“There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there”
In some years there can be as few as two Sundays after Epiphany. This means that the stories of Jesus being found in the Temple and the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee are read every year in the liturgy. They show Epiphany as doctrine. This reminds us that the Scriptures are not simply a random collection of narratives and stories from which we might pick and choose whatever catches our fancy or our disdain but are essentially doctrinal; “a doctrinal instrument of salvation” to coin a phrase from Cranmer and Hooker. The Scriptures are seen as having a unity and an order, a purpose. They are understood credally, we might say. The Creeds come out of the Scriptures and return us to the Scriptures with a hermeneutic, a way of interpreting and understanding them.
Epiphany as a concept or idea is very much about the things that are made known to us: God revealing himself and his purpose for our humanity. Jesus, as we heard last week, “must be about [his] Father’s business”. He is both God and Man who reveals to us the things of God through his essential humanity as taken from Mary who, in turn, reveals the essentially Marian character of the Christian Faith and the Church; “keeping all these sayings in her heart”. Thus these two Gospel readings highlight two dialogues between Jesus and Mary that belong to Epiphany as manifestation, a making known.
The wedding feast at Cana of Galilee is unique to John’s Gospel. It is, we are told, the “beginning of signs” in which he “manifested forth his glory” and awakened faith in the disciples. It is an Epiphany of the divinity of Christ and of human redemption; in short, what God seeks for our humanity. It has very much to do with the concept of marriage theologically understood as an image or symbol of the union of God and man in Jesus Christ, “the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his church”, as the Marriage service so aptly puts it just before making explicit reference to this Gospel story about Christ’s “presence, and first miracle that he wrought in Cana of Galilee”.
The exchange between Mary and Jesus brings out the radical nature of this Epiphany. It reveals to us not simply the beginning of a series of miracles or wonders but the end or meaning of all miracles as belonging to the greater miracle of God’s revelation of himself. God seeks the good of our humanity which ultimately has to do with our social joys as found in communion with God and with one another. Most of the miracle stories concern the healing of our humanity wounded and broken by sin and suffering. But not “this beginning of signs”. It sets before us the end or purpose of all the miracles.
For what are we healed and restored? “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever”, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism so wonderfully and concisely puts it. “O taste and see how gracious the Lord is”, as the evening psalm for this Sunday says, for “they who seek the Lord shall want no manner of thing that is good” (Ps. 34). Our good and our delight is found in God’s will for us revealed in the witness of the Scriptures. We have no good, no delight, apart from our life in God and with God and in and with one another. This is the strong lesson of this Epiphany Gospel revealed to us through the intriguing exchange between Mary and Jesus.
“They have no wine”, Mary says to Jesus. It is more than a prosaic observation. Wine symbolizes what belongs to human joy and delight and ultimately signals – is a sign – for what is essentially sacramental. In other words, our participation in the life of God, “we dwelling in him and he in us” through the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood.
How does one get to that idea? By being like Mary and attending to the words of Christ. Like last Sunday’s Gospel, his words are a challenging rhetorical question: “O woman, what is that to thee and me?” before immediately stating that “mine hour has not yet come”. What does it mean? It means that God is not simply at our beck and call to do for us whenever and whatever suits us. The religion of ‘gentle Jesus come and squeeze us when and where it pleases’ is no religion. Our good is found in God’s will for us, not the other way around. This is the problem of God for us without acknowledging God in himself. It results in collapsing God into the world and ourselves. Deus pro nobis follows upon Deus in se for without that God becomes nothing more than a projection of human interests, divided and incomplete as they are. “They have no wine” means we have no wine. We lack the means of attaining any good, any joy, any delight in and through simply ourselves.
Mary’s observation is a commentary on the human condition in its fallenness. Jesus’ response sets the divine condition for our salvation; our good as found in him according to his will and not according to ours. In a way, the dialogue here is itself a commentary at once on Mary’s fiat mihi, “be it unto me according to thy word”, on Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane, “not my will but thine be done”, and on the Lord’s Prayer, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. For what is his hour? It is the hour or time of his passion, death and resurrection. That is the greater miracle of the opening out to us of the divine life through the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. That outpouring of divine life is the life of the sacraments. Out of his wounded side came water and blood which the Fathers in their reading of the Scriptures saw as symbolic of the twin-sacraments of baptism and communion, the means of our dwelling in God in his will for us.
Mary gets what Jesus is saying which is why she immediately says to the servants, “whatsoever he saith unto you, do it,” essentially bidding them to do as she had said about herself, “be unto me according to thy word”. What unfolds is the delightful wonder of water being turned to wine and not just a little water and not just the usual plonk but a lot of wine and the best wine. It is the wine of the goodness of God himself giving us himself to be in us. “Thou hast kept the good wine until now”. Thus “this beginning of signs” points us and provides for our participation in the purpose of Christ’s Incarnation. It is nothing less than an Epiphany of God’s will for our humanity as grounded in God himself, in his will and being not just for us but in himself.
Our good is found in this union of opposites, the marriage of heaven and earth, of God and Man in Jesus Christ. It is found in our being like Mary for such is the Church. Here in the sacramental mysteries we are, as it were, at the wedding in Cana of Galilee but only if we, like Mary, seek what Christ in his hour seeks for us, our good and our delight in his goodness.
“There was a wedding in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there”
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany 2, 2023