you see the major issue? The servants obeyed Mary when she told them to obey Jesus. Obedience to Jesus led to the blessing St. John recorded.

I said earlier that many people want to know the mechanics of conversion. How does a person become a born-again believer in Jesus Christ? St. Paul wrote in Romans, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” In the first century A.D., “confess” implied more than a mere oral assent to a fact. To confess someone as “lord” in St. Paul’s time meant accepting that person as your absolute ruler. Roman citizens proclaimed, “Caesar is lord” as a sign of their loyalty to Rome. St. Paul told Christians to proclaim Jesus as Lord, a confession that many Christians inferred to mean they could no longer confess Caesar as lord. Countless believers suffered martyrdom rather than confess Caesar as lord of their lives.

When we confess Jesus as Lord and receive salvation as the result of that confession, we must accept Jesus’ standards of life; we must accept that His call on our lives supersedes any other loyalty or allegiance we might hold. This means we must accept Jesus’ call to love God above all else in life. This call often requires believers to leave family, profession, career, and nation to serve the Church and proclaim the Kingdom of God in foreign lands. The call sometimes requires believers to serve their congregations in an expanded role.

The confession of Jesus as Lord always means we must accept God’s command to love others. Every person you meet in life — regardless of race, nationality, or religion — will live eternally, either in everlasting joy in the new Creation of Christ or in eternal separation from their Creator. Jesus died for that person’s salvation. We must demonstrate our allegiance to Jesus in our love for people. We do this best by serving them sacrificially and by living godly lives that, as Jesus’ sign, shows His “glory” in our lives. We love those others reject; we love those others despise. We love and accept all who come to our congregation, believing that God can work in their lives to bring them to confess Jesus as Lord and join us in our ministry to our community. We also love those in our community enough to seek them out and invite them to our congregation so they can learn of their need for God and experience His call to salvation.

Doing Jesus’ commands requires us to listen for His call. Jesus speaks to us through Scripture, through the Church, and through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will never contradict Scripture; the Church must teach Scripture to believers, and believers must exemplify in our lives the commands taught in Scripture. People often find themselves at odds with a call from Jesus, falsely believing He would never call them to do anything that would make them uncomfortable. I seriously doubt Jesus felt very comfortable on the cross, a death He endured because of our sins. If Jesus can endure the humiliation and pain of the cross — coupled with the experience of death itself — for our salvation, I believe we can endure “discomfort” to proclaim His Kingdom to others.

“Do whatever he tells you.” Today, Jesus calls people to confess Him as Lord and then live according to that confession. Today, I encourage you to follow Jesus in obedience, love others in your life, and demonstrate your allegiance to Jesus when He calls you to serve Him and His Church.