John 2:3 NIV
[3] When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”
Happy New Year! And may God grant you a fruitful year, full of growth and achievement.
Have you ever felt like you are running on empty?
I have.
I remember once when I was at work far from home and my daughter was very young. Every day seemed exhausting. One day I got on my train to work. I fell asleep. I missed my station.
I woke up miles from where I needed to be.
It felt like I was too far gone. Certainly to be at work on time.
This might seem like a small issue compared to the problem you are facing. More often than we would like to admit, we find ourselves in situations where it looks like things are too far gone. We feel helpless. Hopeless. Powerless.
Sometimes this is because of things we have done. These are times when we feel like Isaiah’s prophecy is true of us:
Isaiah 59:1-2 NIV
[1] Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. [2] But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
Those are times when we feel that separation acutely.
There are other times when we don’t feel that our situation is our fault, and all feels so unjust. These are times when we cry out with Job:
Job 23:8-9 NIV
[8] “But if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go to the west, I do not find him. [9] When he is at work in the north, I do not see him; when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.
These are the heart-rending times when we feel that our circumstances are on top of us, but God doesn’t seem to be around to help.
If you are in either of these situations, this series of posts are for you.
Because now the parties have stopped and the good times are no longer rolling, now we are entering a new year with all it’s struggles and challenges, it’s very easy to feel overwhelmed by it all. That could be a reason why January is the worst month for suicides in many countries, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere.
However, we are never too far gone. There is never any situation from which God cannot rescue us.
There is no bad that He cannot turn to good.
That is what this series is all about.
And we will start, perhaps appropriately, at a party.
But at a party where things are not all they seem.
I remember one of the biggest parties I have ever attended was at a football (soccer) match.
The Scottish national team had just qualified for the World Cup at their home stadium at Hampden in Glasgow. You can imagine the scene: some fifty thousand jubilant, mostly drunk, football (soccer) fans basically going crazy.
I was there, cheering and dancing with the best of them, when a nearby intoxicated fan yelled out words of profound wisdom: ‘We’ll probably get [beaten – he used an expletive], but who cares? We’re there!’
That has always stayed with me since: that sense of dark reality beneath the partying exterior; that knowledge that we might be celebrating now, but all is not well, we do not have the resources to thrive, and so disappointment is coming later.
And, quite aptly, it did. True to form, Scotland was eliminated in the first round.
But it wasn’t the only time I have seen this or experienced it for myself. Often there are situations where, on the outside, our smiles make us look like we are happy, but inside we feel like we are dying, as if we would like the ground to open up and swallow us. We maintain an outer view that everything is under control, while inside we are barely managing the chaos underneath.
In the 1990s, in their depressing indictment of modern life ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, the rock band Radiohead told a startling truth we have to listen to: it wears us out.
That is where we are in this passage. We will start by looking at The Situation.
The Situation
And this was quite the situation. Anyone who has ever hosted a big party or worked in catering, will sympathise, but this is way worse than that.
We have a wedding. A big Jewish wedding. A big Jewish wedding that could last up to seven days. Seven days where pretty much anyone who is anyone in the village is at that party, celebrating with the families.
Weddings were big, big news.
Whether we like it or not, a family marrying off their daughter would be exuberantly happy. Not only for their daughter’s future happiness – that was only part of the equation – but also because they would receive a dowry for her. Moreover, marrying their daughter into a richer family could possibly lift both her and them further from poverty.
So the party would be big and joyous and loud.
But the catering could prove to be highly problematic. Read what these commentators have to say:
‘To fail in providing adequately for the guests would involve social disgrace. In the closely knit communities of Jesus’ day such an error would never be forgotten, and would haunt the newly married couple all their lives.’ (Merrill C Tenney)
‘In the ancient Near East there was a strong element of reciprocity about weddings, and that, for example, it was possible to take legal action in certain circumstances against a man who had failed to provide the appropriate wedding gift…it means that when the supply of wine failed more than social embarrassment was involved. The bridegroom as his family may well have become involved in a heavy pecuniary liability.’ (Leon Morris)
So this was much more than a catering mishap, and its implications went a lot further than having people tease you or mock you for a short time. Failure to adequately provide for your wedding guests would bring about loss of standing in the community, the implication that the marriage was not happy and potential legal action from the other parents.
We can’t underestimate the stress the hosts would be under when they realised that they had no more wine.
There are often times in life where we come to believe that our problems exceed our resources. We might have glorious verses that tell us we lack nothing when the Lord is our shepherd (Psalm 23:1), or that those who seek the Lord lack no good thing (Psalm 34:10), or that the Lord will not allow us to be tested more than we can bear (1 Corinthians 10:13), but when we have hungry mouths to feed and the cupboards are empty, we are stretched too thin, these facts become a distant memory and we feel overwhelmed.
Is that a familiar situation to you?
Do you know how this host family would have felt?
Do you understand their pain?
Well, we should move on to the next stage in this miracle, from the situation to The Intervention.
The Intervention
And what an intervention!
Or rather, there are two.
The first is Mary’s intervention:
John 2:3 NIV
[3] When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”
Now, consider this for a moment. John states later that this was Jesus’ first miracle (John 2:11). So at this stage, Mary has no evidence, other than who Jesus is, to support the idea that He will be able to do anything about this very stressful situation.
Yet she goes to Him.
More than that, she goes to Him without any flowery words or fluffy language or flattery, she simply tells Him the fact: the hosts have no more wine.
This is a quite wonderful picture of what prayer should be like. We don’t need to use pretentious religious language. We simply need to tell Jesus how it is?
Why?
Matthew 6:7-8 NIV
[7] And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. [8] Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Her prayer is beautiful because it is simple. Direct. Unhindered.
And yet brimming with faith that her son Jesus will be able to do something about this terrible situation.
Even though she has nothing to base this on other than her Son’s character.
The simplicity of this faith is how our faith should be when we approach Jesus when situations are outside of our control. We ought not to complicate it with rituals or rites or the use of certain language or the presence of certain people. We just need to come as we are.
That’s what Jesus told us to do in Matthew 11:28-30.
It just seems so ordinary. So mundane. And yet that’s what we should do.
Jesus’ response to Mary’s intervention is interesting, and possibly a little puzzling:
John 2:4 NIV
[4] “Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”
On the surface, it might seem a little harsh and disrespectful, but the Greek doesn’t sound that way.
What should catch our eye, though, is that it seems as if Jesus is reluctant to get involved.
However, there is another side to this, which explain Jesus’ Intervention. It seems to me that Jesus is not looking here to reveal Himself to the people around Him with some great, grandiose, showman-like miracle. The reference to His hour not yet coming might not refer to the miracle being badly timed, but that it wasn’t yet time for Him to fully reveal Himself to the world.
That seems to be borne out by two facts:
Firstly, Jesus intervenes anyway, as we will see. He gets involved, and there is no sign of reluctance in what He does.
Secondly, Jesus gets involved privately – ‘on the down-low’, we might say. There is evidence here that neither the master of the banquet nor even the bridegroom were aware of what Jesus had done. It was done secretly.
And there is a very good reason for that.
If Jesus had created a massive fuss and noise over His miracle, it might have exalted Jesus, but it would also have debased His hosts. Everyone at the wedding would have realised they had not planned or resourced their wedding adequately and had ran out of wine.
Instead, Jesus cares for their dignity and helps them in secret.
There is a huge difference to how many so-called ‘miracle workers’ advertise their services nowadays. Everything is public. Everything is loud. Everything is showmanship, made for social media.
Ask yourself this: when they roll into town, whose name is the largest on the billboards and the posters?
It isn’t Jesus’.
Because they are in it for their own glory, not for Jesus’.
By comparison, Jesus’ intervention seems so simple. So mundane. He uses one of the most basic and boring elements to save the party and their hosts’ reputation:
Water.
How many people would be happy if water was served at a wedding?
Yet it is through water that Jesus produces wine – not grapes that somehow ferment at speed, but through water.
That again speaks profoundly to me.
Sometimes we want a great Las Vegas miracle to get us out of our situation. But God wants something else. He uses the ordinary things. He uses water.
Think about what happened with the Israelites in the desert. They needed food – enough food to feed a million people – but they had nowhere to get it from.
So what did God do? Did He rain down steak from Heaven? Or a cordon bleu dinner? Or a fancy dessert?
No. He rained bread (Exodus 16).
Now, that caused the rabble among them to complain. Not happy with the miraculous provision of bread, they wanted more: they wanted meat and fish and melons and leeks and cucumbers and onions and garlic (Numbers 11:4-6). God was providing them with the basics, but they wanted an entire Egyptian all-you-can-eat buffet.
Can you imagine the cheek? Can you imagine the gall?
And yet, is that not what we do?
God provides us with a little everyday miracle one day at a time (Matthew 6:34), but we want a huge, showbiz miracle full of pazzazz and an angelic song and number.
But that just isn’t how God works.
Allow me to share with you a personal example. Five and a half years ago at time of writing, I didn’t have a job. I had a little side hustle, but it mostly provided pocket money. It wasn’t dependable. Work came irregularly: sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t.
It took me three months to find a job. During those three months, my little side hustle and my wife’s salary were enough to keep us going.
Now, was that a miracle?
By the standards some of us have, no, because it didn’t all fall into my lap in one go. We didn’t get rich. There was no pazzazz. No neon lights. No angelic song and dance number.
But to me, it was. In the quiet mundanity, God provided for us just what we needed and when we needed it.
We have to remember what happened to Elijah when he waited for the Lord on Mount Horeb. God was not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire.
But He was in the whisper (1 Kings 19:11-12).
Maybe it’s time we tuned out the wind and the earthquake and the fire. Maybe it’s time we tuned into the whisper.
Maybe then we will see God’s tiny miracles in the mundane.
After the Situation and the Intervention, we move on to see The Commendation.
The Commendation
John 2:5-10 NIV
[5] His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” [6] Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. [7] Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim. [8] Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.” They did so, [9] and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside [10] and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”
This quite the commendation! The wine that Jesus had miraculously produced from nothing more than water was the best wine that had tasted all night!
But how did this happen?
Firstly, through faith. As we saw earlier, Mary trusted in Jesus even though He had not yet carried out a miracle.
Secondly, through obedience. Mary simply told the servants to do whatever Jesus told them to do. That was it. Nothing more.
There is a profound truth there. When we find ourselves in a difficult situation, we often look to find our own way out of it, whatever that means.
But more often than not, our schemes and plans don’t work.
Obeying Jesus will. Every single time.
I want you to notice, though, how unusual this was, and how disconnected Jesus’ command seemed to be to their situation. They needed wine. Jesus told the servants to fill jars used for ceremonial washing, and then draw the water into cups to be served as wine.
That seems to me to be a very unusual command.
Yet they have faith, they obey and it works.
More than that, it is the best wine the master of the banquet had tasted over the entire celebration.
Do you see it?
Victory over our situation is always much sweeter and tastes much better when it comes through faith in God and obedience to Him.
As David said:
Psalms 37:3-6 NIV
[3] Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. [4] Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. [5] Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him and he will do this: [6] He will make your righteous reward shine like the dawn, your vindication like the noonday sun.
This reminds me of Elijah's visit to the Sidonian widow (1 King’s 17:7-16). She had nothing: just a little flour and oil. She was about to make a little loaf of bread for her and her son to eat before they starved to death. But Elijah appeared and made the rather impertinent and improper request that she made a little bread for him first.
She agrees and does what he asks.
And what happens?
She received way more that she sacrificed. Her flour and oil lasted through the famine in her land.
There is a deep, deep lesson in this. When we seem to lack what we need to survive (never mind thrive) we often wonder what God is doing, and why obedience to Him seems so very hard.
But when God comes to our rescue and provides what we need, we realise that it's sweeter and better tasting and more wonderful than anything we could have imagined.
Conclusion
In 2001, I was attending a conference in Cebu City, Philippines and sleeping on the MV Doulos. As part of my course, I was meant to be around the bookshop, mixing and mingling with people. While I was there, a pretty Filipina asked me where the ladies restroom was. I knew – not for any creepy reasons, but because it was close to the gents and the cash register. I pointed it out to her.
Something about her was attractive. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.
The following night I wanted to go to a local church, so I did something I don’t recommend any foreigner does, I got in a taxi by myself and went to her church. We hung out afterwards. Her and her friends came back to the ship. I got to know her a little.
That night, as I was trying to get to sleep, I felt a voice telling me, ‘She's the one.’
I brushed it off. ‘Don’t be daft!’ I argued. ‘I’m a missionary. I have no money. I have no home of my own. I have no income. She’s a Filipina. How is this going to work?’
We got married two years later.
We faced a situation which we absolutely did not have the resources to resolve, but God stepped in. We cut through a lack of money, lack of jobs in the UK, lack of somewhere to live, lack of visa. God provided it all.
And that wasn’t even the first time God had done that. Time after time after time God has stepped in when I had already reached the end of anything I had or could do. He took a little, scrawny guy from a rough neighbourhood in one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the European Union and made him a missionary, a father, a worker and a blogger.
So I understand – really understand the situation we face sometimes, like this family, when the resources and abilities we have to change a situation run out and we feel like we have nowhere to go.
But I also understand that the only way anyone can intervene to resolve this situation is to get on our knees and pray.
And I also understand that God’s solution is far sweeter and better tasting than anything we could come up with on our own.
So if you feel like your situation is too far gone, if you are intimidated by the situation you face, if you can see no way out or through, then there is really only two things you should do: trust God, obey Him, and He will lead you through whatever it is your facing.
Without Him, you will never have enough.
With Him, you have all you need.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, I bring before You my situation. I can’t see a way out or through it. But I trust You. I will obey You. Show me how, and guide me through it. Amen.
Questions
What was so difficult about the situation at this wedding? Have you ever faced a similar situation?
What was so interesting about Jesus’ intervention? What does this teach us about how God can lead us through our problems?
What is the benefit of obedience to God that is stated in this miracle? What does this teach us? Has this ever been true for you?
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