Problem Solved

The message given in the Sunday night worship service in the Gettysburg United Methodist church.  The Bible verses used are John 2:1-12.

            Jesus has just gathered his disciples.  We don’t know whether he had all twelve of them at this point or not.  John has described the gathering of five of the twelve disciples, but that’s all.  In fact, the gospel of John never does tell us about Jesus gathering the other seven.  And since the gospel of John is the only one that tells us the story of the wedding at Cana, that means we don’t know how many disciples Jesus actually had at this point.

            But we are told that Jesus and his disciples are there at this wedding, and of course Jesus’ mother, Mary, was there, too.  And as we read this story, it seems to me that there are at least a couple of lessons we can learn from it, depending on whether we look at the story from the point of view of Mary or of Jesus.

We’re told that they run out of wine.  And Mary takes it upon herself to get involved in that.  We don’t know why.  Was Mary in charge of the wine?  Were these good friends of hers, and she felt obligated to help them?  We don’t know, but for whatever reason, Mary took it upon herself to get involved.  And she takes it upon herself to get Jesus involved, too.

We don’t know why she did that, either.  She knew something about who Jesus was, obviously.  But I wonder, what was it that she expected Jesus to do?  Did she really expect him to work a miracle?  Did she expect Jesus to find some more wine someplace?  Or did she not have any specific expectation, but just have confidence that somehow, Jesus would figure out something?

To be honest, that’s the explanation I kind of lean to.  You’re free to disagree, and I certainly cannot prove that I’m right.  But think about Mary’s situation.  Joseph, as far as we can tell, is out of the picture at this point.  We’re not specifically told that he’s not there, but he’s never mentioned after the incident at the temple when Jesus was twelve.  If Joseph is gone, then Jesus, as Mary’s oldest son, would’ve taken over responsibility for the family.  And so it makes sense to me that, when she needed something or when something went wrong, Mary would turn to Jesus and just expect him to take control of the situation.

Jesus, of course, does not want to act.  He says, “My hour has not yet come.”  But Mary basically ignores him.  She tells the servants that Jesus is in charge now, and they should do whatever Jesus says.  Now again, we don’t know what authority Mary had to tell the servants what to do, but they apparently listened to her.  And of course, Jesus told them to fill the jars with water, and when they took the water out it had been turned into wine, the best wine they had.  And we’re told that this “was the first of the signs through which Jesus revealed his glory; and his disciples put their faith in him.”

I said that there are at least a couple of lessons we can take from this, depending on whether we look at this from Mary’s point of view or Jesus’ point of view.  Let’s look at it from Jesus’ point of view first.  Remember, this is not long after Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness.  And we said that part of what he was doing during that time was praying and trying to work out just what he was supposed to do, what God the Father wanted him to do, how he was supposed to really be the divine Son of God.

So, at the end of that, he must have had a plan.  The first step in that plan was to gather some people around him, the disciples.  The next step--well, we don’t know what the next step in that plan was.  But we know that it was not to go to Cana and work a miracle by turning water into wine.  Jesus had no intention of doing that.  In fact, he really does not appear to have wanted to do it or to have thought it was the right thing to do.

You and I make a lot of plans, too.  We make them as individuals, we make them as families, we make them as a church.  And that’s a good thing to do--it’s not really very smart to go through life without having any idea what you might do next.  And I hope that, in making those plans, we spend some time praying and trying to work out just what we’re supposed to do, what God wants us to do, how we’re supposed to be the people God wants us to be.

But the thing is, once we’ve made a plan, it’s easy to get too tied to that plan.  It’s easy to get so focused on our plan that we ignore the needs of people around us.  That does not mean our plans are bad plans.  But we need to be ready to abandon, or at least modify, our plans when the circumstances around us require us to.

Jesus had a plan.  It was a plan he thought he’d worked out through prayer with the help of God the Father.  And now, here comes Mary, wanting him to change that plan.  And when I hear Jesus’ response--”Woman, why do you involve me?  My hour has not yet come.”--I hear some frustration in his voice.  Mom, you don’t understand.  I just spent forty days in the wilderness working out what I’m going to do.  I got tempted by Satan, the real Satan, for crying out loud.  I know what I need to do and how I need to do it.  And darn it, Mom, this is not it.

What might have happened if Jesus had refused?  What if Jesus had stuck to his guns, stuck to his plan?  What if he’d said, “Sorry, Mom, this is not the way it’s supposed to go.  You’re going to have to figure out something else”?  We’ll never know.  Because Jesus did not refuse.  He did what Mary wanted, and we’re told that “his disciples put their faith in him”.

So that’s a lesson from Jesus’ perspective.  We need to spend some time with God and make plans.  We need to do that as individuals, as families, and as a church.  But we also need to be ready to change those plans when God puts things we did not expect in our path.  We need to be ready to change those plans when the needs of others require us to.

But I said there’s also a lesson we can learn when we look at the story from Mary’s point of view.  Mary has a problem.  We don’t know why or how it became her problem, but somehow it did.  And she had no idea what she could do about it.  In fact, she did not think she could do anything about it.

But she knew who could.  She knew that Jesus could do something about it.  And so she went to Jesus.  And it’s interesting--I said earlier that Mary may not have known what she expected Jesus to do, but she knew he would do something.  But when you really look at it, Mary does not even specifically ask Jesus to do anything.  She just goes to Jesus and says Jesus, here’s the problem.

That’s pretty amazing faith, when you think about it.  How many times do we ever do that?  I mean, I suspect a lot of us go to God with our problems, but I suspect that most of the time we also tell God what we want God to do about them.  Even if we don’t specifically say “God, do this” or “God do that”, we probably at least say, “God, I need you to do something.  I need you to take care of this deal somehow.”  I know I do that.  I don’t think I’m the only one.

Mary does not do that.  Mary just says Jesus, here’s the problem.  And even when it sounds like Jesus is not going to do anything, Mary continues to believe that he will.  No, more than believes--she expects that he will.  She has no doubt about it.  She tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”  Mary is completely confident.  After all, she has told Jesus the problem, so she knows--she knows--not only that Jesus can do something about it, but Jesus will do something about it.  She does not know what Jesus is going to do, but she knows he’s going to take care of the situation.  And so Mary just walks away.  As far as Mary is concerned, the problem is already solved, before Jesus even does anything.

That’s the lesson I think we can learn from Mary’s perspective.  When we have a problem, all we need to do is go to God with it.  We don’t have to beg and plead with God.  We don’t have to tell God what to do.  All we need to do is say, “God, here’s the problem”.  And then we need to trust that God will do something.  Even if, at first, it looks like God is not doing anything, we need to continue to believe that God will.  In fact, we need to do more than believe--we need to expect that God will do something.  We can be completely confident.  After all, we’ve told God the problem, so we can know that not only can God do something about it, God will do something about it.  We may not know what God is going to do, and in fact what God does may not be what we had in mind at all.  But we can know God is going to take care of the situation.  And so, we can walk away.  We can be confident that the problem is solved, even before God does anything.

We all need to make plans.  We need to make them as individuals, as families, and as churches.  And we need to spend some time in prayer when we make those plans, so our plans follow God’s will.  But even so, we need to be ready to change our plans when God puts things in our path that we did not expect.  We need to be ready to change our plans when the needs of others require us to.

            But sometimes, no matter how carefully we’ve made our plans and no matter how much we’ve prayed about them, problems come up that we cannot handle.  When that happens, we need to go to God and give the problem to God.  And once we have, we can walk away, because we know God will take care of it.  We can be confident that the problem is solved, even before God does anything.  And then, we can be like the disciples.  We can put our complete faith in God.