Theology and Responding to Human Need

Sermon for North Hill, November 13, 2010

Very early in his ministry, Jesus and his friends were invited to a wedding. Jesus wasn't all that famous yet, so he didn't have crowds of people following him around. He and his friends showed up at the wedding and had a good time. Nothing really out of the ordinary. Then his mother comes over and whispers to him about a huge problem, a wedding-ruining problem. Decades of disgrace was hovering in the air, ready any minute to sweep down and bury the groom's father—and not just the groom's father. The groom's father and the groom. And the groom's uncles and cousins and grandfather and maybe even his brother's-in-law.

“Jesus,” Mary whispers, “they have run out of wine.”

Jesus whispers back, “What are you telling me for? This isn't my wedding. And this isn't the proper venue for launching the miracle-working aspect of my ministry. This is the wrong place and wrong time for me to do something dramatic.”

Jesus' mother nods and smiles and whispers in his ear. “I understand.” Then she walks back to the servants in the kitchen and pointing at Jesus, says, “Go, do whatever he tells you.”

The servants walk over to Jesus and stand with question marks on their faces.

What's Jesus to do?

Remember, he has already told his mother that God's plan for his life does not involve addressing the wine shortage. Jesus' exact words were: “Woman, what do I have to do with you? My time has not yet come.” I don't know how he could have been more explicit. Jesus was at the wedding as a guest. The wine problem—or lack-of-wine problem—was not his problem. His “time” was a schedule, a plan, that came from heaven. And that plan did not include working miracles at a wedding feast in Cana.

And there was his mother, in the kitchen watching him expectantly and two servants standing right next to him, waiting expectantly. And over there is the groom having a wonderful time visiting with his family and other guests, utterly oblivious to the fact that his family is about to experience the massive disgrace of running out of wine at his wedding.

What does Jesus do?

He pointed at pointed at six 25-gallon stone jars and whispered to the servants, “Go fill those jars with water.”

The servants went and filled the jars to the brim, then came back to Jesus. “Now what?”

“Pour a cup from the jars,” Jesus says, “and take it to the wedding master.”

The servants were astonished. No one ever served water at a feast. But Mary had told them to do whatever Jesus said, so they poured a cup and took it to the master of the feast. When he tasted the “water,” his eyes lit up. “Where did you get this?” he exclaimed. “This is fantastic!”

The servants merely pointed at the jars.

The wedding master called the groom over. “Young man, it is customary to serve your best wine at the beginning of a feast. Later, after people have been eating and drinking for awhile, then you bring out your cheaper stuff. You understand? But you've saved your best for last!”

The groom had no idea what the wedding master was talking about, but in that society, a young man did not challenge an older man. So the groom smiled and nodded deferentially then went back to his guests.


What does it mean? What does this story teach us?

The core of Jesus' ministry was responsiveness to down-to-earth human need. It's hard to imagine a more mundane, ordinary human need than the social obligation to provide adequate food and beverage for a wedding feast.

This means my work of studying Greek and reading commentaries and praying and meditating and finally standing here and preaching is no more “like Jesus” than is the work of the people who serve snacks in the kitchen after church.

Let's push it further. Those who clean the toilets and mow the lawn are copying Jesus every bit as realistically as are those who lead us in our worship music.

In fact, those who clean toilets and fix ballasts and pull weeds are more like Jesus in this story than preachers and musicians, because in this story, Jesus' work of providing hospitality is invisible. If you were making a movie you could not show the water turning to wine. That happened out of sight inside the jars. Jesus does not touch the water or the jars. None of his words explicitly speak about a miracle. In fact, the only words Jesus spoke explicitly addressing Mary's request for help were his statement that it wasn't his problem or the right time for him to act.

Jesus' ministry in this case was completely invisible. Like the volunteers who clean the bathrooms and pull weeds and do repairs. Like the people who give money to support our scholarship and assistance funds. Like the members who help people without fanfare or publicity, just responding to human need.


Many commentators over the centuries have written that the gospel of John is the most “spiritual” of the four gospels in the New Testament. Even today, people like to say that John's gospel is deeper, more profound, more concerned with the inner being than are the other gospels. This reputation makes our story all the more dramatic.

In this “most spiritual” of the gospels, the first dramatic miracle, the one that inaugurates Jesus ministry is not a miracle of healing.

It is not connected with a great preaching event.

It doesn't happen in synagogue.

It has nothing to do with defeating demons or “triumphing over the forces of darkness.”

Jesus does not pray before performing this miracle.

The miracle is not described as God's idea. It was not on Jesus' list of “things to do today.” In fact, Jesus performed the miracle under protest. Still he did it. In this most spiritual of all the gospels Jesus begins his ministry by providing wine for a wedding feast.

The heart of Jesus' ministry was responding to human need.

Listening to some Christians nowadays, you would think that Christianity was a particular theory regarding how people avoid going to hell. They insist the essence of the Christian message, its heart, is a very specific way of describing salvation. “Conservative Christians” readily condemn everyone who does not believe just as they do about various details of theological theory. They believe God will torture people forever and ever if people do not believe exactly the right things about how the Bible was written, about the nature of Christ, about the dates of creation and the end of the world, about the proper roles of behavior and faith in our relationship with God.

According to these “Real Christians,” salvation and the ministry of Jesus are about right theology, correct words, proper ideas.

The Gospel of John, the most spiritual of all gospels, the gospel that says the most about faith, disagrees. In John, the first sign of Jesus' power and authority as the Messiah is his willingness to bend “the plan of God” and provide wine for feast.

The same message comes through in several other passages in the gospel of John and in other books of the New Testament. In John 9, the bottom-line proof that Jesus is the Messiah--trumping all theological considerations--is healing of a man born blind.

In the gospel of Matthew, the grand climax of Jesus' sermon about the end of the world is the story of the sheep and goats. In that story, the judgment turns on one question: how did you respond to human need?

In Luke, right at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus stands up in his home town synagogue and reads from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach good news to the poos, recovery of sight to the blind and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. Then he announces, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.”

Theology, in the sense of words and theories about God, is subordinate to theology in the sense of life lived in the pattern of the God revealed in the life and teachings of Jesus.

Here at North Hill we want our mission to be like the mission of Jesus. We want to do everything we can to help people experience the good life that Jesus proclaimed. We want to respond to human need in a way that helps people live more holy, happy, healthy, harmonious lives.

Given the complexity and richness of Christian theology, for some of us, it's easy to become obsessed with “right words,” “right theology.” Martin Luther, John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingle where leading theologians 500 years ago in the days of the Protestant Reformation. All of them played a role in helping the church escape the tyranny of Roman Catholic clergy control and the Catholic distortion of the good news of grace. But curiously each of these men vehemently denounced the other two. Their own unique understanding of just how it is that God pours his grace and love into our lives became the basis for condemning and rejecting those who saw it somewhat differently. For each of them, theological ideas became more important than connecting with real, live human beings.

Last week as I was researching my sermon on yoga I came across a web site devoted to intense study of Christian theology. The people on the web site were hyper vigilant against the slightest deviation from “the truth.” A number of them were severely critical of Billy Graham because he did not insist that Catholics who came to his meetings prove their devotion to Jesus by leaving the Catholic Church. The last word on the subject was this post: Anyone who is a friend of Billy Graham is no friend of mine.

Is this the community of love Jesus had in mind when he said the world would know we were his disciples by our love?

Theological obsession has often been a temptation for Adventists. Adventist theology is rich and coherent. It ties together so many things. It helps correct many scary ideas that are common in classic Christian theology. I like our theology. But the power and coherence of Adventist theology can lead us to idolize our theology. We can become so obsessed with our ideas that we fail to pay enough attention to real live human beings and their needs. Worse, we sometimes use our theology as a weapon against other people and churches.

In 1888, Adventist church leaders were fiercely divided in a dispute regarding the ten horns of Daniel 7: Which of two Germanic tribes that invaded the Roman Empire (the Huns or the Alemanni) fulfilled the prophecy? Really? We laugh now. But if we are not careful, we'll do the same thing in our world. Our certainty about the truthfulness and necessity of some point of Bible interpretation or theological conviction will drive us to anathematize everyone who doesn't see it our way. Right now Adventists risk doing this regarding the age of fossils. We judge people's integrity, intelligence and piety according to their opinions about when the dinosaurs lived. Really? Really.

This kind of thinking moves us away from the mission of Jesus as its is portrayed in the gospel of John. Jesus came on a theological mission. He came to make God known. And when the needs of a wedding feast conflicted with the formal plan for advancing that theology, Jesus set the plan and took care of the simple human need. In doing this, he defined theology in a new way. Theology is not best understood as a list of propositions about God. It is best understood as the way our status as children of God ought to inform our sense of identity and mission. As children of God we are dearly beloved. As children of God we are commanded to live out his values in this world, to make the values of the invisible God visible in our lives. (See Matthew 5:44-48 and James 1:27.)

This does not dismiss theology—that is discourse about God. However, it does strongly imply that living like God is more important than talking about God. And right action is more important than right theories. The greatest test of theology is whether or not it increases our compassion.

We can test our theology by assessing how it informs us when we confront these realities of the human condition:

The explosive growth of diabetes.
The scarcity of clean water.
Economic development among people groups that are chronically poor.
Education access.
Marital harmony.
The obesity epidemic.

If you find yourself looking for “real theology” in this list, if you miss debates about justification and sanctification, forensic vs. adoptionistic vs. moral influence vs. Arminian vs. Calvinistic vs. Lutheran soteriology, the story of John 2 (along with the messages of Matthew 25 and Luke 4) pointedly suggests that your theology is not really lined up with the mission of Jesus.

Perhaps Jesus has become a tool of your theology, a necessary cog in your theory of salvation. If that is so, perhaps it's time to allow Jesus to break out of the categories your theology has consigned him to. Perhaps it's time for conservative Christians to allow Jesus' teachings and pattern of ministry a greater role in forming our theology and shaping our mission as the family of God.