Christ Church

“This is again the second sign that Jesus did,
when he was come out of Judea into Galilee”

Signs and wonders. Things said and done. What is the effect of God’s words on our minds? His word is proclaimed in our presence. His story is told in our hearing. It is told for us. It is even written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. We hear it. We know it. But what effect does it have on our minds and in our lives? Today’s Gospel is an excellent illustration of what Paul means by bidding us “put on the whole armour of God”… “taking the helmet of salvation” that has to do with our minds,  “and the sword of the Spirit,” which is nothing less than “the word of God” (Eph.6.10ff). Is this not what we see?

“This is again the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee,” John tells us. In telling us this, he reminds us of the first sign, the first miracle which Jesus did. Moreover, it is the second time that he is in the same place. What is that place? Cana of Galilee. It seems to have been the place of signs. At the very least what happens here in Cana of Galilee signifies something of the effect of God’s words and deeds on human minds and human lives.

God’s word causes delight. God’s word creates new life and new birth. God’s word causes healing and restoration to life in God. At the very least, we may say, these are the desired effects of God’s word upon our minds.

What was the first sign that Jesus did in Cana of Galilee? It was there at the Wedding-feast that Jesus turned the water into wine. The effect was to cause delight and wonderment. “They have no wine,” Mary said, articulating so simply the human predicament. We lack the means of joy and life in ourselves. We lack what we most desire and seek but which can only come from God. This is the point. Thus Christ gives not only wine but the best wine. Wine, as the psalmist says, “makes glad the heart of man”. The most excellent wine of Christ’s making belongs to the abundant life which he would give us, namely, our joy and our blessedness in his presence with the Father and with one another in the fellowship of faith. The effect of God’s word is our joy. Such is the purpose of God’s word in the first sign that Jesus did in Cana of Galilee. The first sign and miracle signals the radical meaning of all the miracles. They intend our wholeness and our joy, our living and abiding in the truth of God.

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“Then opened he their understanding”

I love Paul’s simple yet poignant phrase that “only Luke is with me.” There is a compelling elegance and simplicity to it. It captures something of the experience of the ministry in its deep truth and meaning. Even more, it captures something of the spiritual significance of Luke, “Evangelist and Physician of the soul,” as the Collect puts it, for the life of the Christian Church. There is something profoundly comforting about the presence of Luke with Paul. And so, too, I hope, with us.

Luke is the Church’s great spiritual director, especially in the long Trinity season where his Gospel provides over half of the Sunday readings. There is a poignant quality to his writings, both in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles generally attributed to him. The special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption is best grasped in Dante’s lovely phrase. Luke, he says, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. The phrase captures the meaning and truth of our spiritual pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God and with God in Jesus Christ. It highlights a special quality to that pilgrimage – gentleness. Not our gentleness but the gentleness of Christ, which at once provides a profound insight into God’s engagement with our wounded and broken humanity and a strong corrective to the negative views of divine judgment. It complements Marylynne Robinson’s insight in Reading Genesis about the quality of divine restraint or forbearance that points to forgiveness and compassion; the very features of his Gospel.

No one better expresses the idea of an ethic of action rooted in compassion and forgiveness than St. Luke. He has been, accordingly, our principal instructor about such an ethic which speaks so profoundly to the confusions and lunacies of our day where either Profit or the Self is God which neither can possibly be. In the absence of any kind of principled ethical discourse there is only the tyranny of “technocratic totalitarianism” (as Fr. Thomas Plant suggests in his book on the Catechism, King Oswald’s Heirs), whether it is global corporatism, governments or companies, or the subjective tyranny of the self. But here, almost as a kind of counter to those totalizing concepts, we are reminded that “only Luke is with [us]” and that it is Luke who emphasises that Jesus opens our understanding by opening the Scriptures to us, giving us a way to grasp their meaning and their application to our lives. It makes a difference.

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