The Blessing of Divine Delay
John 2:1-11
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
St. John 2:3-5 3 And when they ran out of wine, the mother of Jesus said to Him, “They have no wine.” 4 Jesus said to her, “Woman, what does your concern have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Whatever He says to you, do it.”
Dear fellow redeemed in Christ our Lord… Four times in Psalm 107 the psalmist writes these words, “Then they cried out to Yahweh in their trouble, and He delivered them out of their distresses.” You may be familiar with that particular psalm, and you may even have prayed those exact words out loud more than a few times. The problem we have with verses like that, as well as many other Scripture passages that promise help, deliverance, and relief, is that we almost always find out that God’s timing in answering our concerns and our time are not the same. We’re uncomfortable with God’s divine delay.
If there is something that is difficult for us in times of tribulation, it is when we seek help and can’t seem to find it, or God is taking His sweet old time and we have very little patience for that. There are times when help is absent for longer than we want it. These are the times when true faith shows itself. Dear friends, true faith waits patiently for the Lord’s time.
We are impatient with God. We murmur and blaspheme Him when He’s tardy with help…or never seems to show up with help. This doesn’t mean that we should never ask the Lord to hurry up. Daniel (9:19) once prayed to God, “O Yahweh, hear; O Yahweh, forgive. O Yahweh, pay attention and act. Delay not, for Your own sake, O my God, because Your city and Your people are called by Your name.” True faith puts no time constraints on God. True faith never stops asking for God’s help. Patient endurance is a characteristic of true faith in Jesus Christ. Sometimes, and maybe more often than not, God lets us sweat it out for a while in order that we may learn to rejoice in His merciful goodness when He finally does answer our prayers. And it is that very delay of divine help which reveals to us that this is an exercise of faith in Christ.
Our Lord’s first miracle at the wedding in Cana recorded for us in today’s reading from John 2 gives clear evidence for divine delayed gratification. The lack of wine at the wedding is a picture of all of our distresses; it is a picture of all our days of suffering; it is a picture of all the tests and temptations that come over us. And our Lord’s answer to all these ills is the same as what He said to His mother: “My hour has not yet come.”
Perhaps the first thing we think about when our Lord delays help is that He will not or that He cannot help. Maybe we think that His loving hand that always remains open to us has now closed into a fist. Worse yet, perhaps His love for us has cooled or even gone away.
But of course, those things are not true at all. Consider how Jesus dealt with His mother. We have been taught, and rightly so, that it is improper to talk back to your mother or father; this is a Fourth Commandment truth. To some, it seems as if Jesus talked back to Mary when He told her, “Woman, what does this have to do with Me? My hour has not yet come.” Far from being disrespectful in any way, what Jesus is doing here is putting her faith to the test. Jesus wants to see whether she believes that her Son is also God and Lord. Is Mary willing to put aside her motherly privilege and take instruction from her Son? And according to her own words, the answer is yes.
Now, are you willing to take instruction from Jesus when He delays His help? In happy and good days, being a good Christian seems relatively easy. After all, as a redeemed Child of God through faith in Christ, you have a faith that can move mountains even if faith is as small as a mustard seed. Jesus Himself says so.
But then God puts a cross on us. And when we beg for help, relief, and deliverance, Jesus suddenly seems to be deaf. When we bear our crosses and ask Jesus for help, then the rubber hits the road, so to speak, when it comes to patient waiting. This is what separates heroes of the faith from fair-weather Christians.
In our text, Mary cast off all signs of being a fair-weather believer in her Son, when she told the servants, “Do whatever He tells you.” It seems that Jesus’ mother knew that He would help, but He would do so only in His hour and not her hour. So, what seemed to be a setback for Mary actually helped her to realize her unworthiness.
And, dear friends, the same thing happens to us when help is delayed. We seem to ask God for something only when we need it. And when we ask, and what we ask for doesn’t appear right away, we need to understand that God owes us nothing.
Nevertheless, we ask, for Jesus wants us to ask. He tells His disciples in Luke 11:9-10, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.” In Luther’s teaching about the Lord’s Prayer, he reminds us that it is insulting to God when we do not ask Him for both big and small things. It is always right to ask.
The most striking proof of strengthened faith in the face of divine delay is the fact that Jesus’ disciples believed in Him after Jesus changed water into wine. Before this moment they believed, but their faith was more like a smoldering wick. But now that they saw that He desired to help, but only in His time, their faith was strong.
So it is with us today. Our faith in Jesus wanes when it seems to us that He won’t help. But when that help finally comes, even when that help is not exactly what we asked, we have joy in believing.
Notice again what Mary tells Jesus: “They have no wine.” She didn’t ask anything of Jesus, nor did she dictate to Him what she thought He must do. She simply made a statement. Mary gave her Son a free hand. She basically said, “Thy will be done.”
And we also give the Lord a free hand. We make our requests known to Him, but then we need to leave the way, the time, and the hour of His help completely to His discretion; it going to be that way anyway, but we are better off knowing that. And that is key, for then we are unafraid to ask for what we desire because we believe that Jesus hears us and will answer us. King David said in Psalm 27, “You have said, “Seek my face.” My heart says to you, “Your face, Yahweh, do I seek.” Even when Jesus does not answer right away, we are to wait with patience for His answer. And we can do that precisely because we know and believe that He promises to hear and He promises to help, even when crosses burden us with suffering and pain.
This truth is brought home to us in the meaning to the conclusion to the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism where Luther writes words that we should all have memorized: “This means that I should be certain that these petitions are pleasing to our Father in heaven and are heard by Him, for He Himself has commanded us to pray in this way and has promises to hear us.”
Consider Mary again when Jesus seems to give a disrespectful answer. She didn’t slap Him. She didn’t reprimand Him in front of the wedding guests. She didn’t grumble when Jesus told her to wait. She embodied Solomon’s proverb (Prov. 13:12): “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a desire fulfilled is a tree of life.” Many of us have had this play out in our lives. We have our own hopes that we lay before the Lord in prayer, and we would like to see those come true soon. But then nothing happens, at least the way we see it. But when our desires are fulfilled, we give thanks to God for His never-ending mercy. And we also believe that we can return to Him in prayer at any time to ask again.
The prophet Isaiah says (Is 30:15), “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” When divine delay occurs, do not despair. Listen again to King David in Psalm 27: “Wait for Yahweh; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for Yahweh!”
You recall that Simeon waited for the Lord many years, and His patience was rewarded when God kept His promise to Simeon that he would not die before seeing the Lord’s Christ. At Cana it happened with the miracle of water into wine. At Golgotha it happened with the shedding of blood. At Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, it happened with Christ bursting from His three-day prison. In bread and wine and Word we eat the modern-day miracle of Christ’s Body and Blood given and shed for the forgiveness of our sins. In water and Word we are united to Christ’s death and life as our sins are washed clean in Holy Baptism. All of this teaches us that faith is gloriously crowned on those who wait for His response to our prayers.
And while we wait for His next appearance, we cling to the words of Psalm 66: “Come and see what God has done: he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.”
And if you should ever doubt what God has done, look at Christ on the cross. There is the clearest teaching of God’s love for you and for all mankind. Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection happened at just the right time in human history so that all of the Old Testament prophecies would come to fruition in Him. Even though man had been waiting for Him since Genesis 3:15 – and it seemed like an eternity for the Messiah to come – in God’s perfect timing He sent His Son to defeat death and the devil and to pay for all our sins.
Dear friends, God’s timing is never wrong, even though we may believe otherwise. And He gives you His patience and strength in the midst of His divine delay so that when He finally sees you through, you can and will rejoice in that great blessing of God working for both your earthly and your eternal good.
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
