“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”
It is a most wonderful and yet a very challenging gospel scene. Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, says two things. “They have no wine” and “whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”. Both statements are an epiphany – the making known of the barren, empty reality of the human situation, on the one hand, and the revelation of the conditions for the divine perfection of our humanity, on the other hand. “This beginning of signs” manifests God’s purpose for our humanity, a purpose which ultimately has to do with our being with the one who has come to be with us.
In between Mary’s two statements stands the profound yet disturbing response of Jesus to her first remark. “They have no wine”, she says. “O woman, what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come”, Jesus says. What does he mean?
We hear this gospel story in the Epiphany season, a season which is variable in length according to the date of Easter, whether early or late. This is the last Sunday in the Epiphany season this year which is as short as it can be. Yet this story is always read regardless of the length of the Epiphany season. Why? Because it captures something of the fundamental meaning of the Epiphany. “This beginning of signs” contains the meaning and significance of all the signs and wonders and all the words and deeds of Jesus in the gospels.
It seems that “this beginning of signs” extends beyond a simple country event to touch upon the larger meaning of our lives together in the body of Christ. “This beginning of signs” includes all the signs, and indeed, most especially, those signs which are what they signify, the signs which we call the sacraments, “the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace”.
“They have no wine” is far more than merely Mary’s observation about the course of the marriage feast. Her statement captures the whole of the human situation, the situation of our neediness, our emptiness, our insufficiency. She names the human predicament, we have no wine. We lack the wine of divinity, the wine which graces and perfects our humanity, the wine that is “the cup of everlasting salvation” as the Prayer of Consecration puts it.
But is that not the situation which Christ has come to address? Indeed, but on whose terms? Certainly not merely at our bidding, at our command. We can, to be sure, recognize our need and even seek and want God’s grace, but we cannot dictate the hour or the manner of its being granted, if at all. Our desires signal only our awareness of our need. At best, to know that we have no wine of ourselves is to be open to the possibilities of God’s saving grace, but nothing more.
Perhaps, in this way, we can begin to understand Christ’s rather strange and disturbing remark, “Mine hour has not yet come”. His hour, as we know from other places in the gospel, is an unmistakable reference to his passion, to his death and resurrection, the ultimate “sign and wonder,” if you will, upon which everything depends. Here, Christ connects what he does in Cana to that all-defining event, an event which has altogether to do with the complete willing of his being into the hands and will of his Father, on the one hand, and his complete surrender into our hands, our wretched and bloody hands of wickedness, on the other hand; in short, the sacrifice which is love.
And here, then, is an epiphany of that sacrifice of love in terms of the meaning of Christ’s being with us as the Word and Son of the Father, as the Word made flesh. Here, too, is suggested the special role and significance of Mary for faith. She is the Mother of all the Faithful who names our need and in so doing, points us to the one who is the fulfillment of all our hopes and desires. Such is the meaning of Mary as the Mother of God, the theotokos who bears God into the world as Son and Child, as God made Man. It happens through the acquiescence of her whole being to the will of God so that the will of God for all humanity might be made known. “Be it unto me according to thy word”, she said, at that beginning of all beginnings of God’s being with us, her Annunciation.
What she said then is what she says now, “whatsoever he tells you, do it”. We, too, like Mary, are to be defined by our obedience to his Word without which his grace cannot live in us.
“Changing water into wine.” Oh, don’t we wish! In many ways, our culture has been greatly affected by the desire to change and re-image everything; an impulse to change but one which first exploits nature and then denies nature and the created order as well as the patterns of thinking that derive from the Scriptures and theological reflection. Mary’s acquiescence is something active, a taking a hold of the divine will for all. The Scriptures and the teachings of the Church speak to the confusions and the uncertainties of our world; they are not to be collapsed into its categories and assumptions at the expense of the forms of thinking that belong to the Faith that we have received. That is and continues to be one of the struggles for the Anglican Communion as seen in the latest communiqué of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Primates of the Anglican Churches to uphold the classical doctrine of Christian marriage, for example. How to reclaim the scriptural and doctrinal categories for the understanding of our humanity with charity and integrity? How to take a hold of God’s will for our humanity and for our world and day? How to be faithful? Quite simply, how to be Marian?
This story speaks profoundly to what God seeks for our humanity, to our good in his will. He seeks our joy! Do we really know what is that “good life” in which we find our joy? We cannot begin to understand the good life which is the blessedness of God for us apart from the hour of Christ, apart from the sacrifice of love overcoming the darkness of death. That is just the point, it seems to me, of this gospel story. It reveals to us the greater joy and the greater good that God wants for us in spite of ourselves, in spite of all of our confusions. Out of a thinking obedience to Christ, water is drawn and becomes wine, the very best wine. It is the wine of divinity, the gift of God to us in his being with us. It does not destroy nature but perfects it.
Here in this service is the hospitality of God without which we cannot be “kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love” and “given to hospitality”, as St. Paul puts it. Here is the great gift through which all gifts are given, the gift of divine love perfecting and restoring our humanity. Here, then, is the epiphany of God’s will and purpose for us; he seeks our good, indeed, our joy which can only realized in obedience to his will through a kind of sacrifice in us. What he says is “Do this in remembrance of me”.
“Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany II, 2016