“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.
In the story, Jesus’ initial response to Mary is to say, so what? “What has that to do with me and you? Mine hour has not yet come”, he says, before turning the water into wine. His “hour” is a reference to his passion and death out of which come life and resurrection. This first miracle is the Epiphany of Redemption. It points to the whole meaning of Christ’s coming. It speaks to what we do in our liturgy.
We attend to the Word of God audibly and tangibly present in the sacrament. God seeks to fill our empty souls with the grace of his presence sacramentally and in living and vital ways. All of the miracle stories of the Gospel recall us to the great miracle of creation itself, to the divine purpose for our humanity, and to the greater miracle of redemption which fulfills that purpose. In this gospel story we learn something quite profound about the nature of human redemption. The epiphany of human redemption does not begin with a healing miracle or a miracle of resurrection. It begins with a simple human scene, a marriage feast at which the wine runs out.
It begins with a simple human voice, the voice of Mary, naming our lack, our emptiness, “they have no wine.” It begins with Jesus’ challenge to her and to us, “mine hour has not yet come.” It begins with her words to the servants and to us, “whatsoever he says to you, do it,” because our thoughtful obedience is also the condition of redemption. It begins with the discovery, by “the ruler of the feast,” of the water become wine; “thou hast kept the good wine until now.” It begins with our amazement at who Jesus is and what he means for us in our lives; he “manifested forth his glory.” It begins with our being awakened to faith, yet again; “and his disciples believed on him.”
God seeks our good and our ultimate good is a social good. It is found in our being in communion with God and with one another. We find our joy in Christ in the Communion of Saints, in the social joys of holy fellowship, and in the qualities of our life together in the body of Christ, so wonderfully and passionately captured in the epistle reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “be[ing] kindly affectioned one to another … continuing instant in prayer; distributing to the necessity of the saints; given to hospitality” and so on; the very things which belong to our corporate life in Christ and in whatever situation or circumstance we find ourselves. These things compel our help and service to those in need in whatever way we can.
In Christ we find the wine of divinity which refreshes and restores our wounded and broken humanity; our sins and follies notwithstanding. But the redemption of our humanity is for a purpose, a purpose which this miracle, “this beginning of signs,” makes manifest. It is for our life with God in the company of redeemed humanity.
Without God, our humanity is radically incomplete. This is the great insight of the great religions of the world. For Christians, we find our completeness in Christ, the God made man, who provides for us in the midst of our world of want and emptiness. “For he satisfieth the empty soul,/and filleth the hungry soul with goodness,” as the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 107. 9).
The cup of heavenly love is always full, always more and never less than what we need or deserve, but it comes with a cost. It is “the love which my God feels as bloud, but I as wine,” as the poet George Herbert puts it. (It is perhaps, the most persuasive ‘answer’ to the question about suffering: in Christ, God is no stranger to our world of sin and suffering, our world of death and loss).
The Epiphany of Redemption recalls us to the Cross. Out of the wounded side of the crucified Christ flows blood and water. The ancient theologians saw these as the signs of the sacraments of baptism and communion, signs of the nature of our incorporation into the life of God in Christ. Just so “this beginning of signs” points us to the hour of Christ’s cross and passion. “In my beginning is my end,” as T.S. Eliot suggests; and so it is with “this beginning of signs.”
Mary’s words open us out to the grace of Christ, to the one who alone can satisfy the empty soul in an empty world.
“They have no wine”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany II, 2010
Christ Church, Windsor