Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
“Mine hour has not yet come”
It is, as John tells us, the first miracle, the “beginning of signs” which Jesus did “in Cana of Galilee”. It is an epiphany, a manifestation of his glory, the making known of his essential divinity. But as we saw last Sunday, Epiphany also makes known the will and purpose of God for our humanity.
“This beginning of signs” highlights one of the key features of the Epiphany season; the idea of miracles. We are apt to be rather skeptical or even contemptuously dismissive of miracles thinking they negate or contradict the order of nature. It was an ancient debate but for us it is largely seen through one aspect of the legacy of the so-called Enlightenment in its confidence in human reason to the point of denying any other form of knowing, particularly revelation. Thomas Jefferson, for example, influenced by Thomas Paine and other radical figures, took his scissors to the New Testament, cutting out all the miracles of Christ and leaving only a husk of morality. But morals without metaphysics are empty and without meaning, belonging more to the shrill claims of political and social correctness, arbitrary and contentless in our times.
Miracles as signs do not contradict the order of nature but open us out to its underlying principle, God. The God who creates the natural order is, by definition, not constrained by that order. Epiphany seeks to make known the end and purpose of creation for us and for the understanding of our humanity. It counters the idea that the natural and material world accounts for itself in and through the processes of evolution, for example, but avoiding the problem that neither Newton nor Darwin can say what anything is and overlooking the implicit teleology of evolution brought out for instance in Herbert Spencer’s famous addition to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, “the survival of the fittest”. That assumes a telos, an end. Though Darwin cannot say with any epistemological clarity what a species is, there is much to appreciate in the adaptations within species to their environment; it is another thing, a further hypothesis, to assume the development of one species into another. These are just some of the questions but which in no wise take away from the importance of evolutionary theory in its various forms.
Timothy Findley in his marvelous novel, The Wars, relates the very moving discourse between Harris, a young man from Sydney, Nova Scotia, who is dying in a London hospital and the main character, Robert Ross, who is deeply attached to his friend and to the extraordinary things which he says. Harris is fascinated with the ocean and with the sea as the embodiment of all life. Robert says “No. We were always men”, always humans. Harris responds, in a splendid passage of poetic prose about our connection to the sea as the mother of life. “The placenta is a little sea. Our blood is the sea moving in our veins … we are the ocean walking on the land”. Simply wonderful. The point is that both positions are true and both reflect the profound philosophical insight of the creation story in Genesis which connects our humanity to everything else in the created order, on the one hand, but also to the uniqueness of our humanity as made in the image of God, on the other hand.
