JOHN099 - Invited Not Crashing

John 2:1-8

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Music by Jeff Foote

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Have any of you ever crashed a wedding, like actually done it? Obviously, there was a movie about this with Owen Wilson and Vince Fawn. Was Rachel McAdams in that too? It's been a while since I saw that movie. I think it's profoundly offensive. I don't recommend it or any movie ever. But the concept, I mean, just on the all merits of that film aside, the concept of wedding crashing is a very interesting one. Because if you stop and think about it for two seconds, there is a lot of opportunity there. I mean, how many other opportunities do you have to go to a thing where somebody else is paying a whole lot of money and nobody knows everybody? So it's perfectly possible to blend. I mean, when's the last time you went to a wedding and you knew everybody? Even your own wedding. You didn't know everybody. So if you just showed up with a plausible story, you could blend in, you could meet people. People are usually in a great mood at weddings. You could make some new friends, you could get a bunch of food. If you're the boozin type, you could get some free booze, some dancing. It could be a lovely time. I see why they made a movie about it. To the best of my knowledge, I have never done this. Though I guess a little tiny bit I could kind of see the appeal, even though it's clearly unethical and I don't recommend it. In the Bible, wedding crashing is not looked upon super fondly. It's actually kind of sneaky, amazing how many little wedding vignettes we get in the Bible. Like, you know, for those of you who've been around the Bible for a long time, if I said, all right, name uh wedding scene in the Bible, almost surely the first one all of us would come up with would be exactly the one we're looking at right now in John chapter 2. It's very famous, it's Jesus' first miracle. Mary is there, she is uh probably the most important female character in the Bible. I mean, pretty clearly, I would say. I mean, you know, Eve's pretty important, but theologically, I think Mary's the most important female character in the Bible for sure. So I think that attracts a lot of people to this story. But then for those of you who have been around the Bible for a while, if you stop and think for a bit, you're like, oh man, but there's there's a bunch of other stories and images and uh visions of things yet to come in the future that all have this wedding imagery mixed in. And as we glance around at it, one of the things that we figure out is that being invited to a wedding was a pretty big privilege. And coming to a wedding or any banquet uninvited was deeply frowned upon. And further, we get the impression that these weddings, like they were supposed to have a certain look and feel to them. Like certain like banquets are supposed to be kind of classy. For example, it looks like at least sometimes, maybe all the time, the host would provide wedding garments, even for everybody. Like, you know, hey, let's look sharp for just once this year and make this a special occasion. And those garments would be an indicator that you were actually invited to the thing. Yeah, I think it might have been a bigger deal to get invited to a most weddings back in the day, because to not be invited to the weddings in a given region or community meant that you really were on the outside of the whole thing, given the role that weddings played in society. And so I would argue it's a pretty big deal that Jesus and his disciples are invited to this wedding at Cana. This is what we know about the wedding. We don't really get many details. It goes like this on the third day, a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. So they're not wedding crashing, they are supposed to be there, but why? Okay. Well, one possible connection that the scholarly types have come up with is that Nathaniel, who we just met at the end of chapter one, was from a rival community of Nazareth, and that community that he was from was Cana. Some people think that his little barb at Nazareth might have been like, you know, I call it, I liken it to like a high school rivalry kind of thing, the way you would just kind of crap on whatever the neighboring town is to yours, like, ah, the tigers stink. Oh yeah, the eagles stink. Ah, Buster. You stink more, you stink more. I mean, maybe that kind of rivalry. But when Nathaniel finds out that Jesus is from Nazareth, he's like, Nazareth, can anything good come from there? And it really might just be that innocent. We're not aware of any horrible reputation associated with Nazareth that you know everybody would have thought of. So I kind of like the guess that Nathaniel is just throwing out a little barb about a neighboring rival community. But if Nathaniel's from the area, and Nathaniel is specifically from Cana, then it would make sense that the invite here, the reason they're not crashing this wedding, is that Nathaniel is the point of connection. If so, I mean, that's kind of interesting. I don't think John expects us to decode it. I mean, the answer to this is not clear in the text, but if so, that's kind of a fun connection that Nathaniel, who was brought to Jesus on this come and see basis by people who were brought to Jesus on a come and see basis by someone who pointed to Jesus and was like, come and see. You know, it'd be pretty cool if Nathaniel was like, Well, yeah, I'm gonna follow you. Also, I have this wedding I need to go to, and I've got like a plus six. Do you guys want to come with? Absolutely. My mom's actually gonna be at that wedding. Great. Let's go assemble the five original disciples in Jesus' squad. Let's let's go to the wedding. If that's the case, then this chain of three or four come and see, come and see, come and see, come and see, resulted in the first miracle of Jesus in front of everybody, turning water into wine. I still haven't got to that part, but it's what's going to happen. And that's just kind of a cool way that we would get here. I suppose another way that Jesus and the disciples would have made it to this wedding. Not all 12 disciples, by the way, we don't have all of them yet. And the Gospel of John doesn't, I don't think it really tells us how we get all of them. I think they just sort of show up, and all of a sudden there is the 12. Ha, that's embarrassing. Read the Bible every day, study it for a living. But there's a good reminder. I don't remember everything that's in here. It's a very big book. I guess we'll find out together if there's a story about how the rest of the team gets rounded out. But at this point, we're still the small squad, and after this wedding, we're going to pick up more people, and then we'll get out to the the 12 and then the disciples beyond that 12 who are kind of the inner circle. So maybe this is just a Nazareth-Cana connection. Maybe it's a marriage between somebody in Nazareth and somebody in Cana, and Mary's being invited. I do think it's interesting that Joseph doesn't get mentioned. Joseph really shines. I mean, underrated, underappreciated Bible all-star at the beginning of Matthew. I mean, man, this guy came through for Jesus. This guy, really in his own way, relative to Mary. Um, maybe it took him a little longer than Mary, but he was very faithful. And without saying it out loud, he effectively says, May it be unto me as you have said, and he protects his family, he protects his wife, he protects her honor, he protects the holy family. Jesus is born into something good in part as a result of his faithfulness. But a lot of people think Joseph died fairly early on, or at least that he died before the public ministry of Jesus. I mean, probably would have been much older than Mary, or at least somewhat older than Mary. So he's not here. That's kind of sad. But Mary is here, and it's as good a guess as Nathaniel, maybe a better guess, that this was the family connection, and that the reason that all the disciples were invited was as a plus five with Jesus. Well, maybe Nathaniel would have been invited as well, since it looks like he was from Cana. Whatever the case, John the Evangelist doesn't seem to want to give us the details as to what the connections were. Some people have even theorized that this was Nathaniel's wedding. Some people have theorized that this was John the Evangelist's wedding. I don't know, maybe. But clearly, theologically, it doesn't matter at all who is getting married here. All that matters is that setup we had yesterday. We've got a disaster inbound, and the imagery surrounding this disaster looks like it has to do a little bit with purification as well. Because we're talking about six stone water jars that were used for ceremonial washing, and we're talking about water in the ancient world, which might be good for washing, but you might not want to drink that water. However, the process of it turning into wine has a purification effect. The theological symbolism of this miracle seems to center more around that than the wedding itself. But the wedding itself is very interesting to me because of the gravity of it and the significance of it that we talked about yesterday, and because of the wedding motif that runs through the Bible that maybe when we're done with this passage, we'll do a little side quest and go and track down some of those and see how it reads back onto it. There's another logistical conundrum that goes along with the question of who was actually invited and what is the connection to this wedding. And that is just how did they get there in time? The itinerary of the first week of Jesus is really hard. If you've been paying close attention, you can tell that I've tried a few different ways to be like, okay, so they were probably here, they moved here, then they had a day of travel, and then it's like, all right, now we're going to finish the trip to Galilee. I don't know exactly how this thing lines out. Some people feel much more pressure to be like, all right. Well, a group of men with an average age of 22 years who were in good fitness during the spring wedding season, presumably could have covered 28.1 miles per day if they were well hydrated. Having come from a baptism site, we assume that hydration would have been portable. Like and I just I have no idea how to actually add the thing up. John the evangelist feels very comfortable talking to a Jewish audience and being like, look, they were getting baptized where John the Baptist was baptizing. It was Bethany beyond the Jordan. The fact that he calls it that means that he thought the original audience would be like, oh, that Bethany. Okay, I yeah, I know that one right there. And then over the course of about a week, they make their way up to the Sea of Galilee and to this town of Cana. It looks like maybe they arrived to the wedding a little bit late. And Cana, we're going to use this illustration a lot, so just get ready for it. You can kind of hold your hands out in front of you if you want and just kind of make a circle right in front of your face, like a clock or an oval. That's the Sea of Galilee. The you know, the bottom parts of south, top parts, the north. They were coming from the south. Now, if you look at that circle straight ahead and you go to the nine o'clock spot on the clock and you just go west a little bit, that's Cana. Nazareth and Cana are kind of yeah, they're like eight o'clock, nine o'clock, uh a few miles, you know, maybe a partial day's journey away from the Sea of Galilee in that direction. Point is, it was a pretty long haul. And if Jesus knew this invitation was hanging out there, they they would have been hustling to get to this wedding, which brings me to kind of the final pre-theme of the day before we start getting into the miracle itself tomorrow. And that is thirst. I think Jesus and the disciples would have been really thirsty, no matter how you slice this journey or how you draw the, you know, Indiana Jones style red lines on the map to document their travel. They went hard to make it to this wedding on time-ish. My understanding is that ish is kind of the rule of thumb for showing up at things for Middle Eastern events like this. They went hard to get there and they were thirsty. And so I think it's interesting that the theme of they're out of wine, and Jesus has just been traveling really hard along with his disciples. I think that's kind of intriguing as well. Okay, in both the normal human sense and in the cosmic sense, Jesus and the disciples are not crashing this wedding, though it certainly does feel like they're just kind of staggering in out of the desert here, and it's a little odd. No, no. They were invited both by the hosts, but also, you know, as you read through the Bible, you get the impression that God ordained all of this stuff. So, in that regard, Jesus is exactly where he's supposed to be, doing exactly what he's supposed to be doing. And he's about to raise a lot of eyebrows and generate a lot of interest in all this stuff about the Messiah and the kingdom, in the actual performing of the miracle that we'll look at next time around. All right, that's good for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.