by CCW | 14 January 2024 10:00
This is, we are told, the “beginning of signs which Jesus did and manifested forth his glory.” Yet “this beginning of signs” is also the ending of signs, meaning the end or purpose of the signs. Signs here means miracles, the things of wonder which illuminate and transform our lives. But in what kinds of ways? Is it by the things of God being reduced to us and our inclinations and concerns, our obsessions and agendas? Or is it by our being shown the things of God which dignify and ennoble our humanity and raise us up into the things of God in which we participate and find our good? There is all the difference in the world between those two perspectives and tendencies. This story counters and corrects the first by showing us the wonder and mystery of the second and does so in a way which moves our hearts and minds. We are “transformed by the renewing of our minds” upon the things of God revealed to us in which we find our highest good. It is about neither God nor ourselves being conformed to the world in its divisions, confusions, and conflicting agendas.
The story of the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee shows us the radical meaning of miracles or signs. They teach us about God in himself and about what God seeks for us, namely, the good of our humanity. Only John gives us this story. Most of the miracles of the Gospels are about the healing and restoration of our wounded and broken humanity such as we saw in Advent about the purpose of Christ’s coming: “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them,” Jesus himself tells us. And even more, he adds, “and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me.” All this is wonderful and true and belongs to the vision of our humanity as redeemed from sin and its consequences, a wonderful reminder of the wholeness and completeness of our humanity as found in communion with God.
What that really means, however, is seen in this Gospel story. For what end are we restored to wholeness? It is, I think, captured in the Westminster Shorter Catechism composed in 1647 by a synod of English and Scottish theologians of a decidedly Calvinist bent, but then our Anglican sacramental thinking follows Calvin and Thomas more than Luther. “What is the chief end of man?” it asks and answers, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” “O what their joy and their glory must be, those endless sabbaths the blessed ones see,” as the medieval theologian Peter Abelard says in his lovely 10th century hymn, O Quanta Qualia, where “God shall be all and in all ever blessed,” in John Mason Neale’s translation. God is the beginning and end of all created beings, especially rational beings, as Aquinas teaches. This Gospel shows us that God seeks our social joys which have their meaning in our communion with God through Christ’s sacrifice.
For that is the meaning of “mine hour,” which “is not yet come.” Thus this first sign or miracle is meant to be understood in terms of the Passion of Christ; his sacrifice on the Cross. Mary, it seems, intuits something of his meaning, following upon what we saw last Sunday about him being “about his Father’s business,” words which she ponders in her heart. “Do whatever he tells you,” she says here to the servants. What follows is the turning of the water into wine, a kind of divine response to our human lack. “They have no wine,” Mary had told Jesus, identifying the human predicament, our need and our emptiness. But she says it to Jesus and in so doing points us to him.
What he comes to give us is the wine of divinity poured out for the good and the joy of our humanity. It is an epiphany, a making manifest of the essential divinity of Christ through his humanity. The Magi-Kings from Anatolia come to Bethlehem bearing gifts, gifts that teach the meaning of the one who comes. They are, as one of the hymns puts it, “sacred gifts of mystic meaning;” Gold signifying that Christ is King, frankincense that Christ is God, myrrh signifying his humanity in which he suffers, dies and is buried. Likewise this story points towards the classical understanding of the sacraments as “outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual grace” given as the means of our joy and delight with God and with one another in communion.
The miracle of the water turned into wine does not negate the distinctions of the created order but recalls us to Creation and Redemption in their interrelation as manifest in Christ, the Creative and Redemptive Word. It manifests Christ’s divinity and his humanity and in ways which enlarge our understanding. The real change ultimately is in us: in our being taught what God seeks for us which is always more than what we can imagine, desire, or deserve. This beginning of signs manifests our end in God in which we participate sacramentally now. It all comes down to the love of God poured out for us on the Cross of Christ’s sacrifice and all for our joy, a joy which cannot be found in us nor accomplished by us.
The wonder of this beginning of signs is simply how it manifests Christ to us and for us showing us the end of all signs and miracles in what belongs to our highest good, our everlasting fellowship with God in Christ. We participate in this now through the grace of the sacrament wherein Christ gives himself to us in bread and wine signifying his body and blood. This is not something which we can command and order on demand. It belongs entirely to the free gift of grace in Christ sacramentally conveyed to us and received in us by our response to what is being made manifest to us. This Gospel illustrates the qualities of gifts given to us by God’s grace and catalogued, as it were, in Paul’s Epistle from Romans. Such is the divine hospitality which provides for us the best wine which flows out from Christ’s Passion. “What the Sacrifice offers, the Sacrament confers” as Lancelot Andrewes says.
This is the meaning of his hour, an epiphany at once of God and of what God wants for us. It is wonderfully expressed in the Psalmist’s words in the Gradual for this day. “O that men would therefore praise the Lord for his goodness,/ and declare the wonders that he doeth for the children of men!/ For he satisfieth the empty soul,/ and filleth the hungry soul with goodness” (Ps. 107. 8-9).
Fr. David Curry
Epiphany II, 2024
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