Epiphany 2

John 2:1-11 - Epiphany Two - January 19, 2014           
Jesus Gives Joy to Marriage

Marriage is a divine institution, not a human institution.  Proof for this is that it is still around.  How many human ideas – as good as they were in their time for arranging society – have since grown obsolete?  Take for instance the feudal system of Medieval Europe.  And how many social conventions – as useful as they once were for guiding people’s behavior for the common good – have simply outworn their usefulness?  Take for instance the food rationing of the 1940s.  But marriage is different than these.  Marriage has been constant in its essential form and purpose throughout culture and time.  And that’s because it wasn’t invented by man.  It was invented by God. 

The essence of marriage is the union of one man and one woman in a life-long public relationship.  The purpose of marriage is to offer companionship, intimacy, and most importantly to create and nurture human life.  The fact that God gives us marriage is proof that God loves life, that he loves to give life, and that he loves to make life good.  This doesn’t mean that every couple’s marriage will be fruitful, or even as enjoyable as they had wanted.  But it does mean that the institution itself is not to blame when their hopes are disappointed.  That would be to blame God.  Instead, we rightly trace all the heartache and troubles commonly associated with marriage to the sin that causes it.  Marriage is good.  But it is sinners who get married.  It is silly and foolish for sinners to blame marriage for all the pain their own marriage brought them.  Instead, they should repent of their sin to the God who instituted marriage to be good.  The God who made marriage is the God who has mercy on sinful men and women. 

The recent attempts to include two men or two women in the definition of marriage are an historical anomaly.  Never has this even been conceived of by any civilization ever.  Now this doesn’t mean that homosexuality has not been defended and even publicly celebrated.  It has, and Christians of former ages have had to struggle under similar conditions – as they watch their children grow up and contend against an immoral world hostile to the gospel.  Sins against marriage have always been around.  But it is an historical anomaly that people are now trying to redefine marriage itself. 

Why do they do this?  Perhaps it is because folks want to hide their sin behind the respectability that the institution of marriage offers.  Maybe.  But then again, getting married these days certainly is not required for public respectability.  How many young couples live together outside of marriage without enduring any social stigma?  Times have changed.  People care less and less about what God says – especially when it’s they or their own kids who are fornicating. 

But then eventually they want to get married, don’t they?  And they want to get married in the church, don’t they?  And when the pastor says no unless they repent of their sin, they throw a fit.  They do.  Now, it’s not like they want to redefine marriage.  They don’t.  They just want God to tell them that it was no big deal to live like they were married before they were married.  But God won’t do that.  God won’t say what God won’t say even if some liberal preacher who doesn’t believe in the Bible says it.  God is not bound to what we say.  We are bound to what God says.  God’s word creates reality.  Sin perverts it. 

The reason homosexuals want to pretend that they are married and get everyone to redefine the word is not because they want respectability.  In our perverted culture they have had that for some time already.  What they want is the same thing that the man and woman want who won’t admit that it was a sin to fornicate.  They want God to say what God won’t say.  And they want everyone to hear God admit that he was wrong to say no to them.  They go after the institution of marriage itself, because when marriage is defined as the union of one man and one woman, God is saying something.  They don’t want to hear God say it.  And so they speak louder than God.  And they even get preachers to say it for them. 

But God won’t stop speaking.  Marriage is his institution.  Although it is we who get married, it isn’t our institution.  Although the State regulates it, it isn’t the State’s to redefine.  God instituted marriage not when Adam fell in love with Eve.  No.  He instituted marriage when he created Eve for Adam.  He made them one flesh.  Even among us today, marriage is not the church’s way of affirming some commitment that two lovers have made.  No.  Marriage is God’s way of joining a man and a woman into one flesh, and creating a commitment that previously did not exist.  Our fleshly urges are not what create marriage.  The word of God does.  And so our fleshly urges are not what decide when it is over.  What God joins together let no man separate.  God instituted marriage. 

God creates life.  That’s why he made them male and female.  God wants to take care of the life he creates through the office of father and mother.  That’s why he requires marriage before men and women engage in sexual activity.  God wants to make this life good.  That’s why he crowns our humble existence with so many wonderful pleasures, not the least of which is the pleasure through which he blesses us with children.  God is good.  God creates life.  That’s why he gave us marriage. 

Homosexual activity creates death.  It cannot possibly result in life, but only death.  The reason conservative Christians are opposed to so-called gay “marriage” is not simply because what they do is gross or because it looks wrong to see two men or two women together (although that’s true), but because it fundamentally contradicts what God has created to be good.  God created marriage between a man and a woman in order that he might continue to meet a fundamental human need: life.  This need does not evolve.  It is constant.  God creates this need, and he alone is able to meet it.  That is why God loves marriage.  That is why we defend it.  The purpose of marriage is to complete life (between a man and his woman), to create life (within her womb), and to protect life (through the relationship of husband and wife).  This is God’s design.  Marriage is good. 

But long before it became popular for the homosexualists to assault marriage with their remarkably successful political campaigns, Christians gave ground elsewhere – because the sin that perverts marriage out there is the sin that begins in our own hearts as well.  This is sin that we want to ignore.  It is sin that preachers would rather not address.  We fail to defend marriage when we permit our own marriages to be treated like a human institution instead of God’s institution. 

When a man and woman are contemplating divorce, does a Christian friend counsel them against it, and suggest they talk to their pastor for help?  Or is that a private issue, a decision for the pastor to be notified of once everyone’s mind is made up?  When a man is sleeping with his girlfriend outside of wedlock, does his Christian brother gently rebuke him?  Or is that awkward?  When a girl is living with a guy without first getting married, do her parents instruct her that this is a sin against God?  Or do they get mad at their pastor because he said what they should have?  Is divorce despised and avoided as the separation of what God has joined together, or have we grown familiar with it?  Do we just sigh, and say how it’s too bad they couldn’t make their marriage work?  What about pornography?  Is that a personal hobby that a man can have so long as he doesn’t let it affect his marriage?  How far even Christians have fallen! 

These are the sins that we need to repent of.  When we treat sex as though it were private and not public, we deceive ourselves.  Sex is public.  It is not to be engaged in publicly, of course, but God desires that all intimacy take place within the very public bond of holy matrimony.  It is public, because it affects everyone.  To have children born out of wedlock hurts the community – not to mention the children.  Pornography and immodest outfits alike infect relationships with dissatisfaction, and foster insecurity and distrust between husband and wife.  Divorce disrupts the very building blocks of culture and causes untold pain to everyone involved.  But most importantly, our sexual sins offend the body of Christ.  When we treat sexual expression, and marital relationships as though they were our own personal affairs, we treat marriage as though it were our idea and not God’s.  But God still speaks.  He speaks to us Christians.  We are called to be pure.  To abhor what is evil and rejoice in what is good.  But in order to know the difference we need to listen to the word of God. 

If we are to have a pure understanding of marriage, we need to base our own marriages on God’s word.  Only when we know that marriage is God’s institution will we know to seek his blessing. 

A young couple got married.  They loved each other.  They were excited.  They had everything they needed to enjoy the rest of their lives together.  Love.  And to celebrate their love, they provided wine at their wedding feast in order to make their guests as glad as they were.  They thought they knew what their wedding needed.  But they were wrong, because they didn’t know what their marriage needed.  They needed what they in their excitement could not have thought to provide.  It is a good thing that they invited Mary.  She knew what they needed.  They needed God to bless them.  So Mary asked her Son to help.  His hour to be glorified had not yet come.  But his hour to help had.  Jesus provided the young couple not only with more wine, but with better wine.  He revealed for the first time that he was God right here at a wedding.  And he did so on purpose, in order to provide us the opportunity to learn about marriage.  The catastrophe that would have been is a good image of what many marriages turn into.  Only Jesus can remedy the problem.  Jesus is the very God who made them male and female to begin with.  And Jesus is the very God who became man in order to cover the sins of men and women everywhere. 

We think we know what our marriages need.  We think we know what will satisfy us.  And so we pursue it.  By nature we want to treat God’s institution as though it were our own.  And this is the cause of so much sorrow and discontent even between Christian husbands and wives.   When we try to be the authors of marital bliss, the happiness fades like cheap wine at a late night party, and bitterness takes its place, not to mention a headache and heartache.  We need to remember that marriage is God’s institution.   That means God will bless it.  We need God’s love to form the basis of our union.  Only then does our own love take shape in a God-pleasing way.  We find God’s blessing only where we base our marriages on hearing the word of God.  Because that’s what we need.  More than anything we need the forgiveness of our sins.  And I can’t think of anywhere where we sin more than within our marriages. 

In a manner of speaking, we invite Jesus to join our celebration.  We need something better and longer lasting than the cheap wine of our own commitment.  We need God’s commitment.  God commits himself to bless our marriages where he commits himself to rescue humanity from sin and death and eternal loneliness.  The almighty God joined himself in an undivorceable union with our flesh and blood – so that he is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.  And as true God and true man, he shed his holy blood to cleanse us from all our impurity.  As a bridegroom adorns his bride and makes her beautiful in his sight, so Christ clothes us in his own robe of righteousness.  The shame and guilt that was ours – for our failed marriages, our impure thoughts, our irreverent attitudes toward holy matrimony – all of this Christ took upon himself on the cross.  This was his hour.  His hour of glory came when he sealed with his own suffering and death his undying commitment to save each one of us from our sin. 

And this is what he brings to our marriages.  He brings the wine of unspeakable joys to replace our regrets.  Filled to the brim, it far surpasses whatever pleasures we vainly pursue.  And it far replaces whatever shame that follows.  When we survey our lives, our desires met, our desires that have borne fruit, our desires that have caused deep pain and strife, our desires that have been unrequited and unsatisfied, we find that married life for ourselves and for others whose marriages God has deemed appropriate to influence and affect you – you find that there is nothing more than the back and forth cycle of life mixed with spices both good and bad.  Your joy will always be mingled with bitterness.  Such is life.  But the measure of life is not what you have known with your five senses.  The measure of life is that joy that has been mingled throughout and that finds its source in the preaching of mercy today.  It is saved for last – at least its final consummation is.  And here in the forgiveness of your sins you have a foretaste of that joy that will keep the feast uplifting and truly happy for eternity.  It is the wine that makes glad the hearts of God’s beloved saints. 

With Christ in our lives, having his righteousness and approval and favor and mercy, we can look forward to the truly blessed marriage between Christ and his bride, the Church, in heaven.  And so now he invites himself into our marriages on earth.  He wants us to taste this gladness even now where he blesses our marriages with his word and power.  He is willing.  His hour is now to destroy all contentions and bring peace to you and your spouse.  He does so by giving you what he has prepared for you and your children and all who look forward to the best wine at last.  And so we drink deeply from his mercy and praise the giver of the feast until we sit at his table in paradise tomorrow.  Amen.