Not the Correct Order (Second Sunday after Epiphany)

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If all goes well – which really means, if I get a building permit from Montgomery County – I am hopeful that at the beginning of March construction will begin on adding a second garage to my house.  The main purpose of this is to expand my shop and make it useable all year long by adding space, heating and cooling and better lighting and electrical connections.

I am really excited about this, and as home renovation projects go, it’s pretty simple and straightforward.  Still, as I’ve worked with Dan the architect on the plans, I’ve been made aware that there are a few things that need to be done in a specific order.

So to be sure all the sub-contractors were on board with the plan, Dan held a big “pre-construction” meeting at my house on Tuesday because, as he noted in the email to everyone, “there are a couple of tricky things, and they need to be done in the correct order.”  Personally, I don’t know and don’t need to know the exact details, but I am in the know enough to realize that doing certain things without first doing certain other things could cause small parts of my existing house to fall down, which would be bad, so I’m really happy that Dan is making this effort!

Frequently, doing things out of order causes problems.  Not only can things fall down, but doing things out of the correct order can make extra work that nobody really wants.  Doing things out of the correct order can add cost to whatever you’re doing.  And doing things out of the correct order can cause embarrassment and make people mad.

And that is exactly what’s happened in today’s Gospel reading.  Often, we read this story from the perspective of the party goers like the mother of Jesus.  The wine had run out.  There isn’t enough wine in the town to re-stock the party.  And probably the stores are closed anyway.

But then – miraculously – more wine appears! Almost nobody seems to notice there was ever a problem in the first place, and that apparently is part of Jesus’ plan.  And so the party goes on and everybody seems to be happy.

Well, not everybody.  One other person has noticed.  And he is NOT happy.  That’s the steward.  The steward is basically the wedding coordinator. It’s his job to make sure the party runs well.  He’s the architect of this party so to speak.  But at the same time, he’s reliant on the groom to supply things like the wine.  And so when the new wine appears, the steward assumes that the they’ve simply reached the wine reserves that the groom had set up.

But when the steward tastes the water that has now become wine, he gets mad.  And he finds the groom and says to him, “You have done things out of the correct order!”  This is NOT the way we’re supposed to do things.

“Everybody serves the good wine first, because they’ll notice if it’s good or bad.  But after several days (these parties did go on for several days), hardly anybody will notice the quality of the wine and we can pull out the two-buck chuck! 

But YOU have done things out of the correct order!  You have kept the good wine until now.”

The steward is ticked off.  By doing things out of the correct order, the good wine has basically been wasted on people who might not know the difference.  By doing things out of the correct order, the groom has made the steward look like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, because everyone who does notice will assume the steward is an idiot who doesn’t know how to do his job.  And by doing things out of the correct order, the groom has made this wine incident into a faux pax that may reflect badly on the family for years to come.

But often, we miss the intensity of the anger the steward probably felt because John simply moves on and tells us that “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

For John, this story is about a sign that God is doing a new thing in the world.  And that through these signs God’s glory is revealed.  And that by these signs, people come to believe in Jesus.  It’s not really about the wine.

But maybe it is!  Because here’s the thing: Jesus knows he’s doing something out of the correct order.  He could have simply gotten his mother off his back and not caused a ruckus by turning the water into two buck chuck.  Then, everything would have gone on and nobody would have been upset.  But apparently, Jesus chose to do things in a way that was out of the correct order.  And perhaps that’s part of the meaning of the sign.

After all, the way God works through Jesus is often out of what we think of as the “correct” order.  In fact, the whole premise of the Gospel of Jesus is that God:

• Loves us even before we know God, and even when we don’t love God.  Paul writes in Romans that “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”  But that’s not the order we often think things should be done.  First, you do something to show that you’re worthy or special, and then I love you. That’s the “correct” order in the way most human relationships work.  But in Jesus, God does things in a different order…

• Forgives us, even when we’ve messed things up.  Not infrequently in our world, when you mess up really badly, you get fired or canceled.  That’s the order of the way things work.  But also not infrequently, Jesus forgives people even before they ask, and then tells them to “sin no more” even while realizing they probably will mess up again.  And then Jesus forgives them again.  This even happens with some of Jesus’ closest disciples like Peter.  In Jesus, God does things in a different order than we’re used to…

• Celebrates first, and then calls people to live in new ways.  That happens frequently in the parables of Jesus (for example, the parable of the prodigal son), but it actually happens with these “signs.”  That’s because a “wedding feast” is often the symbol of the completion of the coming fullness of the kingdom of God.  In Revelation and other places, the “marriage feast of the Lamb” is the end, not the beginning of the story.  But here, in John’s Gospel, the “sign” of the wedding feast is the FIRST sign – followed by signs of healing and feeding and even rising from the dead.  Jesus does things out of order by celebrating the fullness of God’s coming kingdom first, perhaps because he’s fully certain of how the story will turn out…

And so from the very beginning of John’s Gospel, Jesus does things in ways that are intentionally NOT in what we think of as the “correct order.”  But by doing so, Jesus makes it clear that God is willing to do for us all of the things that the steward was so mad about.

That is, Jesus shows us that God is willing to “waste” the good wine of his love and forgiveness even on people who haven’t earned it and might not even notice.  Jesus shows us that God is willing to look foolish in the eyes of the world by forgiving lavishly and even being willing to die for sinners. 

And you know what else?  By doing stuff out of the “correct order” people apparently DID talk about this wine incident for years to come, or we wouldn’t have heard about it.  And that means that potentially part of Jesus’ plan is for us to follow his example by giving and loving and serving in ways that are so out of the normal order of things that people notice; and that God’s glory is revealed; and that more people come to believe.

Amen.