The Word This Week
John 2:1…
Jesus had presented Himself as the Christ. He had been tempted 40 days in the wilderness by Satan. He had withstood that challenge by employing the Word of God as His defense. He had returned to the scene of John’s baptism and been pronounced by John to be the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
That is quite a mission proclaimed over this humble carpenter from Nazareth. Even His own cousin John the Baptist had not recognized Jesus as Messiah until He saw the sign the Spirit had informed John of.
Jesus IS the long-promised Messiah – the Savior of the world.
Jesus had come into the world of His creation in relative obscurity, born in a stable in Bethlehem, into abject poverty. His parents were special, but perhaps in ways only God would recognize. Who but God would choose to enter the world to working-class parents with hard-scrabble lives. A young couple who would be easily dismissed. Even John the Baptist had a more noble lineage – being descended from the genealogical line of Aaron, Moses’ older brother – the first High Priest.
Jesus entered His public ministry the same way He entered the world – in obscurity. From Bethabara, and being publicly recognized for the first time, we next find Jesus in Cana of Galilee, having traveled there with His mother and brothers and His first handful of disciples. (Perhaps John and Andrew and Peter and Philip and Nathanael.)
Cana, of all places, became the setting of the first miracle of Jesus John records for us. (Of the seven miracles he will employ in his Gospel to prove Jesus is the Christ.) If the region of Galilee was considered a cultural backwater by the erudite Judeans, Cana was one of its most insignificant little towns. Not the place you might expect Jesus to perform His first miracle.
In addition to this, Jesus performed His first miracle in virtual anonymity. None of the crowd gathered for the wedding we read about here was even aware of what Jesus had done – in changing water into wine. Only those closest to Him – and the servants who simply did what Jesus told them to do had any idea what had just happened. If John had not chosen to reveal this, we can be fairly certain no one would have ever known about it.
Pastor Bill
Jesus had presented Himself as the Christ. He had been tempted 40 days in the wilderness by Satan. He had withstood that challenge by employing the Word of God as His defense. He had returned to the scene of John’s baptism and been pronounced by John to be the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”
That is quite a mission proclaimed over this humble carpenter from Nazareth. Even His own cousin John the Baptist had not recognized Jesus as Messiah until He saw the sign the Spirit had informed John of.
Jesus IS the long-promised Messiah – the Savior of the world.
Jesus had come into the world of His creation in relative obscurity, born in a stable in Bethlehem, into abject poverty. His parents were special, but perhaps in ways only God would recognize. Who but God would choose to enter the world to working-class parents with hard-scrabble lives. A young couple who would be easily dismissed. Even John the Baptist had a more noble lineage – being descended from the genealogical line of Aaron, Moses’ older brother – the first High Priest.
Jesus entered His public ministry the same way He entered the world – in obscurity. From Bethabara, and being publicly recognized for the first time, we next find Jesus in Cana of Galilee, having traveled there with His mother and brothers and His first handful of disciples. (Perhaps John and Andrew and Peter and Philip and Nathanael.)
Cana, of all places, became the setting of the first miracle of Jesus John records for us. (Of the seven miracles he will employ in his Gospel to prove Jesus is the Christ.) If the region of Galilee was considered a cultural backwater by the erudite Judeans, Cana was one of its most insignificant little towns. Not the place you might expect Jesus to perform His first miracle.
In addition to this, Jesus performed His first miracle in virtual anonymity. None of the crowd gathered for the wedding we read about here was even aware of what Jesus had done – in changing water into wine. Only those closest to Him – and the servants who simply did what Jesus told them to do had any idea what had just happened. If John had not chosen to reveal this, we can be fairly certain no one would have ever known about it.
Pastor Bill