Sermon Seeds: Fill, Draw, Taste

Sunday, January 19, 2025
Second Sunday after Epiphany| Year C
(Liturgical Color: Green)

Lectionary Citations
Isaiah 62:1-5 • Psalm 36:5-10 • 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 • John 2:1-11
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts/?z=e&d=14&y=384

Focus Scripture: John 2:1-11
Focus Theme: Fill, Draw, Taste
Series: Posted Sentinels (Click here for the series overview.)

Reflection
By Cheryl A. Lindsay

When reading the story of the first recorded miracle of Jesus’ public ministry, Mary’s central and driving participation actually raises questions. How did she become aware that the wine had run out? She was not the mother of the bride or groom. Presumably, she attended just like any other guest. Yet, she brings the concern to Jesus and the servants follow her direction. Mary points them to Jesus.

Maybe this incident is only the first miracle to be recorded in the gospel accounts but not the first miracle Jesus has performed. Perhaps, Jesus was known to have a special gift within his hometown or his family circle. Maybe they went to Mary with the hope of getting to Jesus.

Given the portrait of Jesus that emerges in this Gospel, there is little doubt that the narrative comment made in connection with the feeding of the five thousand applies here as well: “For he himself knew what he was going to do” (6:6). His mother’s remark that “they have no wine” (v. 3) is not so much a request for Jesus to perform a miracle as a signal to the reader that he is going to do so. Her subsequent word to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you” (v. 5), will signal further that this is her expectation as well. In short, Jesus and his mother are thinking along the same lines, not at cross purposes.
J. Ramsey Michaels

A lot of attention may be given to Jesus’ statement that reflects that the time is not right for him to perform a miracle. It is possible that Jesus is not ready to go public with his ministry; however, that theory seems unlikely as he has already had a very public moment at his baptism. This gathering, while well attended, would have included known acquaintances in a way that the public baptism would have attracted followers of John the son of Elizabeth and crowd-followers. If Jesus was not concerned with being revealed through intervention, what could be the cause of his hesitancy?

Of all the miracles that Jesus performs, this does perhaps seem the most frivolous. After all, running out of wine may have led to some shame for the hosts and the families of the newly married couple, but there is no evidence that this condition would have been life or even livelihood threatening. Jesus would cast out demons and unclean spirits. He would alleviate the hemorrhaging of a woman who had been suffering for twelve years. Jesus would even raise Lazarus from his deathbed and a twelve year old girl from her sick bed. Does running out of wine meet those standards?

If this is the case, then Jesus’ words are meant not as disengagement from his mother or what she has in mind, but as disengagement of them both from the wedding banquet and its immediate needs. His mother’s matter-of-fact pronouncement, “They have no wine,” could evoke an impression of extreme need or deprivation (as in Mk 8:2; Mt 15:32). Yet whatever we may think of the importance of being a good host, or of honor and shame in the New Testament world, a shortage of wine at a wedding is not in quite the same category as a life-threatening illness (4:46–54), physical helplessness (5:1–8), being without food (6:5–13), blindness (9:1–7), or death (11:11–16, 38–44). Jesus’ words to his mother are not a rebuke, nor an unambiguous refusal to act, but simply a reminder that the need she has pointed out is a relatively minor one.
J. Ramsey Michaels

Still, Jesus moves forward, and this moment becomes recorded as the first miracle that Jesus performs. While Jesus may have questioned its significance initially, he quickly overcomes his reluctance and the Wedding at Cana becomes a prominent indicator of the identity of Christ’s person in Jesus and his mission in the world. Powerful symbolism, thematic introductions, and foreshadowing infuse the narrative.

The passage also introduces the term “hour,” which appears in several different formulations throughout the Gospel. The reference is to the time of Jesus’ death and glorification. The messianic and salvific echoes in this passage may also be conveyed by the comment that it happened on the third day. While this may simply be a chronological marker indicating that it was the third day after the preceding event—Jesus’ comments to Nathanael—it may equally foreshadow the resurrection, just as the wedding may allude to the messianic banquet, the feast that will celebrate the inauguration of God’s rule (Kobel, 85–86). The passage shows that first-century Jews practiced ritual hand-washing prior to eating a meal; the practice is otherwise known from later rabbinic sources (b. Ber. 53b, b. Shab. 62b). The “bridegroom” is a double entendre that refers literally to the Cana bridegroom but, in the cosmological setting of the Gospel, also alludes to Jesus as the eschatological bridegroom (cf. 4:29).
Adele Reinhartz

Mary demonstrates concern for the honor of a human couple that the reader never hears. Their identities remain shrouded in the background. Their absence does not suggest their names are a mystery. Rather, their identities are not important to the telling of the story. Their needs get met. They avoid an embarrassing situation that they may never have been made aware of. Their parents, who would have hosted the celebration over several days, also remain shielded. Their anonymity and dignity are preserved; it is a reminder that God’s glory does not require breaking of confidentiality or excuse public shaming under the guise of communal accountability.

The story also highlights that honor and shame rarely remain confined to limited targets. There was a reason that the servants followed Mary’s directive to heed Jesus’ instruction without question. It goes beyond her status in the narrative or in the social group assembled for the wedding. They are desperate for a miracle so they accept the possibility without needing to interrogate the source. The final character of note is the banquet manager, who performs a test on the wine without realizing it.

Jesus told the servants to fill the jars, and they filled them “to the top,” complying both with Jesus’ mother (v. 5) and with Jesus. In narrative time it takes only a moment to fill the six huge jars. In real time it could have taken hours, for it was, in Haenchen’s words, “by no means a simple undertaking.” As we have seen, it is in the activity of the servants under Jesus’ orders that the miracle takes place. Ordinarily, the reader’s assumption would be that the water is being drawn for “purification,” not for drinking, but this assumption is quickly proved wrong. As soon as the jars were filled, Jesus told the servants, “Now draw some out and take it to the banquet master,” and again they obeyed (v. 8). A miracle requires verification, and the banquet master, however unwittingly, will provide it.
J. Ramsey Michaels

Mary advises those in need to do what Jesus tells them to do. Jesus, then, follows that invitation with three directives: fill the containers, draw the water, and taste it. Just as the entire pericope teems with symbolic images and actions, these directives transcend the particulars of the miracle of Cana. Part of the call to be posted sentinels is to fully experience the goodness of God. Let us resist being satisfied or resigned to the emptiness that life often offers and fill the vessels of our lives with Living Water. By doing so, we will create reserves that we may draw from during times of trial, famine, grief, uncertainty, and despair. Finally, Jesus invites us to taste it—to test and verify what is good and true and available to us. When we fill, draw, and taste, we will find miracles. We may even become miracles.

Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent
The 33rd General Synod adopted a Resolution to Recognize the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). As part of its implementation, Sermon and Weekly Seeds offers Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent related to the season or overall theme for additional consideration in sermon preparation and for individual and congregational study.
In the 1950s, Myrlie Louise Beasley fell inextricably in love with Medgar Wiley Evers. She loved him the moment she laid eyes on him on her first day at Alcorn A&M College.… She was seventeen years old and intended to major in education, with a minor in music after being part of a locally famous girls singing group in high school. She was talented enough as a singer and pianist that her grandmother and aunt—who had raised her after plucking her out of the arms and home of her teenage mother—were certain that one day she might play in New York’s famous Carnegie Hall, despite her being a brown-skinned Black girl from segregated Vicksburg, Mississippi….
Medgar was twenty-five years old—a tall, dark, handsome football player and World War II veteran. He and his elder brother, Charles, had what you might call “attitude,” which back then was risky for Black men in the South. Medgar had taken risks to register to vote, and he carried himself with a confidence and keen sense of the dignity he knew he was owed by the country he had defended against the Nazis in Europe. He believed in himself and what his education ought to bring him as a man in Mississippi. Medgar, to put it mildly, made an impression on the seventeen-year-old Black girl from Vicksburg.
Despite her family’s determination that Myrlie focus on her education before matters of the heart, love turned her head. Medgar and Myrlie married a year after they met, on Christmas Eve, 1951. They embarked on a perilous, often contentious romantic journey that got swept up in Mississippi’s civil rights struggle and ended in blood, tears, and a woman’s quest not just for justice, but for vengeance….
It is not just about the love between two Black people in Mississippi, and their love for their children. It is also about the higher love it took for Black Americans to love America and to fight for it, even in the state that butchered more Black bodies via lynching than any other, and that ripped apart the promise of Reconstruction with a ferocity unmatched by any other place in this fragile and fractured nation. Despite all of that, Medgar Evers had a deep and unfaltering love for Mississippi….
Myrlie Evers demanded more than once that Medgar tell her if he loved her and his children more than his work. He pressed her to understand that he did his work because he loved her and their children. He didn’t want them to live as he did, growing up walking by the bloody clothes of a lynched Black man on his way to school and seeing Black men and women abused and disrespected as a daily fact of life. He was determined to exorcise the ghosts in the trees that whispered to him and his brother that in Mississippi, and throughout America, people like them were something less than human. Medgar’s work was a labor of love.
Joy-Ann Reid, Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America

For Further Reflection
“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?” — Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“I believe in being strong when everything seems to be going wrong. I believe that happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day, and I believe in miracles” — Audrey Hepburn
“Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” — C. S. Lewis

Works Cited
Michaels, J. Ramsey. The Gospel of John. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2010.
Reinhartz, Adele. “John.” Gale A. Yee, Ed. Fortress Commentary on the Bible: Two Volume Set. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014.

Suggested Congregational Response to the Reflection
Consider the needs of your faith community’s neighbors, what miracles are needed, and how your faith community can participate in their realization.

Worship Ways Liturgical Resources
https://www.ucc.org/worship-way/after-epiphany-2c-january-19/

The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Minister for Worship and Theology (lindsayc@ucc.org), also serves a local church pastor, public theologian, and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities. You’re invited to share your reflections on this text in the comments on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SermonSeeds.

A Bible study version of this reflection is at Weekly Seeds.