Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
“This beginning of signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee
and manifested forth his glory and his disciples believed on him.”
Epiphany is the season of teaching, we have said. It is, also, it seems the season of miracles. Epiphany abounds with the miracles of Jesus. Is there a connection? Yes. The miracles teach. They belong to what is being made manifest, to what is being made known to us about who Jesus is and what he means for us. Importantly, the miracles reveal God’s will and purpose for our humanity.
Yet, miracles may trouble us. Some have thought of them as being little more than the stuff of superstition and nonsense. Thomas Jefferson, for example, in the almost typical exuberance and arrogance of the reason of the Enlightenment, took his scissors to the New Testament and cut out of it all the miracles, leaving merely a kind of core of moral teaching as he thought. But this, I am afraid, to have missed the whole point of the miracles. Without them we miss the greater story of God’s will and purpose for our humanity and our world. After all, as theologians like Augustine pointed out long ago, the great miracle is the miracle of creation itself to which the miracles recall us in one way or another.
The miracle stories of the New Testament open us out to the truth of God as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier and, perhaps, nowhere do we see that more clearly and more profoundly in this Gospel story of the Wedding Feast at Cana of Galilee where Jesus turned the water into wine. John tells us, and it is something he is at pains to tell us, that this was “the beginning of signs” which Jesus did, the first of the miracles as it were. I think he wants us to appreciate how much this Gospel story makes manifest – there is that Epiphany word again – the true meaning of all the miracle stories.
