
One of my favourite films of all time is, “Four Weddings and a Funeral”, written as you all probably know by an Old Harrovian and co-founder of Comic Relief, Richard Curtis. I always presume that everyone has seen “Four Weddings and a Funeral” but just in case you haven’t, in the four weddings of the title something goes seriously wrong on each occasion, sometimes several things.
In the first wedding, the best man, Charles, who also happens to be the film’s hero, is late and forgets the rings, so that altogether unsuitable substitutes have to be found. He also makes a terribly embarrassing best man’s speech. The priest in the second wedding has never conducted a wedding before and makes all sorts of verbal mistakes during the ceremony. He mispronounces the couple’s names, muddles the vows and at one point calls the “Holy Spirit”, the “Holy Spiggit”! At the third wedding, one of Charles’ best friends has a massive heart attack and dies. And at the last wedding, Charles, who is about to marry a girl he doesn’t love, because he has lost the girl he does love to someone else, changes his mind at the altar. His fiancée punches him and the wedding is abruptly halted.
Weddings are supposed to be joyful occasions but things can go wrong. Something went seriously wrong at the wedding that Jesus and his disciples were invited to at the town of Cana in Galilee. They were about to run out of wine. John tells us that it was the third day of the wedding – marriages went on much longer then – so plenty of wine had already been drunk. But in this time and place running out of wine too early was a disaster. Wine had symbolic meaning. It wasn’t just there to jolly people up. It was a sign of the harvest, of God’s abundance, of joy and gladness and hospitality. And so, when they ran short on wine it meant the couple would run short on blessings.
If that happened now, you would grab one of your mates and send him or her out to the nearest supermarket to buy some wine. But you couldn’t do that in first century Palestine. The wine has run out before the wedding has. And it’s a catastrophe.
Jesus’s mother, Mary, comes to the rescue. She picks up what is going wrong and tells her son, ”They have no wine.” People often find Jesus’ response to his mother, “Woman, what concern is that to you or me? My hour has not yet come.” as disrespectful but it is merely formal and this being John’s gospel, there are other layers to the words, “My hour – my time – has not yet come.”
But Mary seems not a least bit offended or put off. She knows her son will respond and tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them to do.
We all know the rest of the story. Jesus acts and suddenly this couple has six huge basins – 180 gallons – of fantastic wine, more than enough for at least Four other Weddings and a Funeral! No one, that is, could now leave this wedding thirsty, for abundance and blessing overflowed.
John tells us at the end of the story, “Jesus did this, as the first of his Signs, and revealed his glory.” What does John mean by this?
Richard Curtis wrote another film called, “About Time.” In that film a young man learns that he has the ability, one inherited by all the male firstborn of his family, to go backwards and forwards in time. In reality, of course, that cannot happen. We are stuck in time. We are born, grow up, perhaps become parents ourselves. We go to school, get a job, shop, eat, sleep, have hopefully, good social lives. Eventually we grow old and die. All of this is inevitable for human beings. We live in time.
But as I have said before from this pulpit (sorry to repeat myself) there are two kinds of time. “Chronos” time from which we get the word “Chronological”: going forward in sequence – which is our human experience of time. And “Kairos” time, which is God’s time and which we sometimes, gloriously get caught up in and see. “Kairos” means, the propitious moment for decision or action. Kairos time is when God acts.
And Jesus certainly acts at this wedding, as his mother knew he could and would do. He rescues the bride and groom and their families from a catastrophe which would have brought shame on them. In the glorious abundance of wine, not brought out at the beginning of the celebration, as everyone would have expected, but at its point of real need, God through Christ’s actions, showers this couple and all present with promises of blessing and abundance in the future. God has come very close, and no one except Mary, the disciples and the servants, really know who managed it – but they know it came through Jesus.
When John tells us that this first Sign – the first of seven, we will learn – shows forth Jesus’ glory, he does not tell us that the glory of God will be most profoundly expressed in the cross. That moment of Kairos time – God’s action to save the world is yet to come. But it is important to note that Jesus’ response to his mother’s request for help is initially to tell her, “My hour has not yet come.” It points us forward to the moment before the Passover Feast (in John 13) when John writes, “Jesus, knowing his hour had come.” During that night, Jesus will be betrayed and arrested, and the next day crucified.
John wants us, in this first moment of Jesus manifesting to the world, who he is through enabling God’s glorious abundance and blessing at the wedding; John wants us to know that this glory of God’s love, blessing and abundance will be manifested even more powerfully, when Jesus takes up his cross. Love is shown abundantly in many ways, but most obviously when a man gives up his life for his friends.