“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee”
Epiphany means manifestation. It is about things that are being made known to us. It is about teaching. Teaching is transformative. “Be ye transformed,” Paul tells us, “by the renewing of your minds.” This story is utterly unique in the New Testament. Only John tells us that this was the “beginning of signs” in which Jesus “manifested forth his glory.” It speaks to the mystery of human redemption. It is really a story of transformation not just of water into wine but our humanity into community with God.
The real wonder of the Epiphany is about what God wants for our humanity. The real wonder of the Epiphany is that our humanity finds its greatest truth and greatest happiness in communion with God. The mystery of the Epiphany is a kind of marriage, the communion of God and man which is the basis for our communion with one another. It is not by accident that “this beginning of signs” happens at a wedding.
Yet this Gospel story is not simply about marriage as a state of life. It speaks profoundly to the whole reality of the human situation. It challenges us to pay attention to God’s engagement with our humanity.
Nowhere is that more clearly signified than in the words of Mary. “They have no wine,” she says, clearly and distinctly. She puts her finger directly on the very nature of the human situation. Our lack, our emptiness, and our pretense and folly. We lack in ourselves the means of our good and happiness. We stand in the way of what God seeks for us. This is the hard but great lesson of the Christian Faith about the presumption of our own self-sufficiency. To know that we have no wine is the reality check and the beginning of our being opened to God’s grace for us and in us.
I am not suggesting in any way that I or anybody that I know has the answer to the predicaments and the confusions and the contradictions of contemporary culture. We all inhabit those concerns in one way or another. But perhaps, and, just perhaps, that is where this unique Gospel story comes in. That “they [we] have no wine,” is the reality of the experience of our fallen humanity. Mary identifies the human predicament and captures the emptiness of human culture. It occasions Christ’s response which at first seems strange and confusing, if not a little off-putting. “O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour is not yet come.”
John says this was the “beginning of signs,” the beginning of Christ’s miracles. Miracles, too, are an essential feature of the Epiphany. They teach us about who Christ is and who he is for us. But in this first of signs we learn how the miracles belong to the whole purpose of human redemption in Christ, to the whole purpose of his coming. Most miracles of the Gospels center on acts of healing: “the blind see, the deaf hear, the dumb speak, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the dead are raised up.” They reveal the divine will for our wholeness and completeness. But to what end?
This Gospel miracle teaches us to what end. The reference to “mine hour” is to his death and resurrection for us. Mary’s response to this is simple and direct: “whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” a kind of echo of her “be it unto me according to thy word.” What follows is the miracle of the water become wine and not just ordinary plonk but the best wine. Why? Not only because God provides for us in the wilderness of our lives but because he seeks the very best for us. And what he seeks for us is our social joys which are found in communion with God and with one another. The story recalls God’s provisions in the wilderness, water from the stricken rock, manna from heaven, and alludes to what will happen at the Last Supper with his disciples and on the Cross at Calvary. Bread and wine become his body and his blood; body broken and blood outpoured.
Out of his pierced side flow not only blood and water but the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion as the Fathers note. Here is the love which seeks our good and calls us to seek the good of one another within and without marriage. Here is the love which is the marriage of God and man, the divine love which perfects our human loves. Embrace the love.
“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee”
Fr. David Curry
AMD Service of the Deaf
January 25, 2015