by CCW | 17 January 2021 08:00
This too is epiphany, “this beginning of signs,” as John tells us. It is a wonderful encounter again between Mary and Jesus, a most intriguing exchange. But what is the epiphany? What is being made known in the encounter between Mary and Jesus and between us and Jesus? How is this encounter philosophical? I want to try to redeem the idea of this encounter from what is simply existential or personal but only so as to give a proper place for the personal and the existential. It has really altogether to do with the universal which is made known through the particularities of this encounter.
Epiphany complements Advent in terms of the importance of the give-and-take of questions. Questions are about our active engagement with the idea, the quintessential philosophical idea, that there is a principle of intellection. This is the idea of knowledge itself, that things in principle are knowable. All our claims to knowledge hang on the idea of a prior principle of knowledge. How we know that we know and what we claim to know presupposes that there is knowledge, something to be known in some sense or another. I say in some sense or another because that principle is known only as the principle upon which our knowing, being, and doing depend. That, I think, is what this remarkable story shows. The encounter between Mary and Jesus is about our encounter with truth, the truth of God which is always there, always present. This story is about our awakening to that truth and its meaning for us in our lives.
Thus, the encounter is in this sense philosophical. It has to do with our coming to know what is wanted for us to know, indeed, what God wants us to know. Such is the radical meaning of the entire Epiphany season. The questions are paramount and necessary because nothing can be known except through the activity of knowing. “Knowledge is intermediate between the knower and the known because it is the activity of the knower concerning the known” (Ammonius, 6th c. AD.). This ancient insight, itself a kind of summary of Hellenic and Greek thought, challenges us. The burden of the teaching church is that it counters the dreary passivity of the consumer culture, the victim culture, and the entitlement culture, all of which are a denial of an essential feature of our humanity.
Mary’s anxious questions to Jesus on Sunday last lead us logically to this exchange. Both Gospels are read every year regardless of the length of the Epiphany season which like the Trinity season varies in length according to the movable date of Easter. Thus, these Gospel stories taken together are significant for our understanding of the radical meaning of Epiphany. This story suggests that Mary has learned what we too are meant to learn about the essential divinity of Christ, namely, what it means for him to be “about [his] Father’s business”. Here is “the beginning of signs”. Here is Mary’s response to Jesus, her openness to the divine will by way of what belongs to the radical truth of our humanity symbolised and realised in her. It is captured in our text. “Whatever he tells you, do it.”
Far from mindless obedience, this Marian command requires our attention and complete mindfulness about the presence of God with us in Jesus Christ. The story is the first miracle which Jesus did. That alone is a challenge to our ordinary ways of thinking, to the usual forms of our atheism. A miracle seems to deny the natural workings of the natural world, to violate the given terms of nature. Water is water, wine is wine. Things are what they are. To be sure.
For some believers the miracle event is enough. God acts. For unbelievers it seems to be an unwarranted, unsubstantiated, and improbable if not impossible intervention on the part of the so-called God. For many, miracles are exactly the stumbling point: Thomas Jefferson in the 18th century took his scissors to the New Testament to cut out all the miracles, leaving the dead husk of a moralizing Jesus accommodated to the presumptions of human reason. But such problems about miracles assume that God must be contained or restricted to the workings of the natural world. Such is a rather mechanical way of looking at God. Why shouldn’t God as the ordering principle of the natural world and its laws be also free to act in other ways? The one needn’t contradict or constrain the other as a number of scientists and philosophers have long recognised. On the other hand, just accepting these stories at face value on the basis of a kind of faith versus reason is a passive attitude which does not actively engage the encounter.
“They have no wine”, Mary observes about the wedding feast. That is to make something known, a lack, an absence of something which is assumed to be wanted at once on a prosaic basis but perhaps signifying something more profound about the insufficiencies of our humanity in and of ourselves. In the background lurks a wonderful Jewish maxim that “without wine there is no joy”. Are joy and happiness things which God, if there is a God, seeks for us? If God is merely an impersonal force, merely an idea, then what would it mean for God to seek our joy and our happiness? But if God is the transcendent principle of absolute truth and goodness, then our good is his joy and happiness for us and in us. It belongs to his nature as God to be the principle of all joy and all goodness. Such poor attempts at argument on my part are intended to try to bring out the power of this story as the “beginning of signs”. This story makes known to us something profound about the whole concept of miracles.
They are not about God as some sort of wunderkind or wonder-worker, providing marvels to delight and entertain us and to distract us from the mundane matters of our everyday lives, as if God were an escape from reality rather than our encounter with reality in its richness and wonder. Miracles are a feature of the Epiphany and in a double sense: they make known something about God and they make known what God seeks for our humanity, our good, as it were, because of the nature of God himself. Something like that is being presented to us in this extraordinary scene. But we have to think our way into its mystery.
Mary’s observation about our lack, then, we may take as more than merely prosaic. And we may do so because of Jesus’s rather cryptic and disturbing response. “O woman, what is that to me and to thee?” he asks before stating, “mine hour is not yet come.” It is a most intriguing response. Is it a put-down of Mary, a kind of rebuke? Or does it highlight an important theological and spiritual insight? Does our recognition of our own lack and insufficiency place a demand on God? Does God have to respond to our demands in other words? Is God subject to us and at our bidding? The statement about his hour provides the necessary and deeper understanding about the Incarnation. God engages our humanity but not simply on our conditions. Redemption happens in and through God’s encounter with our wounded and broken world of suffering and sorrow but only in accord with God’s will, not ours. His hour is his passion and death on the Cross which realises for us the ultimate good which God in Christ accomplishes for us.
The miracle stories of the Epiphany are all about God’s will for the wholeness and completeness of our humanity, “manifest in making whole / Palsied limbs and fainting soul”. They begin with this story which suggests powerfully that God seeks our social good, our social joys. Not ‘the happy, happy, party, party’ kind of hedonism that some seem to think is their natural right, but the deeper joys of our being with God and with one another in mutual delight and honour in seeking the good of each other.
What this means is that Epiphany is sacramental. God uses the things of the created order to restore that order and to bring us into union with its principle. It is about restoration but that is meaningless if we have no knowledge of our lack, our insufficiency.
That the story happens in the context of a marriage-feast is significant not only for what became the logic of Christian marriage but to the more radical idea of the Incarnation as a kind of marriage; at once the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, and the union of our humanity with God through the sacraments. Epiphany as sacrament recalls us to the created order itself; God uses the things of the world to gather us to himself. Far from a denial of the created order or the natural order, this miracle signifies the idea that the whole of the creation exists for and with God. Bread and wine require human labour, our labour with the good order of creation that provides for our necessities and for our good. God takes those things and uses them to gather us back to himself and to a living relationship with him. We only live when we are alive and present to the principle of all life itself. Such is the meaning of sacramental theology.
It requires something from us. This is signalled by Mary. Do whatever he tells you is about our active engagement with God’s will for us. What God seeks for us is our highest good. That is the point not just of the water turned into wine but the idea of the wine being the very best wine in contrast to the more limited conventions of human hospitality. In other words, God by definition, by nature, as it were, seeks the very best for us. Our joy and our goodness can only be found in him. Epiphany is about God’s giving of himself. “And at Cana wedding-guest / In thy Godhead manifest; / Manifest in power divine, / Changing water into wine.” In such wonders, “God in Man [is] made manifest”. And he is manifest in us through our active engagement with what God makes known. This is Mary’s command.
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany II, 2021
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