Q: How many people does it take to be baptized, and how many does it take to be married?
My mind answers back, one to be baptized, and two to be married. I grew up in a “Baptist” church that talked about a personal relationship with Jesus. I also grew up on boy-meets-girl movies that hinge around a personal relationship between two people. But thinking about it, my mind’s wrong. These numbers are all too small.
A wedding needs an officiant, and it needs witnesses. A baptism needs fewer, but it still needs at least two, as the story of Philip and the Ethiopian official makes clear. These most personal of life decisions require multiple persons!
So the two events described at the end of John 1 and beginning of John 2 – the baptisms of John and Jesus and the Wedding at Cana — are both community, it-takes-a-village type of events. They also both involved water, and transformations, so that they go together.
John the Baptist’s preaching platform, the Jordan River, is much smaller than I thought it would be. In the imagination of someone who’s never been there, it looms as large as the Mississippi – after all, it held God himself. But on Google Earth it appears barely wider than the roads that lead to it.
I’ve never been there, but in a sense, I have touched it, and so have you. Two thousand years gives plenty of time for atoms to evaporate and rain down in cycles upon cycles, mixing with the water that passes through you each day. When I saw my children baptized in a tub at the front of our church building, some of the water molecules that washed them must have once flowed by the Jordan’s stormy banks. It’s the same water.
But water is not enough. John baptized with river water, but Jesus “baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” (John 1:33) In the Greek and the Hebrew, the same word (pneuma) is used for spirit, breath, and wind. Jesus’s baptism is harder to pin down than John’s, but it exceeds and outlasts John’s, and John rejoices in being replaced.
The Spirit keeps working, multiplying Jesus’s baptism a hundredfold. Throughout the rest of Chapter 1, the Spirit rearranges the world, aligning human spirits, gathering disciples to Jesus. Even Jesus seems surprised at how quickly things move:
“You have faith because I told you I saw you below the fig tree? You shall see greater things than these!” (John 1:33)
God was working through their own breath turned to words, through their conversations and questions, to move each person into their proper place. Baptism may start with an individual choice, but once you’re washed, you find yourself in a community with others God has washed and called as well. And you don’t have to build this community yourself – you just have to listen and obey that invisible wind.
After Jesus renames Simon as Peter (John 1:42), they all attend another sort of “renaming ceremony” together: a wedding. Here first-century life seems very familiar, with preparation, work, and worry. Things go wrong. It seems that Mary knew about the complications of big family dinners, because she was the one who noticed that the wine had run out.
So, like Andrew brought Simon Peter to Jesus (John 1:42), and like Philip brought Nathanael (John 1:45), Mary brought the problems of the newlyweds to Jesus (John 2:3). I love how this exchange plays out: basically, Mary tells Jesus they have no wine, Jesus replies formally and evasively, and Mary (with a mother’s sigh?) turns to the servants and tells them to obey what Jesus says.
Obedience led to a miracle. The servants filled 20-gallon jugs (about the size of a two-handed storage bin) and took a bit to the wedding planner. And suddenly the water was transformed. It gained complexity, taste, and color. The ceremony was saved, and in this first sign Jesus’s glory was made manifest (John 2:11). The disciplines started to believe that this, the Kingdom of God, was really happening. The first sign of it all was a cup of good wine.
