Has Our Time Come?
David C. Myers
January 17, 2010
Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday
Human Relations Day
John 2:1 - 11
Text: Jesus: "My time has not yet come."
Mary: "Do whatever He tells you." . . . from John 2:4 - 5
There are many wonderfully funny stories about weddings. Any minister worth their salt can tell lots of them. I have one that begs to be shared. It happened at one of my first weddings. Perhaps it explains my lack of comfort with the language of yesteryear. As the fidgeting bridegroom stood before me, I asked him, "Wilt thou have this woman to be thy lawfully wedded wife?" And he answered, and with more meaning than he intended, "I wilt."
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus' ministry begins with a wedding party. It is a somewhat surprising but also provocative text for the day we also observe Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. Accordingly I have three points.
1.) The first has to do with Mary. We need to see her as a truth-teller. We all remember the story of the wedding reception at Cana in Galilee. The whole community was gathered for the event - a grand celebration, a social gala, a big block party. In the culture of Jesus' day, when life was mostly hard and grim and pleasures few, a wedding feast was a bright exception. For seven days after the wedding, the newlyweds were honored by the community, and, in turn, the couple provided an inexhaustible supply of wine for the guests. To fail in this customary duty of hospitality would be a real disgrace to a young couple, and might even threaten their marriage.
We must understand that in that culture wine was not only crucial to this particular wedding reception, it was an essential element in the daily lives of people. Of course, even the good Methodists among us will recognize that back then wine was a staple of basic nourishment, more frequently drunk than water, which had to be purified by boiling. But more than that, often wine was used medicinally, either as a drink to soothe the stomach or as a purifying agent to cleanse wounds. And on occasions like the wedding festival in Cana, wine was also used for mirth, to enhance community.
But there was one problem which threatened to seriously disrupt the festivities. According to John's Gospel, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was the first one to state it outright. "They have no wine."
I'm not sure how Mary knew. Maybe she detected a break in the normal chatter and buzz. Maybe she heard complaints from those who waited in vain for wine to be shared. Maybe she noticed someone watering down the last of the remaining wine to make it last a little longer.
But Mary definitely knew: the wine had run out. And she had the courage to declare it. I thank God for Mary, for she was a truth-teller. Many of us, when there is a diminishment of what is essential for the good life, still keep acting like everything is all right, still try to keep others from knowing that if something isn't done soon, life itself will be threatened by the diminishment.
And Mary knew what she had to do. It must have been a relief to her that her son, Jesus was there. He would know what to do. She simply laid out the problem before Him: "They have run out of wine." No instructions to Him about how He was to deal with this dilemma, no guilt trips, just a statement of tragic fact: someone in need, someone was hurting, someone's happiness was threatened.
Hail to you, Mary, speaker of truth. Something and essential to the community was lacking, and you had the strength to say it aloud. "They have no wine."
We are challenged by Mary's truth telling. In our society today we must decide whether we too will have the courage to speak the truth. So I am going to take this opportunity to share with you a startling truth that should never be far from our thoughts. It should have enormous implications for how we think, how we vote, and how we view the world.
If the world were a global village of 100 people . . . .
18 would be white, 82 would be non-white
9 would speak English
33 would be Christian
80 would live in sub-standard housing
67 would be unable to read
33 would be without safe water
24 would have no electricity
1 would have a college education
5 would control 32% of the entire world's wealth
33 would be attempting to live on 3% of the income of the entire world
. . . source: Dannella H. Matthew's think tank: the Sustainability Project, 2005
Now, what conclusions can we draw from this - if we are truth tellers? We call ourselves the majority, but we are not. We complain about our economic conditions, but compared to the rest of the world, our economic conditions are exorbitant. We say the only problem with world hunger is the political distribution that exists in the starving countries, and yet the very few control almost all the wealth.
But we should not be overcome with worry and despair. Because whenever the truth is spoken, we can find hope, even in situations of diminishing vitality.
That is why I get excited when I read that Mary goes over to talk to Jesus. "They have no wine," she tells Him.
This is a confession of faith. Mary has reached a point where she realizes that her resources are not adequate to meet the need. So she turns to Jesus - Who, she understands, has been sent into the world to bring salvation. She speaks the truth to the One Who has the power to transform the current reality of diminishment. Mary confessed her faith by bringing her need. That is what I believe we all must do.
2.)The second point has to do with how respond when faced with the truth. The story then takes a strange and surprising twist. Jesus, in that moment of need, expresses reticence to be a saving presence. "Woman, what concern is that to you and Me. My hour has not yet come." Do we detect a sassy-ness in His tone, a crispness between mother and son? Do we see some of the same feelings we have? After all Jesus came and walked and lived as one of us.
It's hard to fully understand Jesus' response. Perhaps it was a defining moment for Jesus, such as He had faced in the wilderness, and would face again in Gethsemane, and who knows how many other untold times of His life. And it is a defining moment for all of Jesus' followers as well: our schedule or God's? Our agenda or God's? Our will or God's?
How we respond to the moment defines our relationship to God's will for our lives. Will we look at what is happening around us seeing that people do not have what they need so that they can celebrate life and say, "What concern is that to me. My hour has not yet come." Do we look at the hungry in our very wealthy area and say, "what concern is that to me?", or, "how can a community like Bethesda need a Soup Kitchen?" Do we see the homeless men women and children of greater Washington and say "what concern is that to me?" Do we turn our backs on the hungry of the world, and say, "What concern is that to me? I cannot be responsible for feeding the whole world."
But Mary knew her Son, perhaps better than He knew Himself in that crucial decision, for she simply instructed the servants to give Him whatever He needed in whatever course He chose to take, in providing the solution to this problem.
In the end Jesus discovered that His hour had come. He knew that He could not buy into false dichotomies that separate the spiritual from the social. He knew that what was occurring at the Cana reception was crucial to the heart of the gospel: people were being divided, succumbing to hostility instead of love. So, this awkward faux pas was as good a place as any to begin His ministry.
Mary, too, understood. She saw consent in His eyes - eyes she had looked into since His earliest days. She knew that his passion to bring wholeness could not be restrained, even in that setting.
"Do whatever he tells you," she said to the servants. So they filled up the water pots. Jesus also gave the orders: "Draw some out and take it to the steward."
So water became wine in both abundance and in quality. What a mighty miracle! Jesus has turned water into wine! The story proclaims that God sanctifies and transforms the most ordinary things in our lives. God takes what is necessary for our basic survival, nourishment, and healing and makes it into something filled with joy. And a tragedy was averted, a new marriage protected, and a family's reputation saved. Water became wine. Fear was swallowed up in love.
In this sense the story of the Wedding at Cana is a cameo of the theological truth that, as William Nichols stated, "salvation is not possible without someone's sacrifice." Water into wine. Death into life, despair into joy always requires a Savior Who is willing to say, "this is My business."
Jesus was willing to sacrifice His anonymity and bring wholeness to a young couple and an entire community. Remember the rejoicing of the guests? "The steward called the bridegroom and said to him, 'Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.'"
3.)The third and final point is how we understand this story and the nature of the miracle that occurred. So maybe we need to ask ourselves, what precisely was Jesus' miracle? If we were to ask Jesus, He might respond to us, "What miracle do you need - a biochemical transformation, or a social transformation?" Maybe it was a little bit of both. But what fascinates me about this miracle, and what gives me hope for our situation today was not the change in the elements, but the change in the perceptions of those who drank. Through Jesus we have become aware of a power that is capable of transforming the way we see one another.
When our hour has come, when we are transformed by drinking the new wine, all of a sudden we see things differently. This weekend we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., another person who sacrificed himself for others. If we honor this day, and this scripture, we, too, will be transformed. Instead of seeing a Black person or a white person, we see a brother or sister. Instead of seeing a welfare mother, we see a member of our own family. Instead of seeing a starving kid from a distant land of another race with a bloated stomach, we see our own child suffering. This is the miracle of the Gospel: that it changes the way we see - it transforms us.
According to the Gospel of John, Jesus begins His ministry not saving people from their sins - but from social embarrassment. That may initially sound like poor theology, but when we grasp the full message of the Gospel, we realize that what appears as merely social embarrassment is in fact our deepest sin: for social embarrassment is at its most basic the divisions that tear us apart. Both in Cana in Jesus' day and in our society today, this is the great sin from which we need salvation - we are a people torn apart.
Any religion or any gospel - right or left, that does not deal with the fragmentation of people, and particularly within the Body of Christ, is mere water, it is not wine. And let us not ever forget that what Martin Luther King, Jr. described as the most segregated hour in America is the hour of worship. If our hour has come we must deal effectively with the social divisions between the haves and the have nots, between Whites and Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, and others. If we don't we are not dealing with the best wine, but only a cheap imitation.
And if it is not real wine, or if the real wine has run out, we, like Mary, must speak the truth. We need the real thing, with its medicinal, healing qualities. Nothing short of the real wine of transformation will suffice. What was in those pots of water that Jesus instructed the servants to fill was nothing less than an inexhaustible supply of divine love.
Our hour has come. Let us drink it deeply. Let us experience transformation. Then we will, in the tradition of all good weddings, lift a glass for a toast - a toast to the health of our societies and ourselves.
Sometimes the dynamics of mother and son - Mary and Jesus, can help us determine when our hour has come!