Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
I have always been fascinated by magic. One of my favorite books as a child was Half Magic, by Edward Eager. It’s the story of four children who find a magic coin which grants wishes. The catch is that it always grants just half of whatever you wish for. One of the children wishes to be somewhere else and immediately arrives exactly in the middle between there and where she was. Another wishes for a dog statue to come to life. It starts barking, but cannot move. It’s only half alive. The children have to learn the rules of the magic and learn to care for each other in the process.
I didn’t want magic just to be in books. When I got to go to Disneyland, the magic shop there was at least as fascinating to me as the rides. I quickly figured out that what magicians did was all tricks, not genuine magic, but I was still enthralled. At the library, I began checking out books with titles like “Teach Yourself Magic.”
After one or two living room magic shows, I discovered I didn’t have the patience. To become a really good magician, you have to practice. You need trained moves and eloquent patter to carry off a really good illusion. I learned that professional magicians devote their lives to their craft. The best of them, like Houdini, Blackstone and Copperfield, had the genius of true performers. They studied and practiced their techniques constantly. It was too much work for me.
It’s tempting for me to regard the miracles of Jesus as something like magic. He is able to pull off just about anything. Change water into wine, multiply loaves of bread, walk on water, and of course heal people, as we remembered last week. Better than Houdini, Jesus has real magical power. Trust Him and you get what you wish, just like Mary His mother got what she wanted in our text.
In fact, it’s unclear why we should be talking about His miracles in this series of sermons on His genius. The amazing things He did are pretty obviously the result of power rather than intellect. Jesus didn’t practice changing water into wine. Verse 11 says clearly that this was first time He ever did such a thing. He never rehearsed the feeding of the five thousand. Christ didn’t study to accomplish His miracles.
There were magicians, even some Jews who practiced magic, in Jesus’ time. One of them shows up in chapter 8 of Acts. But they had all sorts of techniques. They pronounced magical words and names; they employed enchanted objects; they may have called on spirits. Jesus employed none of the devices of magic. He simply called on His Father in perfect faith and what He asked was done. It was the power of God, not magical technique.
So maybe it wasn’t magic. But perhaps the miracles of Jesus display a kind of scientific genius. The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” There are those who like to think of Jesus as a brilliant mind who amazed His followers with advanced science. His healings are the product of a grasp of psychosomatic illness. His feeding of the five thousand was accomplished by psychology which encouraged everyone present to share what food they had. The water becoming wine was brilliant sociology by which Jesus actually had plain water carried into the wedding feast. It was so unexpected that the master of the banquet laughed and declared it the “best wine of all,” thereby saving an uncomfortable social situation. Jesus was simply a man ahead of His time in all sorts of ways.
Even for those who believe the miracles happened just as Scripture says – the water really became wine – there’s a temptation to view Him as a kind of super scientist. Dallas Willard falls prey to this kind of thinking when he says, “At the literally mundane level, Jesus knew how to transform the molecular structure of water to make it wine.”[1]
C. S. Lewis borders just a bit on this thought that Jesus is a kind of scientific genius when he writes that the changing of water into wine is what he calls a “miracle of the Old Creation.” It is the Son of God doing,
“suddenly and locally something that God has done or will do in general… Every year as part of the Natural order, God makes wine. He does so by creating [grapes] that can turn water, soil and sunlight into a juice, which will, under proper conditions, become wine. Thus, in a certain sense, He constantly turns water into wine… Once, and in one year only, God, now incarnate, short circuits the process: makes wine in a moment.”[2]
It’s not what Lewis means, but one might read into his words the thought that Jesus is simply particularly adept at manipulating natural processes, something like a good chemist, biologist or engineer.
As much as I would like to claim that Jesus the genius knew physics and chemistry and every other modern science, it just doesn’t hold water, much less wine. Yes, as God, our Lord knew all we know of science and plenty more. But as a genuine first-century human being He didn’t carry around in His consciousness the periodic table of the elements or any of the other facts which modern science has discovered about the physical world. He operated with pretty much the same kind of scientific understanding that any other intelligent person of His time would have had. Whatever Arthur Clarke might think, the miracles of Jesus are not the result of advanced technology.
His miracles do not show Jesus to be either a magical or a scientific genius. Then, you might ask, and I have been asking myself, what genius do they display? How do they demonstrate the keen mind of Christ about which I have been speaking for two months? What brilliance is there in the new made wine, the calmed storm, the clean pink skin of the healed leper? How is it that His miracles are a sign of Jesus’ intelligence?
Miracles are a sign of the genius of Jesus just because they are signs. The brilliance of the miracles is that they are always significant. The Son of God never toys with us. He does not do frivolous miracles. Some spurious writings about Christ are not in the New Testament. They contain silly stories like five year-old Jesus making clay birds by the river, then bringing them to life so they fly away. The young Jesus then withers up a boy who ruins His playthings and strikes dead another who bumps into Him. When some people in the town complain to Joseph, Jesus makes them all blind.[3] All that sounds nothing like the miracles we read in the four real Gospels.
To begin with, verse 11 of our text says that this miracle at the wedding in Cana was the very first. For thirty years Jesus did no miracles at all, neither as a child nor as an adult. As we hear in verse 4, He almost did not do this one. He told Mary that His time had not yet arrived. From the rest of the Gospel, we know that Jesus “time” was His coming death and resurrection. Any miracle He might do before being raised from the dead was aimed at helping His disciples and us understand that one great miracle.
So at this wedding, Jesus is not about to be coerced into playing with miracles, even by His mother. They had run out of wine. It was the groom’s family’s responsibility to provide enough drink for a seven-day feast. They would be embarrassed, but it was hardly a situation over which to trouble the Savior of the world. Jesus addressed Mary gently in verse 4. “Dear woman” is a good translation. But He also rebukes her presumption. “Why do you involve me?” Why should His divine power enter into a simple domestic problem?
Mary clearly saw something in Jesus’ eyes that we cannot read in these words, because she left the matter with Him in complete confidence. What she said to the servants in verse 5 is good advice for anyone, “Do whatever he tells you.”
The rest of the details of the miracle show us plainly that this was not merely a parlor trick done for His own amusement. Jesus told the servants to fill up great stone jars used to hold water for Jewish purification rites. The custom was that water was poured over your hands to wash them both before and after eating. It was not just for health, but a religious duty in order to be spiritually clean. By using those jars and that water, Jesus implied that God was going to transform the old ways of purification into something new.
You can push the symbolism of this miracle in all sorts of directions. The plain water of purification changed into red wine could suggest the blood of Jesus shed to cleanse us completely from sin. In the wine of this miracle combined with His later miracle of multiplying loaves of bread, you can see a prefiguring of the Lord’s Table, bread and wine given to us as signs of the body and blood of Christ offered on the Cross.
The transformation of the purification water may imply the abolishment and change of all the old ways of being right with God through the Jewish Law. Ritual washing and sacrifices and keeping of dozens of careful religious requirements will no longer be needed. One may simply receive Christ as Savior and know forgiveness for sin and peace.
Psalm 104 verse 15 says that God gives wine to gladden our hearts. The miracle of Cana may be a sign of the joy that comes to those whose lives are touched by Jesus, abundant joy, more than you could ever ask. If you “do the numbers” here, you find that the Lord made at least 120 gallons of wine, more than enough to keep everyone at the feast happy for a long time. The eternal joy He brings will make us happy forever.
If nothing else, you can find in this work of Christ simple kindness. With no fanfare, He gently and quietly saves His host from embarrassment and ridicule. He has compassion on the young couple being married and gives them at the beginning of their life together a celebration free from worry and complication. Marriage services regularly recall that Jesus was present at this wedding and blessed it by His miracle. Here we learn that our Lord cares about and wishes to bless and renew every facet of human life.
However you read the significance, the important thing is to know that the miracle is a sign. The genius of Jesus is to take a situation from ordinary life, running out of wine at a banquet, and use it to paint a picture which points forward to His own glorious work of redemption and salvation. That is what verse 11 is trying to tell us. “He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.” His first miraculous sign did what they all are intended to do, to reveal the glory of Jesus and call us to faith, faith in Jesus who will one day make all things new.
Our house is being painted. After eleven years, it really needed it. Bare wood was showing on the south side and the white trim was dingy and dirty. In a few days it will look new again. But for the past two or three weeks if you came by you would have seen a strange sort of effect on the walls in front. Beth tried out colors to see how they would look by painting a few boards each a different shade.
You might have guessed what was going on, especially if you know my wife and how she enjoys colors and experimenting with different looks before decorating. But if you took those fresh painted boards at face value, you could have been wondered what the Bilynskyjs were up to. What’s the point of painting a bit here and there, different colors, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to it all? Why this board and not that one? Why just a bits and pieces rather than the whole thing? You could only “get it” by getting the whole story, the fact that we were making ready to do the complete job. Each of those newly painted boards was a sign of what was about to happen, the painting of the whole house.
The miracles of Jesus are signs that the whole work of God is yet to be done. If we begin to ask why He does a miracle here but not there, it’s because we are not remembering the whole story. Making new wine from water is a sign that one day Christ will make all things new. Healing even one person is a sign that some day all will be healed. Stilling one raging storm is a sign of a complete and eternal peace coming to us all. Feeding five thousand hungry people is a sign of the day when no one will go hungry. And ultimately at the end of the story, Jesus Christ rising from the dead is a sign that God’s plan is to raise up all who trust in Him.
So if you look just at one healing and ask why when two people were equally needy, when both were prayed for just as much, but one was healed and not the other, you must remember that miracles are signs. In the long run, in the eternal glory of His kingdom, Jesus Christ will heal all who place their faith in Him. Right now, the healings and other miracles we see here and there are just splashes of color reminding us that the complete job is yet to be done. God is going to paint the whole house. As the “Hallelujah Chorus” quotes from the book of Revelation, “The kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” It will be done. His will will be done. The miracle genius of Jesus is there to give us the signs that it can and will be done.
In the meantime, you and I are asked to do what His disciples did then when they saw this first miracle, to put our faith in Jesus Christ. One of the best ways I know to express that faith in both good times and bad is to keep before us that word said in verse 10 by the master of the banquet in Cana. “You have saved the best until now.” He was voicing simple surprise that the best wine would be reserved until last. But he gave words to a basic tenet of Christian faith: the best is yet to come.
Let us never fail to recall that the best is yet to come. When all seems well. When we are young and strong and have sixty or seventy years ahead of us full of promise and joy. When there are blessings of prosperity and health and the love of friends and family. When God seems so real and following Christ so natural. Let us remember that the best is yet to come. Let us not become so attached to what we have here and now that we forget to look forward in longing to something much better.
And when all seems wrong, let us not forget the best is yet to come. When we are old and weak and the days ahead seem fraught with nothing but more misery and struggle. When we are jobless or sick and those we love are far away or cause us pain. When God Himself seems absent and even praying a little prayer feels like a horrible chore. Let us remind ourselves that the best is yet to come. In Jesus Christ, God is saving it for last. He will bring us one day out of all hunger and darkness into the bright banquet of joy He has prepared for those who love Him.
So in the miracles you and I too see the glory of Jesus revealed. Put your faith in Him who gave us these and many other signs of the glory He has waiting for us. It will be the very best of all. He promised.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2003 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj