A number of weeks ago I preached on John 2:1-11, or Jesus' "first sign" which he performed at the wedding at Cana. It came on a Sunday within the new year in which the church in Mandela Park, usually high in children and youth, contained but one adult (aside from Anna, me, and the pastor).
"It looks as though we are ministering to the youth," the pastor said to me as it came time for the sermon.
I found myself focusing in this text on the role of "the mother of Jesus". Indeed, her importance is emphasized, for John introduces the setting with reference to her. "On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there." The reader's curiosity is thus piqued regarding her; what role will she play in the unfolding drama?
She plays, in fact, the pivotal role in the story. It is she who tells Jesus that the wine has run out at the party. When he responds that his "hour has not yet come", she refuses to take his "no" for an answer. She presses Jesus until his "no" becomes a "yes."
How? She springs into action. "Do whatever he tells you," she instructs the servants at the wedding. Put in an uncomfortable position, all eyes presumably fixed upon Jesus, Jesus must act. He springs into action. The six stone water jugs are filled. The water is drawn. The water tastes like wine. The wine is the best wine--usually served at the beginning, now reserved for the end. As a result, "his disciples"--who had also "been invited to the wedding" along with Jesus and his mother--"believed in him".
Had the mother of Jesus not acted, not persisted, not insisted that Jesus "hour" had in fact "come", Jesus would not have "revealed his glory" nor his disciples "believed."
The mother of Jesus is, here in John, akin to the persistent widow in Luke 18:1-18, she whose refusal to take "no" for an answer from the "unjust judge" is given as a model to Jesus' disciples for approaching the "just judge", God. Such an approach may be summed up simply as persistence, perseverance, the disciple's determination to trust that God is good despite experience to the contrary. Such persistence will be rewarded. In fact, it finds in store at the end, whenever that end might be, a much better wine than one might have tasted at the start. It finds, in fact, a wine that makes all other wine forgettable, undesirable, useless. It leads to thanksgiving to the God who withheld from us wine for a time in order that we might taste the truly good wine which God has "kept until now."
So what might this story have to say to youth?
In any culture, and particularly South Africa, waiting for the good wine is quite literally a matter of life and death. If the wine is sex, waiting for a trustworthy companion in life, sealed by marriage, may be the difference between contracting or not contracting a deadly virus. Waiting can be the difference in a context of great need between the lure of illusory wealth in the present or lasting stability through the completion of education. For example, in South Africa we have "Mbeki babies", babies born to young women in order to secure government child grants which constitute their only reliable source of income (so named after the former state president, Thabo Mbeki).
More basically, for youth or whomever, waiting is the task of life. Waiting is faith, not of the passive nature which accepts the world as it is, but the persistent kind--that of the mother of Jesus--which demands the action of a seemingly distant but Just Judge to make right the desperate situations of our world.
-Joe
No comments:
Post a Comment