“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.
The miracles of the New Testament are not about Jesus as some kind of thaumaturgus, a wonder-worker, a magician and entertainer. The miracle is creation itself and the even greater miracle of God whose Word and Son is life essential. “In him was life”, the metaphysical principle of the whole universe, “and the life was the light of men”, the epistemological principle of knowledge, we might say. There is the irony of taking the miracles in a literal way while missing the literal meaning which they signify. The point, as John tells, is that they are signs, a potent philosophical concept, signs which are what they signify. And what they signify is that God is life and the light of the world in whom and by whom “all things were made” and “without him was not any thing made that was made”. These are strong and powerful ideas that connect the metaphysical and the moral.
Our contemporary problem, not altogether unlike some features of the Enlightenment, is that we tend to reduce everything to forms of discursive reasoning. Yet God is not a thing, not one object among others. It is more true, theologically speaking, to say that God is nothing. Such is negative theology, that God is not this and that attribute or way of thinking, as distinct from positive theology which makes analogies between God and the world. Even to say that God is ‘other’ implies a division between things which does less than justice to the idea of God. Better to say that God is non aliud, not other, precisely to escape the problematic of discursive thinking and to point us to the reality of God as beyond all finite conception. As Eriugena put it first in his treatise on Predestination and then as the underlying principle of his great work on Nature, the Periphyseon, in God there are no contrary motions, no oppositions which would place limits on the unlimitedness of God. Later Nicholas of Cusa’s Non Aliud pushes negative theology further by pointing out that there is no proportionality between God and creation. We reach beyond ratio or discursive thinking to its ground in intelligentia, in understanding. The miracles, as Archbishop Temple came to understand, are about taking the idea of God very seriously.
They are also about learning what belongs to the radical truth and dignity of our humanity over and against the limits of human knowing and power. The epiphany stories open us out to the truth of God with us without collapsing God into the world and into ourselves. In every way, as we heard last Sunday, they belong to our “being transformed by the renewing of our minds” precisely in contrast to “being conformed to the world”. The epiphany stories make God known and in so doing teach us about our true relation to the world and to ourselves. And, perhaps, nowhere more wonderfully than in “this beginning of signs”, the miracle at the wedding in Cana of Galilee.
“This beginning of signs” signifies the meaning of all the miracles of the Gospel. This is made explicit in our text; “mine hour has not yet come”, a reference to his passion, death, and resurrection which underlies the real meaning of all the miracles as belonging to creation and redemption, the restoration of creation from its fallen character. While most of the miracles of the Gospels concern the healing of our broken and wounded humanity – the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised up and so forth – this miracle, “this beginning of signs”, makes clear the end of all such healing miracles. It signals to us the deeper sense of the wholeness of our humanity as found in God and of the world as grounded in God. Not, we might note, the other way around which is the failing of our discursive reasoning which reduces God to one thing or another or even as the ‘other’ defined then by relation to us, hence nothing more than a human construct. God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, as Anselm put it, really means that God is beyond all human conception.
The miracles belong to that kind of intellectual thinking, to the understanding of God being made known to us in ways that open us to what is beyond our thinking and knowing and yet as that upon which all being and knowing depend. Here in this Gospel miracle we learn that God seeks our social joys and fellowship as found in him without whom nothing is. That it happens at a marriage feast is most telling.
In a way, Christmas and Epiphany season signal the marriage of God and nature, the marriage of God and man united in the person of Christ. But that is to speak by way of metaphor or analogy. Marriage as an institution, a human and cultural institution is more than a metaphor; it is a way of life “instituted in the time of man’s innocency” as the Prayer Book puts it. The exhortation to the Solemnization of Matrimony speaks of marriage as a sign “signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church” and then references this Gospel story by which Christ’s presence “adorns and beautifies” the holy estate of matrimony. In other words, this miracle signals one of the ways in which our lives are lived to God and with God in Christ. Marriage in this view is not simply any kind of committed relationship, the common folly of our time and of our contemporary church. After all one can be committed to anything, a rock, a pet, even oneself. All the miracle stories speak to what is beyond simply metaphor and analogy, to the radical presence of God as the condition and meaning of life and of our thinking about life.
The transformation of water into wine signals the greater purpose of God for our humanity in joy and delight. As such the epiphany teaches what we badly need to hear and know in our disordered, disturbed and dystopian world where our institutions are in radical disarray and collapse, namely, to take delight in God and God’s will and purpose for our humanity. This is the counter to the gnostic tendencies of our current distresses which sees everything in oppositional terms in fear and hatred of each other, as if “God”, as Voltaire has Martin, a Manichaean and a pessimist say in his satirical novel, Candide, “has abandoned the world to some maleficent being”, the devil. The real problem is our thinking away from the very things which the epiphany readings teach us. We glimpse in joy and delight the wonder and delight of God as non aliud, the radical not-other who is all life and light and in whom there is no darkness at all. Epiphany season would bring us into that super-essential light and life of God.
There is the paradox of our current situation that in the seasons of the great feasts of Christmas and Epiphany we have had to endure a time of eucharistic fast owing to the suspension of services by the Bishop. My only hope and prayer – and the reason for this rather difficult and extensive sermon – is that in reflecting on the sacramental mysteries now denied to us, we may come to appreciate their truth and wonder even more, that we will allow our hearts and minds to recover the radical teaching which undergirds our liturgical lives and as such rejoice and take delight in God himself. Such will be an epiphany for us and in us, drawing us into the radical purpose and meaning of all the miracles as found in the hour of Christ’s passion. Such is the radical meaning of God and of God’s will for us, the life which is greater than death and the light in whom “is no darkness at all”.
“Mine hour has not yet come”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 2, 2022
(under the restrictions of the episcopal suspension of services)