Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Trinity: October 24, 2021 jj
Rev’d Mark B. Stirdivant, Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Yucaipa, California
✝ sdg ✝
The Evangelist St. John doesn’t want us to forget about Cana. When, after His night meeting with Nicodemus, Jesus returns from Jerusalem to that hilltop city in Galilee, the miracle of today’s Gospel, of the father’s son made well, is meant to remind us and connect it to Our Lord’s first miracle, when He turned water into wine.
That is a strange miracle, and if you think about it in one sense, changing water into wine was one of the least practical if not the most impractical works Jesus performed, and certainly the most given to abuse. The wedding guests were well drunk on the ordinary stuff when Our Lord provided more and even better wine. Its beauty and delicate vintage were lost on most of them. They just wanted to keep their alcoholic buzz going, and it didn’t matter what kind of booze did the job.
Here in the second Cana miracle, when Jesus healed the Capernaum nobleman’s son, that seems much more practical. This is the sort of miracle Americans like. The kid was sick, dying, so heal him. That is real. That is important. That is not at all like making fancy wine in order to waste it on drunks. It makes about as much sense as if you were to give a Maserati to an Australian Outback bushman.
Yet John insists that he sees a connection between the two miracles. He practically begs us to explore it. And the wine miracle is the more significant from his standpoint because it gives meaning to the healing and not the other way around. Every trickster miracle-worker claims to heal people. Only Jesus produces superfluous wine of the greatest quality and gives it to people who don’t and can’t appreciate it.
We can see some similarities. Both miracles had the goal of producing laughter and joy. A healthy child would cause more joy in the noble father’s household than when his son was sick, and it is written somewhere that God has given wine to make glad the hearts of men. Jesus didn’t just show pity for a sick kid. It is pity also for the distraught, at-the-end-of-his-rope father. The house has gone silent with fear and regret, and Jesus will restore its laughter, much like the giving of wine.
During the wedding in Cana, Jesus had a rebuke for His own mother, St. Mary. “Woman, what has that to do with Me? My time has not yet come.” Yet when the nobleman requested for Jesus to heal, He unleashes against the whole crowd: “Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe.” Yet St. Mary responds in faith, telling the servants, “Whatever He tells you to do, do it,” which is always good advice, so long as He is always Jesus. The man of Capernaum likewise responds with faith. John says the man “believed the Word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way.”
Notice also a very slightly noticed but greatly significant alliance in these miracles. They both are immediate miracles that Jesus performed, but they include something of a delay in them and there’s some element of distance. At the wedding the servants are told to put water into the ceremonial washpots and then take that same water to the master of the feast. The master tastes the miracle wine, without knowing what happened, and assumes the bridegroom made a huge mistake. In the second miracle, the Word of Jesus instantly heals the nobleman’s son way down the hill in Capernaum, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. But there is no internet connection, telegraphs, or even smoke signals. So the boy’s attendants in Capernaum don’t know how it happened. They only know that it did happen and at what time. They might have thought the nobleman doesn’t need to go find a miracle worker because one is no longer needed.
You can catch in both Cana miracles that Our Lord is reluctant to be a miracle worker, but He’s more explicit about that in the second. Indeed, there is something like disappointment or frustrated irritation in His voice as He says: “Unless you people see signs and wonders you will not believe.” It’s the kind of anger you get from a mother, perhaps–it feels like she’s yelling, but she doesn’t even have to raise her voice.
That makes us wonder, why wouldn’t Jesus want to do these miracles? Wouldn’t He instead be glad to step up and flex His God-muscles, if that will mean that more people will believe in Him? Wouldn’t that be the way you would like to think of Jesus in your life?
But there’s no need for you to be a PR agent for God. He doesn’t need your help. In fact, it is this exact unbelieving tendency to want to apologize for God, or explain Him away, that is the most responsible for heresy in the history of the Church. It is also blasphemous, as though you make yourself to be nicer than God is. Don’t do it.
In any case, the fact remains, the Lord did not really want to heal the nobleman’s son or provide wine at the wedding. But in both cases, He relented and performed those miracles anyway. He is moved to act because of His compassion. He is like a mother who tells her child “no, you can’t have a candy bar,” who then gives her child a candy bar anyway.
And here’s the difference, though. We fallen parents do that because we are weak. We are wore down. We want the kids to be quiet and quit their begging. We do it, but then we resent it, and wish we hadn’t. We wish we were more consistent, more patient, better parents. Or we do it because we feel guilty, because we know life is hard on these kids, we messed up somewhere along the way, or we don’t spend enough time with them or because we know we’ve just not been the parents that we should be. Or just because we want the kid to have some joy in his life and are hoping that somehow we can buy that for him with this candy bar. We do it because we are weak. The children beg, nag, and act shamefully, and our response is wrong and unhelpful.
Our Lord is different from us. We beg, nag, and act shamefully, worse than children throwing a fit, but His compassion is legit and has no weakness. He has no guile. He is selfless. He does not want to be known as a miracle worker, not because He lacks compassion or doesn’t think we deserve it, but because He does not want to rot our teeth, to use the candy analogy. That is to say that if He performs too many miracles He will spoil us and it will not be for our good. If He performs too many miracles we will lose sight of His ultimate mission and our real need. We will demand a bread king, one who meets only our daily bread temporary needs, whether they are about our health, wealth, or relationships, a Savior who looks and acts like we would and lets us sing only our favorite songs in church and makes us feel better about ourselves just as we are. Selfish sinners. That is a well-worn path to Hell. And Jesus is too wise to lead us down that way.
The healing and joy that Our Lord brings is not so much intended for this life as it is for the next. The joy we have now is anticipatory, a breaking-in of the real joy that will be. We rejoice based on the forgiveness of sins we have now and the promise for the future when not only will we be pronounced holy, but we will also be holy and sinless in every way. Our justification will match our sanctification.
The Lord Jesus Christ, Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, Creator of all things, has come into our human flesh to be a Sacrifice. He has come to suffer a bloody death, to become sin and a curse, to be forsaken by His Father as punishment for our sins. This is the Word that you need to believe: “Your son will live.” It is true for all the baptized, even if some of them have died and are buried. This is the word that Jesus speaks to you still: “You and your children will live because I live and I have overcome death.”
That’s what you need to take home with you today from the Cana miracles. Because that is a Word that brings comfort and joy in a world that you already know is still full of chaos, temptation, pain, and death. Jesus lives so that you and your sons will live.
Jesus bestows the wine of His Holy Spirit that makes glad the hearts of men in the forgiveness of sins for He has reconciled all the world to His Father in order to have you. “Whatever He tells you to do, do it,” says St. Mary, prototype of the Church, icon of motherhood, first of the saints. “Whatever He tells you to do, do it.” Today, He tells you, “Fill the Chalice with wine this time, not water, and take it to the Bride, not to the master. For I give her my best vintage: I give My very own Blood that was shed for her in a Holy Sacrifice, a guilt and a peace offering combined in one. You put in wine. The Church drinks Blood, she drinks of My Holy Spirit because I have made with her a New Covenant. Her sins are forgiven and she is joined to Me that I might give her sons.” And as Jesus said to the nobleman in Cana, not far from the famous wedding hall, so He says to you today at this very hour: “Your sons will live.”
In the Name of the Father and of the ✝ Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Readings:
Gen. 1:1—2:3 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth
Psalm 8 When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers
Eph. 6:10–17 Put on the whole armor of God
John 4:46–54 Go your way; your son lives.