Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
admin | 19 January 2020There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee
This story, like the story of the boy Christ being found in the Temple teaching and learning, is essential to the meaning of the Epiphany, itself the season par excellence of teaching and learning. But teaching and learning what? About God and man but with a new and distinctive emphasis upon the divinity of Christ as revealed through the humanity of Christ.
This story, like the story of the boy Christ at the age of twelve, is an epiphany, a making known of the essential divinity of Christ. “Did ye know not,” he says in the Temple, rather challengingly, and we might think even rather abruptly to his mother, “that I must be about my Father’s business?” meaning, of course, the will of God. In relation to that exchange we are told that “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart.” It is a wonderful phrase that complements and builds upon the Shepherd’s Christmas where Mary is said to have “kept all these things and pondered them in heart.” What things? All the things that were said about the infant, the unspeaking child Jesus. But in the story of the boy Christ, “his mother,” Luke tells us, “kept all these sayings in her heart.” What sayings? All the things Jesus himself is saying. Wonderful. Mary keeps in her heart both what is said about Jesus and what Jesus says to us.
We are called to be Marian in the sense of attending to what is said about Jesus and what is said by Jesus and to let that define and dignify us in spite of our sins and follies. In so doing, we open ourselves to the miracle of God’s grace at work in our lives, not only perfecting and restoring our wounded humanity, but in signalling the joy of redemption, our joy in the things of God without which we are radically incomplete.
This brings us to the Gospel reading for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, to one of the quintessential stories of the Epiphany, to the idea of miracles that teach as distinct from things that amuse and entertain. It is about attending to what Jesus does.
Miracles are an important aspect of the Christian Faith despite the long, long legacy of skepticism about miracles. They aren’t an article of faith so much as an aspect of our thinking about God in relation to us and our world, to what we might call the mystery of life itself; the miracle par excellence, we might say. We live in a world which desperately wants miracles and yet despairingly rejects the very idea of miracles. The great miracle is creation itself, our life as grounded in the Creator’s gift of life. Today’s Gospel helps us to appreciate the miracle of the gift of life, a miracle which challenges the destructive narcissisms of our culture and age.
There is no problem with miracles from a more reflective and even a scientific outlook. The God of all creation is not simply bound to his creation as if God were simply nature operating according to natural laws. The miracle of creation is not simply that it is but that it continues to be. Creation is a continuing event, a running miracle, we might say. God is the author of nature but while we seek to understand the wonder of the natural world, what has long been known as the Book of Nature, in no way does this limit God from acting in other ways according, we might say, to his sovereign freedom. God is not tied and bound to nature but neither are his actions purely and simply arbitrary and meaningless. The struggle is to understand what is signified in the miracles of the Gospel, to what is revealed in the Scriptures, itself another Book of God.
At issue is our openness to what God seeks for our humanity. Theologically understood, that is our good as found in the goodness of God. The miracles belong therefore to the idea of the “infinite power, wisdom and goodness of God” (Art. 1). The Gospel miracles are miracles which teach exactly that and they do so in terms of the divine purpose for our humanity and our world. They recall us to God’s will.
It is wonderful that “this beginning of signs” is the story of the wedding at Cana of Galilee where Jesus turns water into wine. It is not a miracle of healing exactly which most of the miracle stories are but a miracle about hospitality and redemption in a far greater register. Ask yourself this. What is the point of the healing of the blind, the deaf, the dumb and the lame, the cleansing of lepers and the raising of the dead? The answer, it seems to me, is found in “this beginning of signs” which points to the end of all signs. They are all about our participation in the life of God.
Nowhere is that signalled more wonderfully than in this story which is intentionally and profoundly sacramental and speaks to the union of opposites, of God and man in and through the union of man and woman in marriage. These are unions which do not obliterate differences but affirm and re-establish them in love.
“They have no wine,” Mary says, to which Jesus responds intriguingly and rather perplexingly. “O woman, what is that to thee and to me?” Is he saying, ‘So what?’ ‘Who cares?’ No. “Mine hour has not yet come,” he says. What does that mean? He is pointing to the whole point of his Incarnation. He has come to do the will of him who sent him. That is the redemption of our humanity through his cross and passion. Out of the side of the crucified flow blood and water, the symbols of our incorporation into his life through baptism and communion. He seeks our social joys not just with one another but as gathered to him in love. His love seeks the perfection of our loves; his love pours itself out for us in the giving of the very best wine. The wine of divinity restores, enriches, and dignifies the poverty of our humanity. This is the great marvel that awakens such wonder.
The wonder is the wonder of God in which we discover the wonder of our redemption. Our redemption is about our life together in prayer and praise, in word and sacrament. It is about the union of God and man. It is profoundly sacramental. God uses the things of this world to teach us about his will for us. Such is the goodness of God revealed to us through the word and actions of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 2, 2020