The following is a sermon from Grace City Church in Denver, Colorado. Grace City exists to make and mature disciples of Jesus Christ. For more info, visit gracecitydenver.com. On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee. And the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples. And when the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, they have no wine. And Jesus said to her, woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. His mother said to the servants, do whatever he tells you. Now there were six stones of water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding 20 or 30 gallons. Jesus said to the servants, fill the jars with water, and they filled them up to the brim. And he said to them, now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast. So they took it. When the master of the feast tasted, the water now become wine. This did not know where it came from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. The master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, everyone serves the good wine first. Good morning. I'm Richard, one of the elders here, and I have the privilege this morning to preach on one of my favorite passages from the Gospels, In our culture, there is nothing quite like a wedding. Weddings have this mix of seriousness and joy, often even playfulness, that just doesn't happen anywhere else. You get a group of people together that would never otherwise be together in the same room to celebrate. The dress, the flowers, the decorations, the food, the drink, all these things are, for many people, the most they'll ever spend and the most planning they'll ever do on a single event in their entire life. And we can quibble about the commercialism around weddings these days, but setting that aside, I think we intuitively recognize that a man and a woman making a lifelong covenant with each other before God and their friends and family is something worth making a big deal over, however you do it. Now, as much as we think weddings may have gotten out of control in our time, weddings in first century Jewish culture, like the one that we read about in John 2 today, we're an even bigger deal than what we do, if you can imagine it. So let's look at what that would have been like. First, there would have been a big feast. So you start with the feast before the ceremony. Then late in the evening, after everybody's been feasting and celebrating what's about to happen, you actually have the wedding ceremony. After which the bride and groom get paraded through the entire town in a big parade with all the wedding guests and usually a canopy over them, sometimes carrying them on chairs under the canopy with torches going through all of town so that everybody can congratulate them and celebrate. Something to consider. Jordan, Lauren, Brennan, Sarah, upcoming weddings, maybe at a parade. Just think about it. They would take the longest possible route through town too, so they would get the maximum amount of celebration and congratulations. And then, That was just day one of a week-long celebration. Instead of a honeymoon, they would host an open house party for the entire week, and people would keep partying the whole week long. And during the party, the bridal couple would usually dress in crowns and bridal robes and kind of be the king and queen of the party for the week. So this is the context that John drops us into in chapter two. This morning, we're going to dig into what's going on in that passage. The narrative is only 10 verses long, but John has packed it with a lot of meaning that we might miss from our 21st century perspective. And then we'll look at what John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, is showing us about Jesus and how we ought to respond. Remember, as we look through anything in the Gospel of John, in this whole series, John tells us at the end of his gospel, in chapter 20, why he wrote these particular stories from Jesus' ministry out of all the different things that happened. There was a lot he could have written about, but in John 20, 31, he says, these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name. So John writes this not just to show us something about Jesus, but to show us that he's the Christ, the Messiah, and cause us to believe in him and have life through him. So in this brief story, we're going to see that Jesus responds to the prayers of his people, that Jesus is a savior who brought a new and better purification through his blood to replace the cleansing rituals from the Mosaic law. We'll see that Jesus is the creator God, not just a good moral teacher. And we're going to see that Jesus is extravagantly, beautifully good. So getting into the story, We're just a week into John's narrative at this point. Day one was the delegation sent to John the Baptist. The next day, Jesus comes out to John the Baptist who proclaims him the Lamb of God and sees the Holy Spirit visibly come on him. The other three gospels add the detail that John the Baptist baptized Jesus right before the Holy Spirit came on him. So that's day two. The next day, John's two disciples and then Peter follow Jesus and stay with him. And the day after that, you have the episode with Philip and Nathaniel. So three days later, which would bring us to the seventh day, Jesus, his mother, Mary, and the first five disciples are all at this wedding feast. We're in Cana, which is where Nathaniel was from. But Mary and Jesus, and presumably the other disciples, now that they're staying with Jesus, would have come down from Nazareth, which is four or five miles away. So they probably all knew the wedding couple somehow. They were friends or family. John doesn't tell us. And before we get into the details of what happened at the party, I think it's something we shouldn't miss, that Jesus and the disciples were invited to this wedding celebration. They were the kind of people you'd want at your biggest, most important party. And if that doesn't fit your conception of Jesus, you've either got the wrong idea about Jesus, the wrong idea about parties, or both. The incarnate Jesus was the kind of person who made a party more joyful by his presence. And the fact that he could be perfectly holy and a central participant in a multi-day party with feasting, wine, and dancing is a signal to us about how to party in a joyful and holy way. And maybe you've only experienced parties that are austere and serious at one end or kind of out of control and sinful at the other. And this story, though it's not what it's about, shows us that something else is possible. God's people should be capable of celebrating in a big way with God's gifts. And if we can't, that's not a problem with parties. That's a problem or an area of growth for us. Now, to be clear, there were certainly parties in Jesus' era that he wouldn't have joined in. Paul talks about these when he's writing to the Greek churches, like in 1 Corinthians. But there were definitely parties that with Jesus' presence became both better celebrations and more holy than we're used to experiencing. and that's probably something we should take note of and maybe try to bring into our lives more. All right, so this wedding party is in full swing. We don't know how long it's been going at this point, how far we are into that week of celebrating, but when we get to verse three, there's a crisis. They've run out of wine, which may not sound like as much of a crisis as it actually is, but it's a big deal. It's something like, it's not quite, Well, it's more serious than this. But it's something like if we were hosting a wedding now and the food ran out halfway through the buffet line. So only some of the guests have filled their plates and half your guests are going to go hungry. It's kind of like that, but it's a bigger deal than that in two important ways. First, our culture isn't the same kind of honor-shame culture that the Jewish culture of Jesus Day was. Our culture is much more individualistic and transactional. Even if you were the host of the wedding that ran out of food, there would probably be some spreading around of the blame, like the caterer must have messed something up or the wedding planner maybe missed a detail and didn't count correctly. Or maybe just some of the guests early in the line took too much food. But in a culture like the one here in John too, the host of the wedding, who in that day would have typically been the groom, carries all the honor or all the shame associated with how well the celebration goes. If something serious goes wrong, it doesn't really matter whose fault it is. It's the groom's problem. The shame sticks with the host. And in fact, as I was researching this, I saw that there's some ancient evidence that running out of wedding supplies could lay the groom open to a lawsuit from the bride's relatives for bringing the kind of reflected shame on them. So that's the setting. in terms of the shame that the groom would have once word got out that they were short on wine and the party was still going. There's a second reason, though, that it's an even bigger deal than our modern buffet running short, which is the symbolism of wine at a Jewish wedding. Throughout the Old Testament, wine symbolizes joy and celebration and blessing, and the lack of wine symbolizes being cursed. I'll give you a few examples of wine as blessing and joy. Genesis 14, the kind of mysterious priest-king Melchizedek brings out bread and wine to bless Abram. When Isaac blesses Jacob in Genesis 27, thinking he's blessing his eldest son Esau, part of his blessing is, may God give you plenty of grain and wine. That was a picture of having plenty and being blessed. Psalm 104 speaks of God giving wine to gladden the heart of man. Isaiah 25 paints a picture of a future where the Lord will have made all things right. He's swallowed up death. He's wiped away every tear. And a major part of that picture is a feast with well-aged wine. In fact, it's so important. The well-aged wine gets mentioned twice in the details about the feast. It's a feast with aged wine. There's a feast. It's lots of well-aged wine. It's like symmetrical around the wine. On the flip side, In Deuteronomy 28, Moses is warning Israel of the consequences of failing to obey God when they're about to go into the promised land. These are some of his last words to the people of God. And one of the curses he warns them about is, if you don't obey God, you shall plant vineyards and dress them, but you shall neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes, for the worm shall eat them. That's how bad it would be if you don't obey God. You wouldn't get your wine. So when Mary says to Jesus, They have no wine. We can hear what she literally said, but we could also hear it as they have no joy, or they're running out of blessing on their marriage, or even this marriage is cursed. Running out of wine was embarrassing in the way that running out of supplies for the wedding would be embarrassing, but more than that, it had this added weight of being a particularly inauspicious thing to run out of. So that's the crisis in verse three. That's the situation we're in. Now, what's going on when Mary brings this news to Jesus? Because Jesus isn't hosting this thing. We're not even sure Mary actually has any responsibility over it. She may just be a guest, a friend, or family member of the couple. So at one end, you have people suggesting that Mary was just reporting the sad news without any expectations, like maybe just gossiping. Like, can you believe they've run out of wine? But her instructions to the servants in verse 5 to do whatever Jesus tells them suggests she's expecting something practical to come from letting Jesus know about the crisis. At the other extreme, you have people suggesting that Mary was effectively demanding a miracle. Like, they're out of wine, do something about it. But John reports in verse 11 that this was Jesus' first miracle. John uses the word sign for miracles. So when he says this is the first sign, he's saying this is the first miracle that Jesus did. So Mary probably wasn't expecting that. So like the apocryphal things you've seen about Jesus making doves appear as a kid and things like that. Not really in scripture. This seems to be the first miracle Jesus did. So Mary probably wasn't expecting that. So what's going on? Why is she bringing it up to Jesus? I think the most likely explanation is that Jesus has just proved himself resourceful over the years. Tradition says that Mary was widowed by this point. Joseph would have passed some years before. Jesus is referred to in Mark six as the carpenter, not just the son of a carpenter. So he'd probably been continuing the family carpentry business and providing for Mary for years at this point. And not to mention as the perfect sinless man, even when he's not acting in his supernatural power, he would have been the most resourceful person you could have in your household. He's not at all selfish or lazy. He just does what needs to be done. So Mary was probably thinking, if anyone can find a way out of this crisis, not imagining a miracle necessarily, it's Jesus. Jesus' response to this is kind of unexpected, though, in verse four. Remember, he is, up to this point, the perfect son, right? And so his response can sound jarring to us. So she says, they're out of wine, and he replies in verse four, woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come. Okay, we need to make sense of this, because this is really weird in English. Woman is definitely not the typical form of address for your mother in this culture. But it's not as distant or condescending as it sounds in English. It kind of has some distance to it. We don't really have anything quite like it except maybe ma'am if you're not in the South. Because you would call your mother ma'am in some context in the South. So this is a thing you wouldn't say to your mother, but it's polite and kind of distant. And so he's doing something to create some distance there. But it's not as condescending as like woman. You don't hear it with that tone. It's more like, something's different here. And then the question he asks, what does this have to do with me, literally in the Greek, what to me and to you, is actually an idiom in that time expressing distance and even a bit of rebuke. Like, what do we have in common when it comes to this thing? What does this matter have to do with both of us? So Jesus is signaling to his mother that At this point, as his public ministry begins, something has changed in their relationship. Up to this point, Mary has had a special place in Jesus' life as his mother, but now as he starts his ministry, he's distancing himself from any human authority over him and fully putting himself under his heavenly father's authority. One commentator explains it this way. Mary could no longer view Jesus as other mothers viewed their sons. She must no longer be allowed the prerogatives of motherhood. It is a remarkable fact that everywhere Mary appears during the course of Jesus' ministry, Jesus is at pains to establish distance between them. This is not callousness on Jesus' part. On the cross, he makes provision for her future. And by the way, he says woman at that point, too. It's at the end of John. Woman, here's your son. John, here's your mother. Back to the quote. But she, like every other person, must come to Jesus as the promised Messiah, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Neither she nor anyone else dare presume to approach him on an inside track, a lesson even Peter had to learn. So the relationship has changed there. But the reason Jesus gives for the shortage of wine not being his concern is kind of puzzling. My hour has not yet come. We don't see it yet in John 2, but a half dozen other times later in John, whenever Jesus refers to his hour, he's referring to his death on the cross. Still though, how is this a response to Mary's concern about wine at the wedding? Like, what does this have to do with me? I'm not going to the cross yet. Well, Over and over again in the Gospels, we see Jesus responding to someone's physical concern by addressing a deeper spiritual reality. For example, when the Samaritan woman at the well, a few chapters later in John, he talks with her about living water. To the paralytic, he says, your sins are forgiven. And here, I think he sees the prophecy from Isaiah 25 and elsewhere about well-aged wine flowing in the Messianic kingdom, and he knows the symbol of communion wine as his shed blood for the rest of the world that's coming. And I think he's taking this physical reality and pointing ahead to a deeper spiritual reality that it represents. So one way to hear his response to Mary is, this isn't the wine that I've come to earth to provide. I will supply the wine you need, but it's not this wine. So that's why the, my hour makes sense. It's, I am bringing wine, but I'm not bringing this wine. Look at Mary's response to it, though. She accepts the gentle rebuke from Jesus, and then she responds in faith, telling the servants, do whatever he tells you. So she's accepting that Jesus isn't going to do something about this based on their family connection, but she knows that Jesus is good, and he's capable, and so she leaves it in his hands. He's gonna handle it. Do whatever he says. You can see an echo there of the much younger Mary's response when the angel tells her that she's going to become pregnant with Jesus by the Holy Spirit. In Luke 1.38, she says, Behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. And same sort of thing here. I don't know how this is going to work, but I trust that you're going to do something good. And Jesus does respond. But he does it in a way that advances the Father's will while doing good for people Jesus loves. This brings us to the first thing that I think John wants us to see about Jesus so that we can believe in him and have life in his name. Namely, he responds to prayer. But not out of any power or authority that we might claim over him like he owes us something, but simply out of his goodness. And not always in the way we imagine. but in a way that fulfills God's larger will for us and for the world. Some of us with a strong view of the sovereignty of God can sometimes find ourselves thinking or acting as if prayer is solely for us to conform our will and our desires to the pre-existing will and plans of God, the things he was going to do anyway. But that's not what we see in scripture. God's character doesn't change. His overall plan is solid, but he often responds directly to the prayers of his people. And scripture sometimes describes it as God changing his mind or relenting on what he was going to do. So if, like many of us, you're reading through the Bible with the five-day-a-week plan, you saw an example of this in the last couple weeks, where God, in response to Moses' prayer, relents from wiping out the people of Israel in the wilderness in the whole golden calf episode. I don't think there's anything in this text that requires us to assume that Jesus went to the wedding knowing they'd run out of wine and just waiting for Mary to ask him to do something about it so Mary could see what he was gonna do in his way. As John tells the story, he's there as a regular wedding guest and he responds to the need as Mary brings it to him in faith. So for us, let's believe in Jesus as the Messiah who responds to the prayers of his people. Not because we have any claim over him, but simply out of his goodness and in line with his father's will. So bring your own needs to him like Mary did, and then trust him with them like Mary did there. So continuing on, the way Jesus addresses the shortage of wine reveals three more things about him that John wants us to believe. These are all ways that Jesus manifests his glory, as John puts it in verse 11, and God's glory which Matt has explained this several times, but it's been a little while. God's glory is the beauty and goodness of his character, his attributes, and his being. So manifesting that is just making it visible, highlighting aspects of it. And that happens three ways here. First, Jesus is bringing a new and better purification to replace the old cleansing rituals from the Mosaic Law or the ones that people added on to the Mosaic Law by Jesus' time. So he's manifesting his glory as Savior. Notice in the story, Jesus doesn't just change any old water in any random container to wine. He has the servants grab these six stone water jars that normally wouldn't have been used for drinking water. So it isn't like just go grab the pitcher that you would normally use for water and I'm gonna fill it up with wine. These jars are for something else. They were, John says, for Jewish rites of purification. So the guests and servants would use them to ritually wash their hands and ritually wash dishes so they'd be ceremonially clean. When Mark talks about a similar practice in Mark 7, the implication is that all of this washing goes way beyond what was required in the Law of Moses. It's extra laws that the Pharisees and others had added to sort of just in case. We're gonna do some extra washing so that we don't accidentally eat something unclean. So they've added these extra laws for purification. So Jesus has the servants fill up these jars with water and then draw some out for the master of the feast to taste, at which point it had become wine. Jesus is replacing this water, which can't really purify them, with his wine, which can. literally the wine they were drinking there, but if you make the connection that he foreshadowed with the reference to his hour, he's symbolically replacing the purification by water with purification by his blood on the cross, which, as Hebrews 9 puts it, talking about this, it says it provides an eternal redemption. And Jesus, of course, connects those two things explicitly at the Last Supper when he describes the wine of the Passover meal as now my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. So every time we take communion, as we're going to in a few minutes, we rehearse that connection between the wine and Jesus' blood. So John wants us to see and believe that Jesus brings a new and better purification, and in believing that, we find redemption and life in him as our Savior. Second, John shows us here that Jesus is the creator God, not just a good moral teacher or even somebody who can do some tricks. John declared this back in chapter one, which we talked about a few weeks ago. In the beginning was the word, all things were made through him and without him was not anything made that was made. Now, this first sign is demonstrating what John declared back in chapter one, that Jesus is the creator. Throughout the gospel, John is really deliberate about what details he shares and how he phrases things. So it's not likely to be an accident when he emphasizes the sequence of days in the narrative so far, placing this miracle exactly a week into Jesus' ministry, echoing creation, saying this is the culmination of sort of a new creation that Jesus is doing with his kingdom. And of course, turning water into wine is itself a creative miracle. At the beginning of the creation narrative in Genesis, it describes the beginning of creation several times as the waters, and then each successive creative act adds distinctions and variations on top of the waters. So you can see an echo of that here, where we begin with water, and then Jesus creates instantly something that would have taken life and time to make naturally. Making good red wine takes, five to seven years from the time you first plant a grapevine until you finally get a harvest and make the wine and age it. So Jesus is speeding up this long process and doing it without the raw ingredients that you would normally do it with. So it's a creative kind of miracle. But the fact that it's wine, out of all the different things he could do, particularly reveals Jesus as creator. I've gotten very into wine over the last 20 years or so, and as I've learned more about wine and winemaking, this miracle has become better and better for me. There's layers to it. So, without going too far into the details, I'm going to share a little bit about how wine is made and some of the chemistry there that reveals the amazing nature of this creative act. So, wine is made from just two ingredients. It's grapes, and it's the microorganisms on the grape skins, mostly yeast, and in some wines, there's some bacteria that's also involved. When the grapes are crushed, the yeast eats the sugar in the grape juice, and wildly simplifying the chemistry involved, when the yeast metabolizes the sugar, it makes alcohol as a byproduct, along with a bunch of other flavor chemicals. So, if you don't know much about wine, and you go to the store, and you look at the label on a wine bottle, Say you grab a bottle of Italian Pinot Grigio and it says, this has apple flavors. You might think that there's actually apples involved in this process. Like they're just tossing in some cider apples along with the grapes, but they're not. It's just grapes. However, when that particular yeast strain eats those particular grapes, in this case you get malic acid and ethyl hexanoate, which you may not know, are literally the things that make apples taste like apples. When we're tasting an apple, we are tasting those two things and some other flavor chemicals along with them. But those are the two big ones that make you bite into an apple and say, even if you're blindfolded, I just bit into an apple. So that wine that has the apple flavor in it isn't just reminiscent of apple flavor, like that reminds me of apples. It literally has the flavor of apples in it despite having no apples. Likewise, when you get cherry or plum or hibiscus or whatever flavors in your wine, you're literally experiencing the flavor chemicals that make those other things across all of creation taste and smell the way they do. Particularly good wines, like the one that Jesus made here, are noted for having layers and layers of flavors and not just fruit flavors. Like you might get aromas of a forest floor or a leather saddle or a rose or something. Cheap wines tend to be simple and one-dimensional and in the worst case, taste like grapes. It's true, it's not a compliment to call a wine grapey. So in making great wine, out of all the things that he could have made, he could have turned that water into any number of other drinks. By making great wine, Jesus is manifesting his glory as the creator. He's saying, I made all those things, and here's a picture of it for you to enjoy. Third, John is showing us that Jesus isn't just a little bit good. He's extravagantly good. He's manifesting the glory of his goodness here. We're well into the wedding celebration at this point. People have had a lot of wine. And Jesus could have done this a different way. He could have just extended the wine supply. That wouldn't be unprecedented. There's several miracles in the Bible where God just extends the supply of something, like Elijah and the widow who makes, out of her last flour and oil, she makes one more loaf of bread and then expects that she and her son will die. And God extends the supply of oil in a miraculous way, but it's the same oil and just lots more of it. Or Jesus feeding the 5,000 with the bread and the fish, it's more of the same thing. But if you look at verse 10, The servants bring a taste of the water turned wine from the stone jars to the master of the feast, who's probably either the head waiter, if this is hired out, or just a friend of the groom responsible for overseeing the party. And this master of the feast says to the groom, everyone serves the good wine first, and when the people have drunk freely, then the poor wine, but you've kept the good wine until now. Jesus provided better wine than had been served at the wedding so far. and noticeably better. Even wine professionals who spit as they taste, so they're not getting drunk, even they experience palate fatigue after a while. It becomes hard to tell the fine differences between wines. But even then, really remarkable wines still stand out. A few years ago, our family had an amazing opportunity to taste wine at several winemakers in the Barolo and Barbaresco regions of Western Italy. Our son, Brennan, who's leading worship this morning, was 15 at the time, but he'd become interested in wine. Not for the alcohol, but because it makes food better and, you know, all the things that we've talked about here, all these different flavors you can get into it. He'd become fascinated by that. And so they were letting him taste at all these wineries. They were pretty excited to have a teenager there who was actually interested in wine as wine. So it was the afternoon. We'd visited a few wineries, and we were at the last one of the day. And the patriarch of the family was particularly excited to have a teenager who took wine seriously. So they gave us this tour of the vineyard with the setting sun. It was gorgeous. It was amazing. We went through the winery, the cellars, and then they finally sat us down at their big dining room table to taste their wine. We'd had probably 28 or 30 wines at this point. small tastes of them and spinning a lot of them, but they were all pretty much the same one variety of grape, Nebbiolo, and all made in a pretty similar way. So it was getting hard to tell the difference between them. But this older guy in the family who made the wine was pretty fired up to have a 15 year old there engaging with his wine. So he goes down to the cellar and he comes back with a dusty bottle and says, We've been saving this one since the 1978 vintage, and I think it's time to try it. 1978 was famously like the best Barolo vintage ever. So this is pretty exciting. And even with our tired palates after 30 wines, we could tell that this was a special wine. It was something we could never have afforded to buy and just drink on our own. And that's what's happening here at this wedding feast. We're well into the wedding feast. The guests have, as John says, drunk freely, and this new wine stands out enough that the master of the feast notices several days in, this is something different, and shares his amazement with the groom. If it had been a little bit better, he probably wouldn't have said anything about it, but it was that much better. By the way, if you're wondering if the wine here was actually wine versus just unfermented grape juice, the Greek word, methusko, translated drunk freely, always refers to drinking a lot of alcohol, not just drinking a lot of liquid. It doesn't necessarily mean that the guests are drunk, intoxicated, but it definitely refers to alcohol. And other historical literature talks about wine as wine. It's lower alcohol than like a California cab at 15% alcohol, but it's something like in between our modern beer and our modern wine. So they were actually drinking alcohol. Scripture, of course, elsewhere, condemns drunkenness and indicates wine is not for everybody in our fallen world, but it's definitely actually wine here. And the wine is clearly symbolic of a good gift from God. So let's look at how good this gift was. Jesus made extravagantly good wine that you would notice even if you'd been drinking wine for a few days. But look at how much he made. Each of these stone jars held 20 to 30 gallons. And Jesus had the servants fill them up to the brim. 20 gallons is 100 bottles of wine. 30 gallons is 150. And there were six jars. So Jesus made 600 to 900 bottles of wine, or 50 to 75 cases of wine. Picture those boxes in a liquor store. That's a case, that's 12 bottles. 50 to 75 of those would fill a good chunk of this stage. And let's think about how much that wine would have been worth. That 1978 Barolo that the old winemaker shared with us, which we would have never bought on our own, would have sold for $500 to $1,000. I've seen 78 Barolos going for over $6,000 in auction. Now, there's collectability priced into that. But if we look at really special wines that people buy now, young to drink right away, you can easily spend $100 to $150 a bottle for that kind of wine that you would notice was amazing a few days into a party. So let's use that for a back of the napkin calculation here. So Jesus made 600 to 900 bottles of wine worth $100 to $150 a bottle in our time. That's $60,000 to $135,000 of wine. Talk about a generous wedding gift, right? They probably wouldn't have used it all at the wedding, so that couple could have sold what was left and been set for years. And what makes it even more remarkable and more extravagant to me is that only Mary, the disciples, and the servants knew what was going on. Everybody else just thought the groom had pulled out a stash of really good wine for the party. So Jesus wasn't just gifting wine to the wedding party, he was also gifting status and honor to the groom. It's a microcosm of our salvation. The groom, ordinarily in that culture, for running out of supplies for his wedding would have only received shame. But instead, the groom received the honor that Jesus actually earned by providing on his behalf. Jesus is just so, so extravagantly good to the people he loves. So finally, coming to the end, let's look at the result of the miracle, which John gives us in verse 11. It manifested Jesus' glory and his disciples believed in him. And that's what the Holy Spirit, through John, wants for us. May we see that Jesus responds to the prayers of his people, that Jesus is a savior who brought a new and better purification through his blood, that Jesus is the creator God and not just a good moral teacher, and that Jesus is so extravagantly good to his people. And seeing Jesus as he is, may we believe in him and receive him and experience the fullness of life in his name. Let's pray. You just listened to a recording of a sermon from Grace City Church in Denver, Colorado. We hope you can join us in person soon. Thanks for listening. The Lord bless you and keep you. Amen.