“Little” Problems, Abundant Answers
St. John 2:1-12
17 January 2016 – Redeemer
“They have no wine.”
Not a day goes by without a little problem. Pick your favorite. Your computer won’t access your e-mail. One of your children informs you at 8:45 pm that you need to make a Target run. You open the mail and your phone bill was raised $5 – no explanation, no letter, just a line of codes and abbreviations that you can’t understand.
At the Wedding of Cana, Mary brought a little problem to her Son Jesus. In response Jesus manifests His glory to His disciples. He gives them an Epiphany. He shows that He is God — God for whom no problem of ours is too little and God who gives us gifts in abundance. He manifests His glory that we ight trust Him with our little problems and be confident in His abundant answers.
They ran out of wine at the wedding. The groom’s father was beside himself – what will they say down at the Legion or at Bowling on Monday night? But really, was it that big of a deal? How many couples spend thousands of dollars on a wedding and don’t spend any time working on their marriage? A perfectly planned wedding has no significance for your marriage. But the devil is in the details, reputations are important. God forbid the free drinks run out. So someone went to Mary and Mary went to Jesus.
She doesn’t really tell him to fix it, but you know what she means. Your wife says, “Honey, the garbage is full.” Your mom tells you, “Your room is a mess.” You don’t respond, “Yes it is. You’re very observant.” You know what Mary means and so did Jesus. “They have no wine. Take care of it.” Mary gets rebuked. It’s a little problem. “Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” Jesus’ hour is the cross. I’m going to pour out my blood for the sin of the world and you want me to be a wine spigot for these wedding guests. Woman, what does this have to do with me?
Mary has been Jesus’ mother for thirty years. She has seen more of Him than anyone else. She knows His perfect heart, His compassion, His complete obedience and trust for His heavenly Father. He rebukes her and she still believes whatever He does will be good and right – that’s faith. Maybe He’ll send all the guests home – you’re drunk, the party is over, be safe out there. Maybe He’ll pull His Visa out and send Judas down to Westside Liquor. Maybe He won’t do anything. Whatever He does for her and the bride and the groom will be right. She says to the servants, “Do whatever He tells you.”
I don’t believe Jesus ever considered a problem little. Every problem, even the little problems are indicators of sin. Maybe the bridegroom was miserly and selfish and didn’t buy enough wine for the guests. Maybe there was a whole bunch of wedding crashers because Jesus was there and they were hoping for a selfie with Jesus and 10 seconds of fame on snapchat. What’s the problem? Sin. Self-centered, self-serving, self-protecting sin breaks everything it touches. The little brokenness we experience everyday is a sign of the great brokenness of sin. Your tire goes flat, your toaster quits working, you get a hang nail, some little tiny cell in your body misfires and cancer starts. That’s not the way it should be and you know it. It’s broken. The world is broken. Everything breaks and ends up in a landfill. Everyone dies and ends up in the cometary And that is tied to Jesus’ hour. He has come to bind up the broken-hearted and to give life to the dying.
Jesus never considered anything too little for His attention. He welcomes a little child onto His lap. He has lunch with the wee little man Zachaeus. He’s known as the man who dined with the least – the sinners. Why? Because that was His heart – you aren’t too little, too lost, too insignificant for Him. The world may consider you insignificant, but your Savior doesn’t. As He walked this world in the flesh He stopped along the way again and again for the least among us. All of that directs our eyes to His hour – the hour of His suffering and death, for the least of us – for you and for me, for our sins, for our brokenness, for our little and large problems.
Do whatever He tells you. Six stone water jars. Twenty to thirty gallons each. St. John likes the details. “Fill the jars with water.” Jesus said “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast.” (Jn 2:7-8) 120 to 180 gallons of wine. Approximately 5 bottles in a gallon – that’s between 600 and 900 bottles of wine.
What a waste! This is the best wine ever made on earth – it was vinted by God Himself. It was the “very good” of creation. And these guests had already been drinking for three days. If they were drunk they wouldn’t appreciate it. If they weren’t drunk they soon would be.
Wasteful. The wine steward certainly thought so. If the bridegroom was behind this he was a fool and the steward told him so, “Anyone with half a brain would have served the good wine first and brought out the cheap stuff when everyone was drunk.” What were you thinking? Do you like to throw away your money, wasting this very good wine?
And that is how our God appears to the world. He is a fool (in Greek the Word is “moron”) who squanders his wealth on a bunch of ingrates. Jesus dies for the whole world – He dies for those who will never believe in Him. He dies for the atheists who exhaust themselves fighting against Someone they don’t believe exists. He dies for parents who never bring their children to church. He dies for confirmands who promise to be faithful to death and are faithless the next week. He pours out His blood for every sinner. His Spirit opens the spigot of Word and Sacrament for the world with forgiveness enough for every sinner – those who abuse it, those who reject it, those who are ignorant of how “very good” this wine of Jesus is.
But you and I see something different. We are not the stewards who call the bridegroom amoron, but rather we guests at the wedding who rejoice in the Bridegroom’s gracious abundance. Because the Spirit has poured this new wine into us old wineskins. The Spirit has given us eyes to see and feel and repent of our brokenness, realizing that the great problem of our sin lurks behind the broken toaster and flat tire and all our other little problems. And then we come to this foretaste of the feast to come and Christ gives us more to drink that we can swallow.
I forgive you all your sins. That’s a ridiculous amount of forgiveness. Doesn’t He know me? Doesn’t He know I abuse that forgiveness? That I take advantage of it? Indulge my sins with it. Yes, He knows you, but He’s willing to pay – not silver or gold, but holy, precious blood on the cross. God’s blood. Yes, He knows you, but He’s willing to risk it for you – His forgiveness, His mercy, His compassion, that all your little problems (which aren’t really little) might be fixed (now by faith and then by sight) through His abundant forgiveness.
It’s another Sunday after Epiphany, another Sunday where our Father shows us Himself in the Son. He is the God who answers our little problems with His great abundance. In the name of Jesus. Amen.