Dr. Sproul investigates Christ's three verbal responses to his mother when told the feast has no more wine and then proceeds to look at Jesus' physical responses. Dr. Sproul considers the use of wine in the scripture and the areas of controversy around the use of wine.

Our Scripture this morning is from the gospel according to Saint John. I will be reading from John 2:1–11:

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Now both Jesus and His disciples were invited to the wedding. And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.”

Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.”

His mother said to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.”

Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews, containing twenty or thirty gallons apiece. Jesus said to them, “Fill the waterpots with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. And He said to them, “Draw some out now, and take it to the master of the feast.” And they took it. When the master of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and did not know where it came from (but the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom. And he said to him, “Every man at the beginning sets out the good wine, and when the guests have well drunk, then the inferior. You have kept the good wine until now!”

This beginning of signs Jesus did in Cana of Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed in Him.

He who has ears to hear the Word of God, let him hear. Let us pray.

Father, as we continue our study of this gospel, we pray that Your truth may be understood by Your people, and that I may handle this text according to that truth. For I ask it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Christ’s First Miracle

Chapter 2 of John’s gospel records for our edification the first miracle accomplished by Jesus in His public ministry. You may notice that when John records the miracles of Jesus, he refers to them as signs: “This sign Jesus did in Cana of Galilee.” The word sēmeion in New Testament Greek, which is translated as “sign,” indicates that the miracle is performed not for its own sake, but to point the observer and the reader beyond what takes place to something that is “sign-ificant.”

The New Testament tells us that the signs wrought by Christ first call attention to Him as One who speaks the unvarnished Word of truth—that is, the miracle represents God’s accreditation that this person was sent from Him. But also, in Jesus’ case, His signs point not only to His person but to His work of bringing to pass the “breaking in” of the kingdom of God. That is important for us to understand, because I think it is interesting that the very first sign that Jesus does takes place at a wedding. It is a sign that seems almost profane, since it involves the making of wine for thirsty guests.

Let us look at the account. We are told that this wedding took place in Cana and that Jesus and His disciples, along with His mother, were invited. I think we can assume from this that the wedding involved people who were known to Jesus and to His family and friends. Also, because it included His disciples as well as Jesus and His mother, and given what we are told about the size of the waterpots, it was a very large wedding.

In the ancient world, it was customary for wedding feasts to last as long as a week. So, when people had a wedding, they had a wedding, and the celebration was a joyful one, to be sure. But in the midst of this wedding, something terrible happened. The host, who was the bridegroom, ran out of wine.

That represented two problems for the bridegroom. On the one hand, it was a massive embarrassment for the groom to run out of the refreshments he was providing at his own expense for the guests he had invited. Maybe he did not make enough provision in the first place, more people came than he anticipated, or they drank more than he anticipated. For whatever reason, they ran out of wine.

The second problem the groom faced was this: There is much evidence to indicate that in the ancient Jewish community, if provisions such as these failed, the groom could be liable to a lawsuit. That is how seriously hospitality was and is treated in the Middle East. It was a scandalous moment at this feast when the wine gave out.

My Hour Has Not Yet Come

Jesus’ mother hears about the dilemma. Having compassion on the bridegroom, she immediately goes to Jesus and says: “Jesus, they’ve run out of wine. Do something. Fix it.” We find this response in the New King James Version, where Jesus says to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.”

There are three questions we may have about Jesus’ response to His mother when she alerts Him to the embarrassment of the groom. First, when He speaks to her, He calls her “woman.” In our day and age, it sounds like He was being downright rude to her. But this was a title of respect.

Remember, this is how Jesus addressed her when He was on the cross. This is how Jesus addresses the woman at the well, as we will see later. It was a polite form of address. It is like saying “Ma’am” or “Madam.” It is not like a cab driver in New York saying, “Where to, lady?” It is not that kind of address. This is a very nice way of addressing His mother. So, Jesus is not being mean to His mother.

But then it says, “What does your concern have to do with Me?” If you have a different translation in front of you, chances are that you have different words there. I remember, in my first year studying Greek, looking at this statement of Jesus in the second chapter of John and being completely baffled by it. I am glad to know that even today, Greek scholars are not exactly sure how to translate this. Jesus says, literally, “What is this to you to Me?” It is a strange, awkward construction, but the translators are doing the best they can with the way they render it here.

Jesus is saying to His mother, “Don’t tell Me what to do in My earthly ministry.” He is taking directions from His heavenly Father. But the irony is that even after He tells her, “Don’t be telling Me what to do, for My hour hasn’t come yet,” He goes ahead and does it anyway to deal with the problem.

The other thing I wanted to say about this verse is that Jesus makes the enigmatic statement, “My hour has not yet come.” God willing, I want to preach through the whole of the gospel of John, and we will see references again and again from the lips of Jesus to His coming hour. Sometimes He refers to the hour as “the hour of His passion,” when He is to be given over to be crucified. But the hour even goes beyond the cross to the resurrection, and He talks about the hour in which the Father will manifest His glory.

Mary knows that Jesus, at some point, is going to have His glory manifested. You may remember when we talked about His presentation in the temple. In Simeon’s prophecy, he told Mary that a sword would pierce her soul, but that Christ would be exalted as the Messiah.

Jesus lived His whole life under the burden of that hour, the hour of His death—but beyond that, the hour of His glory. He says to His mother, “It’s not yet time for Me to enter into My glory.” In a sense, He is gently rebuking her not to rush Him. He has other things that have yet to take place before His glory can be made manifest.

Old Water to New Wine

Jesus’ mother says to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.” We could say that this is the greatest sermon Mary ever preached. No one, in all of history, ever received better instructions than these servants received from the mother of Christ when she said, “Whatever He says to do, do it.” That has application far beyond the immediate task of these servants.

In verse 6, we get a clue as to why Jesus performed His first miracle at this wedding. Verse 6 says: “Now there were set there six waterpots of stone, according to the manner of purification of the Jews.” If you have seen waterpots from the Middle East, which are still used today, most of them are made from mud. They are earthen vessels. Yet in addition to those mud-made vessels for drinking, the Jews also made special jars and vessels out of stone. The simple reason was that the stone waterpots did not contain contaminating bits of dirt. These stone pots were always used for the Jewish rituals of purification. If you have water that is going to be used for purification, you do not want to have it mixed with mud or dirt, so they were specially designed.

This was a big wedding, and every Jew who came had to go through a purification rite before he attended the wedding itself. If nothing else, he had to wash his hands and feet when he came into the wedding feast. Apparently, these jars had been filled with water for the purification rites of cleansing.

This purification with water points back to the Old Testament economy. When Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom in the New Testament, He uses the metaphor of wine to do it. You may remember that He elsewhere talks about the new wine that has to be put in new wineskins. This represents a change from the economy of the Old Testament, going beyond water to the higher level of new wine. It is the new wine of the kingdom that He is bringing.

Remember the dispute that took place among the Pharisees when John the Baptist came onto the scene. We saw that John came in the garb and in the guise of the Old Testament prophet, Elijah, coming out of the wilderness and living on locusts and wild honey. There has been some speculation that John the Baptist had taken the Nazarite vow. The Nazarites were a small group of specially dedicated members of the clergy who did not drink wine throughout their lives. So, John came in a spirit of austerity.

Yet when Jesus comes, He is eating with the publicans and going to feasts, and what do the Pharisees say? “He is a glutton and a winebibber.” Jesus calls attention to the fact that it was appropriate for John to be in a mood of total abstinence because the bridegroom was not present. But when the bridegroom comes, it is time for the party to start. That is Jesus’ whole point, and now He starts the celebration of the breaking in of the kingdom of God appropriately by making provision for celebration.

Wine in the Old Testament

Let me say this: We have a tendency to think that the Jews in the Old Testament drank wine because the water was no good. No, the water was fine, and they normally drank water. Most of the time when wine was used, it was for special Old Testament feasts or celebrations, such as the Passover. Then they brought out the wine.

The wine industry was one of the two largest industries of the Old Testament Jews, the other being the olive crop, which produced olive oil. With the agriculture of the day, the purpose of growing vineyards was to produce wine. You may remember that when Noah came out of the ark and began his new life, the first thing he did after building the altar was plant a vineyard. The purpose of planting the vineyard was to produce grapes, from which wine would be made.

I will mention this in a moment, but let me gently say to you that the Old Testament Jew knew nothing of unfermented grape juice, which is perhaps best associated with Mr. Welch in the United States of America. The grapes were grown to make wine, and that is what they did with them. They made wine. The word wine is used over 140 times in the Bible. The word oinos means fermented grapes.

Now, the Jews had very strict laws against drunkenness, and the New Testament repeats those laws. For that reason, there were occasions where rabbis insisted that the fermented grape juice—that is, the wine—be watered down, lest people fall into the sin of drunkenness. But the primary way in which people became drunk in the Old and New Testament days was by drinking too much wine.

In fact, there is a bit of euphemistic language in the text I read to you about why the wine had run out. The verb used there means not that the wine had all been drunk, but that some of the people had drunk too much wine. That was a problem they had at the feast.

An Abundant Miracle

Jesus comes to the feast, they have run out of wine, and some of the people have obviously had too much wine. What would you expect Jesus to do? Maybe He would use this as a perfect opportunity to chasten the people for overindulging in wine. Maybe He would step up and say, “That’s what you get for abusing this gift that God gives to His people.”

No, what Jesus does instead is make more wine, about 150 gallons of it. Most commentators indicate that it is a sign of the abundance of God’s grace—that when the new comes, it comes with the abundance of God’s blessing. The Jews saw wine as the gift of God. It had the capacity to make the heart glad.

Calvin, for example, said how appropriate it was that God used wine to signify the Passover feast in Israel because of its dual significance. On the one hand, wine had a certain bitterness to it, yet on the other, in that culture, wine was the symbol of joy and celebration. So, Calvin said, how fitting it was that when Christ celebrates the Passover, He uses wine to indicate His own life-giving blood. The redemption of Christ is indicated in the very first miracle that He performed—making wine.

A Controversial Miracle

Let me just say carefully that this text of Jesus making wine has faced controversy from two directions. On the one hand, the liberals of the nineteenth century, who had a built-in allergy to anything supernatural, wanted to de-supernaturalize the record of the ministry of Christ. They said, “Jesus obviously did not make wine, because if He made real wine, that would’ve been a miracle.” They did not believe in miracles, and so they denied that Jesus made wine because they denied that He had the capacity to do miracles.

The liberal theologians said: “The people had been serving wine out of waterpots, and when the pots got empty, there were still dregs of wine at the bottom. When you added more water, it gave a hint of the taste of wine, and the people had drunk so much wine that they didn’t know the difference. So, Jesus fooled them with a little bit of trickery.”

When I was growing up, my minister said, “Jesus said to fill the pots with water and give the people water because water is the best wine.” Isn’t it interesting that people would call it a miracle to turn water into water? But you can see how many hoops critics jump through to deny that Jesus really made wine.

Then you have the conservatives, who jump through just as many hoops because they are embarrassed by the biblical text that indicates Jesus made wine. The premise is that drinking wine is a sin. The syllogism goes like this: It is a sin to drink wine. Jesus was sinless; therefore, He could not or would not possibly have made wine. This is instead of the classic Christian syllogism that goes like this: Jesus turned water into wine and drank it. Jesus was sinless; therefore, it is not a sin to drink wine. It is a sin to get drunk on wine, but not to drink wine.

Sins of Conscience

Many people, particularly in America, have been reared in churches teaching that Jesus never made or drank wine. They will say that the Lord’s Supper was based on the “fruit of the vine,” which simply refers to grape juice. Every Jew in Palestine knew that the fruit of the vine was wine. Everyone knows that the Old Testament feast of the Passover that Jesus celebrated in the upper room called for the use of real wine by divine sanction.

If you have been taught all your life that Jesus did not make real wine, that it was really grape juice, and if you are convinced by your conscience that it is a sin to ever have your lips touch wine, then for you to drink wine is a sin. The Apostle talks about this in terms of what you are to do when there is a dispute over what is proper ethics and what is not. If you are convinced by your conscience that an action is sin, and if you do it while believing it is sin, then you have sinned.

It is not that the New Testament has a relativistic ethic, but it simply says that “Whatever is not from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). Something may not be a sin, but if you think it is and you do it, you have done something you believe is wrong and have acted against your conscience. That is why at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, when we serve the Lord’s Supper, we give you the option. We have the outer ring of grape juice for those who are persuaded that one ought never to taste wine.

Do you hear what I am saying? I disagree that the Bible forbids tasting wine. I think the Bible is manifestly clear that our Lord made wine. He drank wine, and there is not a word in the Bible that teaches it is sinful to drink wine. It is sinful to get drunk, but abuse does not require disuse. But some people are absolutely convinced that it is wrong, and so I say to them, “You had better not drink wine, because if you think it’s wrong, then for you, it is wrong—unless your conscience is changed by more information.” I do not want to belabor that any further.

A Sign of the New Kingdom

Not only did Jesus minister to the bridegroom’s embarrassment and take care of the needs of the wedding party, but He performed a miracle in their midst, by which His disciples came to fullness of faith in Him. They saw the significance of Him. This is how He begins His public ministry: with a work of miracle. It is a miracle that points not only to Him but to the new kingdom that has come to pass, to the new wine.

Even the new wine continues to ferment. That is why Jesus said you cannot put new wine in old wineskins. The old wineskins, which were made of leather, had expanded and stretched through the fermentation process. Those wineskins had been expanded to their limit. If you put new wine into those old wineskins, what would happen? They would burst, and you would lose your wine. You had to have new wineskins that had ample room to be stretched and expanded during the ongoing fermentation process of the wine. Jesus is saying, “I’m bringing something new, something greater than water, something that gives you a blessing you have never imagined.”

This wine links us to the night on which Jesus was betrayed, when He took the elements that were used during the Passover feast. He took the bread, and when He had blessed it, He broke it, and He assigned a new significance to the bread, saying, “This is My body, broken for you, eat ye all of it.”

In the same manner, when they had all eaten, Jesus took the cup and said: “This is the cup of the new covenant. This is the cup of the New Testament. This is a cup that goes beyond the purification water of the Old Testament, because now this cup is My blood. It is not the blood of a lamb that was shed and posted on your door, but My blood, which is shed for the remission of your sin.”

Then the New Testament, in the name of Christ, invites all who are His, all who are repentant of their sins, all who put their faith and trust in Christ alone for their salvation, and all who come boldly to the throne of grace to come to His table to be nurtured by the bread that is from heaven and the wine that is the new wine of the kingdom of God.

This transcript has been lightly edited for readability.