Water into wine

'Our Lord Jesus Christ was himself a guest a wedding of Cana in Galilee and through his Spirit he is with us now.'

I love those words from the introduction to the marriage service. They remind us that Jesus graced a wedding with his first ever miracle and in doing so showed the high value of marriage in his estimation, and many a wedding sermon has made that point.

In fact, there are quite a few sermons you could preach on the wedding at Cana.

You can talk about the water of the old Jewish rites of purification being  transformed into the new wine of the kingdom; you can talk about the transformation the presence of Jesus makes to a wedding, a marriage or just about anything else; but if you want to keep the main thing the main thing, the focus of a sermon on John 2 has to lie somewhere else.

John 2 is one of those passages of Scripture where the inspired writer tells us what the main point is.

Its about Jesus. Its about his glory being revealed and the disciples putting their trust in him. John tells us that much and presents the turning the water into wine as one of the 'signs' pointing to Jesus that make up the first part of his Gospel, often called the 'book of signs.'

But how does the miracle reveal Jesus glory?

You need to understand what the miracle was, I said today.

It was neither cookery nor chemistry (both of which involve the ingenious combination of certain proportions of ingredients), but creation.

When God creates, the theologs say he creates ex nihilo, literally: out of nothing. He makes stuff without the ingredients.

Water is just plain old hydrogen and oxygen. Wine is a lot more than that. When Jesus was turning the water into wine he was performing a creation miracle. He was doing what only God can do.

That's why it was at a wedding in Cana of Galilee that the disciples realised they had God-in-the-flesh standing before them. The glory of Jesus was revealed and they put their trust in him.