Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
“They have no wine”
After the celebrated fullness of Christmas, it must seem suddenly strange to find ourselves utterly empty. “They have no wine,” Mary says to Jesus. Not just the post-Christmas mantra of the Deep Dark Woods’ song “All the money I had is gone”, but we have no wine! Empty wine-skins and empty pockets, it seems. And, of course, we may find ourselves empty, too, with grief and dismay at the terrible destruction of the earthquake in poverty-stricken Haiti; a natural catastrophe magnified by human poverty. There, too, it must seem there is no wine, no joy. And, of course, there are those who point the finger of blame at God because of the realities of human suffering. That, too, is part of our emptiness.
And yet, this gospel story speaks powerfully to the human predicament. We are empty in ourselves of all that has purpose and meaning, of all that has joy and delight. We are just so many broken pots and empty cups. We confront emptiness and loss. Mary’s words are really quite profound. She speaks of an emptiness that is about something more than money, more than even wine physically and materially considered. We lack the wine of divinity.
We meet in the season of the Epiphany. The gospel story of the marriage feast at Cana of Galilee is one of the outstanding stories of the Epiphany season. It is an epiphany. Why? Because it calls our attention to the making known of the essential divinity of Christ as critical to the understanding of him as the Redeemer of our humanity. One of the most poignant stories of the Epiphany, it manifests the power of the one who seeks our good, the one who brings redemption and salvation to a world of empty souls.
“This beginning of signs,” John tells us, is the first miracle and it gives us an insight into the meaning and truth of all the miracles of the gospel and an insight into the redemption of our humanity.
In the background to Mary’s remark is an old Jewish saying that “without wine there is no joy.” We lack the joy of divinity which graces our humanity. Left to ourselves, our joys and our happinesses are incomplete and empty. We need the wine of divinity. This is what God wants to give us precisely in our awareness of what we lack. God seeks the perfection of our humanity which is found in him. Out of the six jars of water comes the wine, the good wine, which restores the joy of the party and signifies the social joys of our humanity. They are found in God. They are found by our paying attention to the creative and redemptive word of God incarnate in Jesus Christ.
