by CCW | 15 January 2017 15:00
Saying and doing. Acting upon what has been said. Does it mean just simply doing what you are told – mindlessly and without thinking? By no means. Epiphany presents us with the great wonder and mystery of God revealed to us through the words and deeds and person of Jesus Christ. The Feast of the Epiphany itself marks the break-out from Bethlehem in the sense of the making known of Christ’s birth to all people. The Magi-Kings present gifts to the Child Christ. They are gifts which teach. Christ is King, and God and Sacrifice. And then The First Sunday after Epiphany presents to us the story of the boy Jesus at the age of twelve being found in the Temple in Jerusalem in the midst of the doctors of the Law. The scene is all about teaching and learning, things which have very much to do with our humanity in concert with divinity. God and Man. Jesus the Divine Teacher; Jesus the human student. What is signaled ever so profoundly, too, is the mission and purpose of Christ’s Incarnation.
“Wist ye not”, he says to Mary. “Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business”, or as another possible way of translating puts it, “in my Father’s house”. Epiphany is all about the things of God revealed to us through the humanity of Jesus. Central to the teaching or doctrine of Epiphany is the relationship between power and wisdom. The first article of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, for instance, identifies three essential attributes of God: his infinite wisdom, power and goodness. When wisdom and power fall apart then we have abuse and destruction, bullying and domination – all at the expense of wisdom and truth. It is the story of the 20th century and continuing into the 21st. Epiphany, to the contrary, points out the essential and necessary connection between wisdom and power. Such things belong to God and only then by extension to the shaping and ordering of our lives in community.
That idea of the unity of wisdom and power underlies another feature of the Epiphany season. It is very much the season of miracles, of signs and wonders. We are in the midst of the mystery and wonder of God being made manifest and known to us. But miracles sometimes trouble us. We both want miracles and dismiss the idea of miracles at one and the same time. We lack a certain wisdom and understanding that would allow us to grasp properly the real wonder and mystery of miracles. They are really about God’s purpose and will for our humanity. The biblical miracles all recall us to the greater miracle of creation itself which is about a fundamental relation to a Creator. Only in that understanding of reality can we begin to make sense of redemption. The redemption of creation is unthinkable apart from the idea of creation itself. All of the miracle stories of the Epiphany season teach us something about the divine purpose for our humanity and for the world. A great wonder indeed.
And so it is not by accident that the first miracle story both in the season of Epiphany and in John’s Gospel is the story of Jesus and Mary at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee when Jesus turns water into wine. The story is profoundly and inescapably sacramental but in ways that recall us to the essential doctrine of the Incarnation and to its radical meaning in terms of the making known of the things of God to us through the humanity of Jesus Christ. This story is said to be the “beginning of signs” which Jesus did and so it teaches us something profound about all of the miracles of the Gospel.
The miracles are not mere displays of power to delight and amaze, to entertain and amuse. That would be power without wisdom and understanding, without any real purpose. No. They teach us something about what God seeks for our humanity. What makes this Gospel story so powerful is that it shows us – makes manifest to us – the meaning of redemption. All of the other miracle stories that involve the healing of the blind, the deaf, the dumb and the dead and so forth have to be gathered into “this beginning of signs” which presents the meaning of all signs and wonders, all the miracles of the Bible. As this story teaches, God seeks our social joy, our delight and enjoyment of one another in and through our life with God. Such we might say is the importance of the image of marriage. It signals the idea of unity, of love and respect, and delight and goodness in an extended and metaphorical sense, indeed, a theological sense. God seeks the very best for us and not some second rate happiness. God gives the very best wine.
The point is that by ourselves we cannot attain ultimate happiness. That can only be achieved by God and by God with us and in us. That is the point of the sacramental life of the Church. It requires our thoughtful obedience to God’s Word and Son, to Jesus and to what he tells us. Mary gets this. She is the paradigm of faithful humanity. She identifies the human predicament. “They”– we – “have no wine”. We lack the wine of divinity which alone can perfect our humanity and which alone can give us real joy. Everything else is but a shadow. To know our lack – to be aware of the distance between where we are and where God would have us be – is the beginning of redemption itself. It opens us to the things which God seeks for us.
Mary gets this. “O woman”, Jesus says to her in what is again a challenging kind of remark. It is not altogether unlike his rhetorical question to her in the temple. “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business”, he had said as a boy of twelve. “O woman”, he says here, “what is that to thee and to me? Mine hour has not yet come.” He is speaking about the human lack, the lack of wine in this case, but he connects it to something more profound and significant, namely, “his hour” meaning his passion. “This beginning of signs” is already connected to the end and purpose of Christ’s coming – his passion, death and resurrection by which we are redeemed and saved, the mystery in which we abide sacramentally. Take, eat, Drink this. Act upon what he says. “Do this in remembrance of me”.
Mary gets what he says. Her remark to the servants and to us is incomprehensible without the realization of her understanding of what Jesus is saying. “Whatsoever he says to you, do it,” she says. It is anything but mindless obedience. It is precisely about responding responsibly to what is said and understood. That is precisely how we enter into the mystery of God revealed. There is the teaching and there is the learning and only then is there the action. The servants follow the directions of Jesus but it is the master of ceremonies, the governor of the feast, who discovers the wonder, water turned into wine and, indeed, into the very best wine. It is symbolic of what all the miracles seek – our joy and our delight in the things of God which is the true condition of our social lives.
In a way, it is all about the marriage between God and man, between the Creator and the created. We come Sunday after Sunday to the marriage feast of the Lamb, to the one whose Word is truth and life and in whom we find our joy and our delight but only if we heed Mary’s word and act upon what we have heard and learned.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 2, 2017
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2017/01/15/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-after-epiphany/
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