Sermon for the Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity

admin | 25 October 2015

“Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe”

In one way, it is a curious criticism. After all, the concept of Revelation begins with signs and wonders. God reveals himself to Moses in the Burning Bush, a sign and a wonder, to be sure, and one that catches our attention, a bush burns and is not consumed out of which God speaks his Name, “I am who I am.” It initiates the Exodus, the journey into the understanding of God’s will for our humanity. But there is a further question.

What is the effect of God’s Word on our minds? His Word is proclaimed in our presence. His story is told in our hearing. It is told for us. It is even written out for us to read in Jesus Christ. We hear it. We know it. But what effect does it have on our minds and in our lives?

“This is again the second sign that Jesus did, when he was come out of Judaea into Galilee,” John tells us. In telling us this, he reminds us of the first sign, the first miracle, which Jesus did. Moreover, it is the second time that he is in the same place. What is that place? It is Cana of Galilee. It seems to have been the place of signs. At the very least what happens here in Cana of Galilee signifies something of the effect of God’s Word on human minds.

God’s Word causes delight. God’s Word causes healing. God’s Word creates new life and new birth. Such are the desired effects of God’s Word upon our minds.

What was the first sign that Jesus did in this place of signs, Cana of Galilee? It was at the Wedding-feast in Cana of Galilee that Jesus turned the water into wine, a story which we hear every year during Epiphany. The effect was to cause delight and wonderment. They who heard the word “receive[d] the word with joy”. Christ gives not only wine but the best wine. Wine, as the psalmist says, “makes glad the heart of man”. That most excellent wine belongs to the abundant life which he would give us – our joy and our blessedness in his presence with the Father and with one another in the fellowship of faith. The effect of God’s Word is our joy. Such is the purpose of God’s Word in the first sign that Jesus did in Cana of Galilee.

If we are open to his purpose – disposed towards it and alive to it – then there is joy and delight in us. But it is the joy and delight of God’s Word in us.

“This is the second sign that Jesus did.” A second sign from the second time that he was in Cana of Galilee. What was the sign? The healing of the nobleman’s son. This father went to Jesus, searched him out, as it were, and found him in Cana of Galilee. But his son was in Capernaum. “Come down,” he says, and “heal my son”. Jesus does not come down but he does heal his son. His Word causes healing. We become aware of the real meaning of revelation. It is about what is made known in and through the signs and wonders.

The healing was in Capernaum. But the cause of the healing was in Cana of Galilee. It was in Jesus Christ who is God’s Word and Son who has come that “[we] might have life and have it abundantly” and to that end he has come to heal us of our sickness and death. He has come to heal us of all our sins which make us less than what God would have us be in his truth and will. That Word made flesh stands in Cana of Galilee, to be sure, but that Word is God’s Word which cannot be contained and limited to time and space but “goes forth to accomplish that which it purposes,” as Isaiah says.

God’s Word purposes healing. That Word was in Cana of Galilee but is hardly constrained to that little village. It reaches out to heal in far-off Capernaum. It reaches out to heal us who stand yet even further off in time and space. And yet that Divine Word heals in Capernaum because it was heard and received in Cana of Galilee. It was heard and received in faith by the nobleman who came to Jesus.

And he, too, was healed. How was he healed? What was his sickness? His sickness was an error of the soul, a mistaken view about the power and truth of God’s Word. He came to Cana of Galilee seeking out Jesus Christ but demanding that he come down and make a house call. He thinks that Jesus has to be physically present in Capernaum in order to heal his son in Capernaum. God’s Word is not so constrained by our expectations. His Word causes healing if we are alive to his Word, if we are alive to the real wonder of Revelation.

What stands in the way is just our expectation. “Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe”. Here in Cana of Galilee, there were two signs – things said and done by Jesus that reveal God to us and redeem us to God. But the point in each case is to go beyond the sign to the thing signified. What does God’s Word purpose? His Word purposes our delight and our salvation, our joy and our being healed in soul and body of all that would destroy our fellowship with God. The signs are done to open us out to the power and truth of God’s Word and not to constrain us to signs and wonders themselves. The signs and wonders are but the outward and visible aspects of what is inward and spiritual. They are like the sacraments in which we see and taste the bread and wine but know in faith the body and blood of Christ, his life in us making us one with him.

We hear about these signs and wonders. Is it enough to cause delight and healing in us? It was enough for the nobleman. He went at Christ’s word and command: “Go thy way, thy son liveth”. This second sign already points beyond what is immediately sensed and seen. Its power lies in what is heard and received. And so it must be with us. The telling of the sign and wonder opens us out to the truth and power of God’s Word. It frees us from demanding that Jesus be physically present. It alerts us to his being with us spiritually and actually. It convicts us of the conditions of our fellowship in the Gospel.

We meet here in this place of signs and wonders, to be sure, but only to be challenged about the meaning of what is signified in and through what is seen and heard in the Word proclaimed and the Sacraments celebrated, the Word audible and visible that is beyond both seeing and hearing. That is the counter to all of the tribalisms of religion – the counter to the tendency to constrain and limit the majesty and power and the truth of God to our own expectations; in short, to the ghettoes of our minds, to the denominations of religion which easily become sects. Fideism is about a closed world, communities of faith that are closed in on themselves with too narrow a view of God, a God constrained and limited by our family and tribal identities, a God for us but not for others. Fideism is really all about us and our claims to faith, not God and the God of Faith.

This Gospel opens us out to the transcendent power and truth of God conveyed in and through the signs and wonders that belong to Faith in its catholic and universal sense. It awakens us to Faith, to awe and wonder, to delight and joy. It happens not just in Cana of Galilee, not just in Capernaum but wherever we are touched by God’s Word in its power and truth. It happens here.