We could all use more joy in our lives today, tomorrow, and forever. A comedian reminded me of this a few days ago. Let me explain. My wife, Julie, and I went and saw a comedian Friday night. We enjoyed some laughs together. Julie tried to carry the joy into the next day by sharing one of the jokes the comedian had told with our daughters. But one of the things the comedian said that stuck in my head was that a lot of times when he goes to church, the preachers talk about heaven as if all that goes on there is chanting the same song over and over again for all eternity. I don’t know how you feel about chanting, but if this is all heaven is, it did not appeal to the comedian.
In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus brought joy in the moment at the wedding feast, helped that joy carry on into tomorrow, and gave us all a taste of the joy we are invited to experience at the eternal wedding feast in heaven.
Joy today. The first reason Jesus’ first public miracle in the Gospel of John happened with water being turned into wine at the wedding of Cana was because the bride and groom invited Jesus, Mary, and the disciples to the wedding. If they had not been invited, they probably wouldn’t have been at the wedding and the water would not have been turned into wine. If we want to experience joy and a miracle today, we should start the day by praying to Jesus and asking Mary to pray for us and intercede for us.
While Jesus and Mary were there because they were invited, for some of the others at the wedding feast, I think it took more than a simple invitation for them to show up and to stay there. An essential element of a weeding feast in the first century was wine. If the bride and groom did not have wine at their wedding the simple fact is that some of the people they wanted to come to the wedding feast would not have come. If they did not think they were going to experience some joy at the wedding feast they would not have shown up. The same is probably true for some of the people we wish were here today but who are not here. Sorry to spoil the surprise, we have water and wine here today. But do we have joy? Maybe the reason some of our friends and family who we want to be here today are not here today is because they don’t expect they will experience joy here. I try to be a servant leader, so when something doesn’t go the way I would like it to go, I try to look in the mirror and see what I could have done better to improve the situation. Maybe the reason some of our friends and family members are not here today is because we aren’t living our lives with more joy that attracts others to want to come see where we get our joy so they can experience joy too.
Jesus was enjoying the moment at the wedding feast. I think you can tell this by his conversation with Mary. She tells Jesus, “they ran out of wine.” I imagine Jesus was hanging out with his friends, having a glass of wine, listening to the music, eating some food, and enjoying talking with his friends when Mary told him about the bride and groom running out of wine. Now, remember, Jesus is not the groom, he is not the father of the groom, he is not the headwaiter, he is not even one of the servers. He is just a guest. It is not his job to make sure there is enough wine. Maybe you have experienced this when you are at a party with friends or family and you are enjoying yourself and then someone brings up a responsibility you are supposed to take care of or a job that needs to be done. “Ugh” you think to yourself. “I just want to have a good time. I don’t want to work.” I imagine Jesus is thinking like that when he responds saying, “woman, how does your concern affect me. My hour has not come.” I think this interaction between Jesus and Mary shows us how Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, how he has both a human intellect and a divine intellect. His human intellect or mind exists within time and changes over time, he grew in wisdom. His divine intellect exists outside of time and does not change. We hear him verbalize the thought of his human intellect when he responds to Mary. To me, his response to Mary sounds an awful lot like Jesus is saying, “no” to doing anything about the problem of them running out of wine, but he ends up turning the water into wine. With that Divine intellect, he knows to honor your mother and your father. God the father and Mary like all good parents are on the same page in terms of what they want their child to do, so he obeys what Mary wants him to do.
This shows us that for all those times that we have been praying to Jesus for the same things over and over again and being frustrated by Jesus’ response or apparent lack thereof, we should ask his mother and our mother to pray for us. We all have someone in our life who we have a real hard time saying “no” to, for Jesus, that person is Mary. We need to be asking her for her intercession.
Mary then says the only recorded commandment from her in the Bible, which are also her last recorded words in the Bible. Five simple words, “do whatever he tells you.” Following this commandment is the path to sainthood. It’s as simple as that and as hard as that. Why is it hard? We get a taste of this in the Gospel reading. What does Jesus tell the servers to do? He tells them to take the six stone water jars and to fill them up with water. When we hear this in the 21st century, that sounds easy enough to us. We take the water jars over to the faucet and turn on the water, fill them up, and place them on the kitchen table. Not the case back then. They had no running water. They had to take the stone jars to a well to fill them up and the well was usually located outside the city. They would have had to haul the jars outside the town to the well, fill it up, and carry the jar filled with water weighing about 200 pounds back to the wedding feast. They had to be tempted to halfway do it, to just fill the jars halfway up. Sometimes we are tempted to just halfway do something Jesus is asking us to do or that we know we are supposed to do. If the servers would have just halfway filled up the jars, maybe Jesus would have refused to turn the water into wine since they didn’t do what he told them to and maybe they would have ended up with just half as much wine.
Sometimes, Jesus only blesses us to the extent we allow him to bless us. If we only halfway do something, maybe we only experience half of his blessings. When we fully do what Jesus wants us to do, that’s when we fully experience the blessings Jesus wants us to experience.
Jesus turns the water into wine because he wants us to experience joy now, for that joy to be extended into tomorrow so that we may begin to believe in him, so that can be just a foretaste of the joy he wants to experience with us at the eternal wedding feast in heaven. While it took those servers the hard job of carrying those jars of water weighing 200 pounds each in order for Jesus to turn it into an abundance of over 120 gallons of wine to extend the joy for a long time, Jesus comes here today, takes the water and wine and turns it into his precious blood. All it takes is one drop of this precious blood to cleanse us from our sins so that we may enjoy the eternal wedding feast with him and Mary.
So friends, invite Jesus and Mary into your life today so that we may experience joy today and that extends into tomorrow and extends into the lives of all our friends and family. May this joy attract them to want to experience this joy so that we may all experience the joy of the eternal wedding feast with all our friends and family and Mary and Jesus in heaven.