Year: 2012

“They found him in the Temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors,
both hearing them, and asking them questions.”

Epiphany is, par excellence, the season of teaching. It begins with the Magi-Kings bearing gifts to the Child Christ, gifts that primarily teach; “sacred gifts of mystic meaning,” as one of the hymns puts it. And then, there is this Gospel story, the only Gospel story about the boyhood of Jesus. He is found in the Temple in Jerusalem by his parents. He is with the doctors, the teachers of the Law. He is both listening and asking questions and providing answers. He is at once both student, humanly speaking, and teacher, divinely speaking. Epiphany is about what God makes known to us through the humanity of Jesus Christ.

This Gospel story challenges us about education. It does so from within the meaning of the story of the Epiphany itself which is primarily about adoration, a concept which we have, perhaps, lost or forgotten in our contemporary culture and which then affects how we think about education, about teaching. Education, too, is often described as a kind of journey, an adventure in learning, and so forth. But what kind of journey?

There is a journey to be sure, the journey to and from Bethlehem by the Magi-Kings. And there is a journey to Jerusalem and, ultimately, back to Nazareth in the Gospel story of Christ teaching in the Temple.

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“Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof,
but speak the word only and my servant shall be healed.”

Mean thoughts, mean words and mean deeds result in a mean world of mean people. How great the contrast with healing words and deeds that arise from healing thoughts?

Words can make or break our day. A word spoken in kindness and truth can build us up and encourage us. A word spoken in disdain and hate can unsettle and disturb us.

Here is an Epiphany story of two miracles. It is simply about the power and the truth of the Divine Word which challenges us about our thoughts, our words and our deeds.

Two miracles. Miracles, we have suggested are part of the teaching programme of the Epiphany season. They belong to God’s will and purpose for our humanity, to our being able to take delight and find joy in one another and in God’s world. All the healing miracles of the Gospel point to that picture of the restoration and perfection of our humanity. They signal the idea of creation redeemed and sanctified. But only through the encounter with Christ. Only through the manifestations of his essential divinity communicated through his perfect humanity.

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“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.

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