Some years ago, at a communion service, I read the gospel story of the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11), and was about to speak about it when a young guy in the congregation, who was there with his mate – they’d just come in off the street, we’d never seen them before nor since – interrupted and said, “Excuse me. Why did Jesus turn water into wine?” As I was just about to launch into a sermon on that very subject, it wasn’t too difficult to offer an answer to the question. I’d come up with:

1.    His mother told him to.

Which is a good enough reason to do anything! Jesus’s relationship with his mother is not exactly straightforward. She had been warned when he was a child that he would break her heart (Luke 2:35). Jesus’s mission is to the whole world and his own family was sometimes eclipsed and mystified by that, to the point where they thought he was mad (Mark 3:21). Here, his conversation with his mother is at least a bit strained – she says, ‘They have no wine’; he says, ‘Woman, what’s that to you and me?’ (v4). Rude!

But he does it! Mary knows that Jesus can make a difference, so ‘Do what he tells you…’

2.    He had seen a need.

In Jesus’s day, weddings would last a week. Imagine picking up the bill for that – a week’s worth of eating and drinking! And the unthinkable happened, the wine gives out. Imagine the embarrassment! We’re not told whose wedding it was but it might have been a relative. Whoever it was, they are in danger of looking mean or foolish in front of the whole village. Jesus sees the need and steps in to meet it. Actually, he does more than that. He doesn’t just provide wine, he supplies good wine, and gallons of it – 6 jars, each holding 20 to 30 gallons of water, used in a rite of purification. That’s 120 to 180 gallons of wine, or 800 to a thousand bottles! And it’s good stuff! Not the plonk that you might get away with after everyone has had skin-full!

That’s more than meeting a need, that’s exuberant, extravagant abundance! It’s a picture of grace: that God more than meets our needs.

3.    In this, the first of his ‘signs’, Jesus ‘revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him’ (v11).

This is the real point: this is a moment of revelation. John tells us it’s the first of Jesus’s ‘signs’. Not miracles. Not magic tricks. But signs. A sign points to something. The signs of Jesus point to who Jesus is. In John’s gospel we’ll see him healing people, feeding people, walking on the water and raising Lazarus to life (John 11). These are signs that God is at work in the life and ministry of Jesus. The ultimate sign will be his own death and resurrection; but we start here with the abundance of God’s grace.

Jesus’s ‘hour’

At the start, Jesus says “My hour has not yet come” (v4). He’s talking about his death on the cross. In John 7.30:

“Then they tried to arrest (Jesus), but no one laid hands on him,
because his hour had not yet come.”

And in John 8.20 we read that Jesus

“spoke these words while he was teaching in the treasury of the temple,
but no one arrested him, because his hour had not yet come.”

It’s not until John chapter 12 that Jesus says:

 ²³‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’.

And in John 13, before Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, we are told that Jesus

“knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”

This is where the abundance of God’s grace will be made known. The pouring out of wine at the wedding was a sign of God’s grace. On the Cross, in the pouring out of his very lifeblood, Jesus pours out the grace of God.

At the crucifixion, John tells us:

A jar full of sour wine was standing there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to his mouth.

When Jesus had received the wine, he said, ‘It is finished.’ Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. (John 19: 29, 30)

Jesus gives the best wine to others, starting with the guests at the wedding in Cana.

In Revelation 19 we hear of the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:6-10), when we will eat and drink in God’s presence. We anticipate that in our eucharist, where we take bread and wine in remembrance of the one who tasted the sour wine of death for us and offers the good wine of the kingdom to us.