by CCW | 16 January 2011 15:01
Mary’s statement describes in a simple phrase our human predicament. We are without. We lack the means for our true joy, for our true blessedness. In the background to her remark there is an ancient Jewish saying: “without wine there is no joy”. “They have no wine” means, we may say, they have no joy. But ‘they’ are ‘us’. We have no wine, no joy.
The deeper point is that we can have no joy in ourselves. We lack, we might say, the wine of divinity, the source and the occasion of all joy, the wine that truly gladdens and rejoices the heart and soul. To know our lack, however, is saving knowledge. To know our limitations is to be alert to the possibilities of their being overcome – not by us but by the grace of God for us and in us. To know our lack is to be alert to the real presence of divine grace in our midst.
I cannot think of this gospel story without recalling the phrase “the wine of divinity” used by Fr. Robert Crouse in a sermon on this gospel. A great teacher and scholar of international standing and repute, he was a friend and a mentor to a great number of priests and scholars around the world. The Rev’d Dr. Robert Darwin Crouse passed away yesterday. Many of us owe our love and what knowledge we have of such outstanding theological and poetic figures as Augustine and Dante, for instance, to Robert. Through his teaching in hundreds and hundreds of sermons over many years, many people, both clergy and lay, have learned a love of God and an understanding of Christian doctrine, particularly as expressed in the liturgy of The Book of Common Prayer. Acknowledged as “the conscience of the Canadian Church” by another theologian, Canon Eugene Rathbone Fairweather, Robert’s voice was the calm still voice of wisdom and understanding, a voice which has not always been heeded by the Anglican Church, but which lives on through his writings and teachings and, perhaps, in some small way through his many, many students, of which I count myself one.
He was, perhaps, the most outstanding scholar that King’s Collegiate School in Windsor, (now King’s-Edgehill) and the University of King’s College in Halifax ever produced. The School contributed to his love of nature, his love of music and his love of learning; loves which stayed with him throughout his life. While a student at the School, he often came down to Christ Church to play the organ: it was his way, he told me, of getting out of rugby! He has left his mark, quite literally, on the inside wall of the organ chamber where his signature in chalk can still be seen. The smell of the wood and fabric of Christ Church, he once told me, has always stayed with him as evocating the very image and idea of the essential being of the Church.
Robert’s teaching was always in some sense, sacramental, which is why, perhaps, his sermon on this gospel story has always stayed with me. From Robert we learn something of what it means to have “no wine” in ourselves and, even more, to discover “the wine of divinity” in which we may find those joys celestial which have no ending. May he rest in peace and may his example inspire us all.
In the Gospel, Mary’s simple statement is made to Christ. Her next, equally simple statement is made to the servants. Yet it extends, really, to all of us: “whatever he tells you, do it.” In between her two simple statements, there is Christ’s rather curious and seemingly dismissive remark: “O woman what is that to thee and to me? mine hour has not yet come.”
What can it mean except that the fulfilling of our needs cannot just be at the dictate of our demands? As if God were some sort of Genie let out of the bottle to do our bidding! As if everything must be done according to our will. To the contrary, it has to be according to the word and will of God, according to the purpose of his coming. In him we find the true measure of our desires. In him we find what is most to be wanted: “thy will be done.” The cost of that is to be found in the meaning of his hour. His hour refers to his death and resurrection, to the miracle of all miracles, of which this miracle at Cana of Galilee is but the “beginning of signs.” The fullness of its meaning is to be found in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
What transpires in this epiphanous “beginning of signs” tells us something profound about the purpose of Christ’s coming. Epiphany season is the season of teaching. The miracles of Christ which “adorn and beautify” this season all teach us something about the truth of Christ. They all manifest – make known – his essential divinity. But they also teach us something else. They teach us something about what God wants for us.
“This beginning of signs” above all else signifies God’s great desire to give us what is best for us. He seeks our joy and our blessedness. He seeks what is best for us. That is why this first miracle, as John presents it, is a miracle about the superabundance of God’s grace. He gives more than either we desire or deserve. He gives more quantitatively, we might say, and he gives more qualitatively: the best wine has been saved until the last. But beyond that, he gives what is best absolutely and supersubstantially from himself. Even more, in the reference to his hour, we are to understand that he is giving his very self – body broken and blood outpoured.
There is an inescapably sacramental character to this Gospel reading. It signifies our redemption as within the epiphany pageant of revelation, a revelation that is a light from within the conditions of humanity and not simply from above. Christ is the light of the world now present in the world. Epiphany is about that light shining out from the midst of the world and the things of this world. Through Christ’s Incarnation, the simple things of this world are made the vehicles of the great things of heavenly grace.
This means, too, that there is an integrity to the things of this world in their unity and difference. There is “male and female” as the God-given categories of the understanding of our humanity in creation which, in Christian marriage, become a sign of Christ’s love for the Church. There is “bread and wine”, themselves gifts of creation transformed by human labour, which become, by God’s grace, something more, namely, the effective signs of Christ’s sacramental presence.
The story of the Wedding Feast at Cana, where Jesus turned the water into wine to provide the joy of the feast, emphasizes the teaching that is learned through the sensible things of this world. The teaching is, we might say, sacramental. Something is conveyed to us through these signs which effect what they signify. They do what they say. The sacraments of the Church are the effective signs of God’s will and purpose for us in all the varied circumstances of our lives. An inward and spiritual grace is given to us through the outward and visible signs of bread and wine. They are given to us by Christ himself “as a means whereby we receive this grace, and as a pledge to assure us thereof”, as the Catechism teaches. The grace lies in what he wills to give us. What he wills to give us is nothing less than the very best. It is himself. In the miracles of Epiphany “we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
We behold what he makes manifest for us. Our joy, our good, our truth, our blessedness is found in the company of the one who has come into our midst. It is to be found in his hour, in the purpose of his coming. He comes to give us what we lack. Our humanity is utterly incomplete without God. We lack the wine of divinity. But Christ is our wine, the wine of everlasting life. In him we have all that we need. “According to [his] word”, and not otherwise, may we enter into what he has provided for us, both now and at the hour of our need.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany II, 2011
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