Water to Wine, Separation to Unity

Sermon Text || Year C: Second Sunday After Epiphany

The Gospel of John is my favorite of the four gospels. I love the layout, the themes, and the abundance of intertextuality. I’ve been writing a weekly article on the eschatology of John, which usually posts every Wednesday, but due to the holidays, I’ve not been able to write on it since before Christmas. If nothing strange happens, the next iteration of it will go out this Wednesday on John 8.

Water to Wine, Separation to Unity

A Bit About the Gospel of John

The Gospel of John is all about union with God. The Christ took on flesh so that we may see God as God really is, and in seeing God, we can know God. To demonstrate this, John uses pairs of opposites: light and dark, above and below, life and death, and love and hatred.

But in speaking of the mutual indwelling that is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, John also breaks down barriers between different groups of people that also may be spoken of in terms of opposites: clean and unclean, righteous and sinners, and Jews and Samaritans.

So when we read the story of Jesus turning water to wine, we should be asking some questions: (1) what is this passage telling us about who God is, (2) what is this passage telling us about the new creation Jesus is inaugurating through the incarnation, and (3) what is this passage telling us about who we are in relation to each other?

We’ll answer these questions in reverse.

How We Relate to Each Other

The first sign Jesus performed in the Gospel of John was turning water into wine, but let’s not skip over this detail too quickly. What kind of water did Jesus turn into wine?

Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. John 2:6

Let’s start by acknowledging that this is a lot of water, which means it was a lot of wine—over 120 gallons!

But this water was used “for Jewish rites of purification.” This is no ordinary water; this is holy water. This water marked the difference between clean and unclean, between who is in and who is out. This water separated “us” and “them.”

And Jesus turned it into wine.

Here is one of the reactions to this miracle: “Everyone serves the good wine first and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10).

Jesus didn’t make average wine; he made the good stuff.

And what does wine do?

Wine brings people together. Wine helps people to open up. Wine loosens up otherwise rigid people.

Something that was designed to separate, to mark who is in and who is out, was transformed into something to bring people together and to keep the wedding from turning into a disaster.

This is just like Jesus, isn’t it? Jesus tears down the barriers that stand between us. Jesus invites us into a new way of living. No longer do we look at each other in the old ways using the old labels because we have been transformed.

This is the new wine of a new creation.

New Wine and New Creation

From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! 2 Corinthians 5:16–17

Neither is new wine put into old wineskins; otherwise, the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins are ruined, but new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.” Matthew 9:17

From waters of separation to waters of unity. From a “human point of view” to a divine point of view. This is the miracle of John 2.

Of course, there is a whole lot more going on here than meets the eye. The thing that “breaks down the middle wall of partition” and brings about the “new creation” is the Cross of Jesus. John looks back on this during the crucifixion account by pointing out how both blood and water flowed from the side of Jesus (John 19:34).

While Jesus told Mary that his hour had not yet come, this first sign typified what was to come: an hour of glorification, an hour of wine and water, and a time when the ultimate wall would be torn down—that of death and life. Just as water was turned to wine, death is turned into life.

Instead of being a way to extinguish life, death is now the servant of God by becoming a precursor to resurrection. Instead of something to be feared, death is something to be embraced, even welcomed.

“Blessed are those who die in the name of the Lord.”

“All things are yours…life and death.”

“For to me to live is Christ, but to die is gain.”

In this new creation, the dualistic lines that separate us, that control us, that frighten us are all torn down. The old things have passed away; behold! new things have come.

New Wine and the Nature of God

What does this tell us about Jesus? It shows that Jesus—therefore, God— is less concerned about ritual purity than he is a good marriage party. God is about bringing people together and relationship. God is about retelling the wrongs and making all things new.

In the book of Isaiah, Isaiah talked about how the people had forsaken the covenant by forgetting the orphans and widows (Isaiah 1:23). Because of this, their silver had become corrupted and their “wine is mixed with water.” In Jesus’s ministry, he retells this story by turning water into wine. He undoes Israel’s mistake, and he does so on a major scale; remember how much water there was!

This is who our God is.

This story also tells us that God is not afraid of change. The things we think matter give way to a deeper way of living. Our external purity and classifications of who is in and who is out are transformed into a new creation of inclusion and wall rupturing.

Jesus became a change agent in light of the Cross, and when we wish to effect change in our communities, it needs to be cruciform change. How are we bringing people together, not building more walls? How are we offering ourselves for others? How are we demonstrating the Father’s love? How are we turning water into wine? And when it comes down to living a cruciform life or staying in our comfort zone, are we willing to crucify those old wineskins so we can be open to receiving the new wine of revival and resurrection?¹

Lectionary Reading: January 19, 2024 - Second Sunday After Epiphany

Old Testament: Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm: Psalm 36:5-10
New Testament: 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Gospel: John 2:1-11

1. It’s hard to remember all the people who influenced this reading of John 2. I know I picked up on the Isaiah 1 bit from Rob Bell back in 2018. Brad Jersak’s book “A More Christlike Word” has a section on “water-to-wine hermeneutics, which I happened to read after writing the above sermon. The IVP Biblical Background Commentary by Craig Keener is always helpful for passages like this.

I also recently read a book written by Liz Edman for a class I’m taking on race and gender issues in which she briefly discusses this passage. The book is called “Queer Virtue,” and it discusses her particular journey as someone who feels called to priesthood and who identifies as a member of the LGBT community. The book was challenging and had some compelling ideas, but, for reasons I’d discuss with anyone privately, it isn’t one that I would recommend to just anybody.